2008
Maladjusted Managed Economies
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By Thomas E. Brewton
The experience of the Soviet Union, Japan, and China should, but will not, cause liberal activists to proceed with caution.
According to the New York Times:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said that if she became president, the federal government would take a more active role in the economy, to address what she called the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration…
Reflecting what her aides said were very different conditions today, Mrs. Clinton put her emphasis on issues like inequality and the role of institutions like government, rather than market forces, in addressing them.
The logical end of Senator Clinton's prescription was first articulated by the followers of Henri de Saint-Simon, who in 1829 addressed the following to the President of the French Chamber of Deputies:
The sole effect of [the free market place] system is to leave the distribution of social advantages to a chance few who are able to lay some pretence to it, and to condemn the numerically superior class to deprivation, ignorance, and misery. [Socialists] ask that all the instruments of production, all lands and capital, the funds now divided among individual proprietors, should be pooled so as to form one central social fund…
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