Political-Economic Curiosities

Senator Obama visits Berlin soon. Pundits speculate how he will compare with other high profile visits to the previous vertex of capitalism and communism.

It is curious that Reagan's visit was a critique of communism's failure as an economic system.

Is it not curious that he was proffering an alternative system of monumental failure--a system that always promises full employment and low inflation through "freedom" of the marketplace, and always fails?

Not only has capitalism been a complete failure of providing full employment with low inflation, always trading the two off, but produces perennial tragic failure with one of the very best examples of the failure being Reaganomics, Senator McCain now its chief proponent following the Bush administration.

Even though it cyclically proves itself a failure, over and over again, requiring socialist policies and programs to maintain a false free-market legitimacy (a mixed economy), Reagan, in a demonstration of fundamental illogic emblematic of his entire administration, confidently declared a system that virtually achieves full employment and NO inflation with sustainable success as a failure.

Reagan did not recognize the tyranny of oligarchs in a command economy (the political system) as a failure. That would be an indictment of his own subscribed model of power (elitism).

Instead of advocating political assurance of free market economics (pluralism), Reagan effectively argued as virtue unconstrained profiteering which results in inflation and deflation at the same time with perennial deprivation and suffering through consolidation and command of markets, and providing for the general welfare as vice.

Both systems are a command economy operationalized with an elitist model of power (the bureaucratic model of power and political economy). They both lack the critical element of freedom that provides the virtue of a stable legitimacy operationalized with a pluralist model of power, politically and economically congruent, and with both the means and ends of power, in the same way, convergent and not illegitimately divergent which requires a command and control to stabilize it.

Reagan's rhetoric in Berlin is a curiosity of reason, a freak of logic, not the experience of a historical political-economic irony. It is the experience of a corrupt incompetence that we should learn very well not to allow access to power.

Obama 2008!

Very best wishes.