Congress Needs a Remedial History Lesson

One of the characteristics of being a scientist or an engineer is that ideas, theories and designs are tested before adopting them.  From these test we see what works and what doesn’t and we proceed with our next step.  In a similar but less rigorous way, historians analyze the issues behind historical events and look for an understanding of the common forcing functions to events in history.  They document these historical “experiments” so that we can learn and through that understanding, avoid making the same mistakes. 

Our representatives in Congress, State Legislatures and county and city governments, and in particular the Tea Party and other extreme conservatives, do not seem to have learned their history lessons.  They see their jobs with no sense of history.  Their fanatical quest for smaller government and privatization of society’s support network overshadows any lessons of history they might have learned.  To some extent extreme left wing liberals have a similar problem, but since there are so few of them in comparison to the ultra conservatives, their position in policymaking is not as influential.

In Sunday’s comments Krugman argues that Congress and to some extent the Administration and all levels of policymakers (Federal, State and City) have become insensitive to the plight of the unemployed and have begun to accept the high levels of unemployment as the “new norm.”  They should be worried about the plight of the jobless and the continuing waste from a depressed economy.   Instead, policy makers seem gripped by a combination of complacency and fatalism, a sense that nothing need be done and nothing can be done.  Although there has been an intellectual collapse of austerity economics as a policy doctrine, their fanaticism toward austerity keeps them from using the tools at their disposal to fix the unemployment problem.  Many are tooting the libertarian manifesto, as E.J. Dionne indicates in his comments: “individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government and a free-market economy.”  Libertarians push this philosophy as long as getting to a minimal government does not cut the programs to their base – the older generation.

From a historical perspective we have had many experiments that demonstrate that the extreme economic positions being argued today by the fringes of our political representatives do not work.  What we need a balanced sensible approach to governance.   A couple of experiments from recent history illustrate these failures.  In the United Stated, during the last quarter of the 19^th century;   and in the Soviet Union, in the middle half of the 20^th century.  These two experiments demonstrated that extreme positions of an uncontrolled economy and of a controlled economy do not work. 

It seems that the extreme liberal factions of our government have learned their lessons and do not advocate an extremely controlled economy.  However, the conservative factions of our government, the Tea Party members and Libertarians, flunked history in High School and still advocate a totally uncontrolled economic policies.

In the U.S. Mark Twain called the experiment the “Gilded Age” a period of uncontrolled capitalism.  In 1890, over 90% of U.S. families earned less than $1200 per year with an average annual income well below the poverty line.  They lived in housing  spread across city landscapes, teeming with crime and filth.  Americans confronted the emergence of a society increasingly divided between the haves and the have-nots.  Many poor workers struggled just to survive while an emerging industrial and financial aristocracy lived in palatial homes and indulged in opulent amusements.  The rampant greed and speculative frenzy of the marketplace, and the corruption pervading national politics allowed the creation of Industrial giants like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who although revolutionized business and ushered in the modern corporate economy, also, ironically, destroyed free-market economic competition in the process.  Is this what conservatives want to go back to? 

The second experiment was the controlled economy in the Soviet Union that we refer as “communism” was also a complete failure.  This was somewhat of a flawed experiment since the “communism” experiment of the 20^th century was more of an experiment of a controlled economy by a dictatorship rather than a pure concept of communism.   Nonetheless, it did not work. 

Marx and Engels were simply elaborating on a concept that has been around since Plato and actually practiced in a smaller scale by the Catholic church.  Early Christians practiced a simple kind of communism. The English humanist Sir Thomas More extended this monastic communism in Utopia (1516), which describes an imaginary society in which money is abolished and people share meals, houses, and other goods in common.  The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries provided the impetus and inspiration for modern communism.   Marx, Engels were deeply disturbed by what they regarded as the injustices of a society divided by class. Appalled by the poverty and squalor in which ordinary workers lived and worked.   They maintained that the poverty, disease, and early death that afflicted the working poor were endemic to capitalism. 

They saw systemic and structural problems on society that could be resolved only by replacing capitalism with communism.  They envisioned a society without class divisions or government, in which the production and distribution of goods would be based upon the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”  Marx saw this evolution in two stages:   A the dictatorship of the proletariat and eventual communism.  The Soviet experiment never seems to have gotten out of the first stage.  Regardless, of its stage, communism, an economic-political experiment lasting over half century, demonstrated that a controlled economy did not work.  It failed as the U.S. experiment in an uncontrolled (near pure capitalist) economy failed. 

So why aren’t these lessons of history being applied?  Why does Congress (or certain factions) insist of a return to total capitalism; no regulatory controls, no social support network, privatization of services – a return to the Gilded Age?  Although there is are no counterpart policy proposals in the sense of socialist/communist direction, those terms are being used and misused by conservatives as scare tactics to cultivate a political base and to avoid a serious conversation and compromise on the choices we have to make as a country.

There can never be an uncontrolled capitalist society with little government as envisioned by the Libertarians and the Tea Partiers.  Also, there can never be a Utopia as described by Marx and Engels.  I think we should send all our Senators and representatives to a remedial history class.