One of the great centrist hat tricks is to divert the
discussion of government programs from asking whether they successfully meet
their goals to the question of its correspondence with some Chicago school
notion of how governments just need to get out of the way for capitalism.
Here's how France's retirement system meets its goal, for instance: "... just 3.6% of
French retirees live in poverty, compared to the OECD average of 12.5%".
Huh. Funny, that stat just gets lost in the squid ink shot
around these kind of issues, issues that the richest people - who are the most
influential on the media mindset - have decided. One of the conclusions young
people are reaching is that the neo-classical defense of Capitalism is a
defense of a system that can’t afford retirement for old people or education
for young people. Yet the very folks who write this kind of nonsense about “reforming”
the system – that is, 99 percent of mainstream media – can’t draw the simple
conclusion that what they are suggesting is that there’s a high acceptable level
of illiteracy among the young and death and poverty among the old so that ‘free
enterprise” can award the top 1 percent trillions of dollars. In other words,
they are toting up the cost of social democracy as though it were a matter of
cuts in programs, rather then taxing at the rate that preserves social
democracy – taxing, for instance, capital gains both every year – not at the
point of sale – and at a high enough rate to successfully achieve social democratic
goals.
Which is why I’d recommend, for a horselaugh, the NYT's elegy today of one of its favorites, Emmaneul Macron, whose
unfullfilled promise makes all the upper 20 percent so sad! It is full of these paleo-capitalist sugarplums. I choose, at random, this
absurdist description oF Macron's "reform" of the social security
system: "Mr. Macron accomplished the first two goals but not the third. He
set off angry protests after pushing through an unpopular rise in France’s
retirement age to 64 from 62, a move that economists say was critical to
stemming the tide of red ink. " Yeah, everybody in France - the France
dancing in the head of Bret Stephen's - retires at 62. Or even 64. Those are
cases that are at the lower boundary of the retirement range. Macron's
"reform" didn't stem any rising tide of red ink, partly because they
were purposefully designed not to hurt any of those middle class people who
were 62 when the 'reforms" were put in place. And the airy reference to
economists is so NYT-y and unspecific that you would never know the journalist
is writing as a citizen of a country that owes 40 trillion bucks on its own
debts. Which, actually, is the cause of the crisis worldwide. The U.S. bond
market drives the interest on other smaller bond markets throughout the world,
and in combo with the massive debts accumulated by AI building companies is
actually going to sink a lot of people in the next decade.
Anyway, upshot is: the one thing the NYT can never, due to
its structure, report on is: foreign affairs. It is always and forever
clueless. And it is an essential tool for mapping out the cluelessness of the
American elite’s view of the world, provincial, self-serving, and perpetually in
shock because it is rejected not only by the dark masses of the benighted,
non-U.S. nations, but by the U.S.’s own population.
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