I want to try and describe in Australian history that captures the hubris of economic reason by drawing on Don Watson's Recollections of A Bleeding Heart.
If we return to the recession of the 1990s we find that the economic reformers reckoned they had done their great works. The revolution was all but complete. A bit more work was required in mircro-reform ---eg., deregulation and enterprise bargainining on the waterfront and the labour market-- but they had got things to the point where market forces would pull the economy up. That day of sunshine was just around the corner.
That was the one truth. Everything else was a sideshow--history, philosophy, sociology human suffering. These were follies. The one big truth was that markets were self-correcting and tended towards equilibrium. Any state intervention to help the hundreds of thousands thrown out of work was counterproductive.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 21, 2004 02:36 PM | TrackBack