All the President’s Zombies

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published on Monday, August 24, 2009 by The New York Times

The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.

Let’s talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.

First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn’t happen.

To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/opinion/24krugman.html?_r=2&ref=opinion

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We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals.

We know now that it is bad economics.

~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which

you really stop to look fear in the face.

You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

~ Erich Fromm