An Affluent Society?

Biden and the Democrats dig up John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith and pack them in a 1988 DeLorean for another "Back to the Future" go at turning America into a socialist paradise.

Joe Biden famously (infamously?) opened his administration by saying “Milton Friedman isn't running the show anymore.”

It is hard to understate the impact of that statement or the ideology behind it.

Biden’s Democrat Party is not only the most communistic iteration of that party in history, but the party is also fooling itself that the “old” economic rules no longer apply.

The old rules didn’t give the Democrats what they wanted, so they just created new ones with no basis in economic reality.

As America is painfully learning, those “old rules” are still around because they are true.

You have also heard Biden say that “America is a wealthy country” and “America can afford” this or that policy. That comes straight out of Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 book, The Affluent Society.

I haven’t read the book in a couple of decades, but as I recall, Galbraith’s basic thrusts were:

• The post-WWII boom made America so wealthy there is literally nothing it can’t afford (Biden claiming we are a wealthy nation and the embrace of Modern Monetary Theory).

• Adam Smith’s ideas no longer apply in this “new” economic world (Milton Friedman isn’t running the show).

• GDP is a poor measure of national economic health because it doesn’t include measures of social and personal well-being (ESG scores, anyone?).

• The American economy is driven by consumerism where demand is created by corporations wanting to sell more rather than individual need.

• America must transition from a private production economy to a public investment economy. Instead of an economy based on luxury goods and wants, productivity beyond that required for the satisfaction of basic needs should be spent to relieve poverty and wealth inequality.

This has pretty much been the Democrat playbook for decades – to one degree or another.

Keep in mind that Galbraith argued in 1958 that America’s system of production had reached a point of no return. As one reviewer wrote in 1959:

“It has become a well stuffed cornucopia that pours out an apparently endless flow of goods, all ostensibly seeking to satisfy the craving of the contemporary American to gorge himself on a bewildering array of commodities. These goods, privately produced and sold, create the image of an affluent society. Yet, in reality, we are much less prosperous than we think. When it comes to public services the amount of deprivation is almost depressing. Schools are old and overcrowded; there is a lack of parks and playgrounds; cities cannot clean their streets; and the ghastly exhaust of the monsters that pass for cars pollutes the skies.”

But the fact remains that America has poured trillions into programs claimed to fund solutions to education, environmental preservation, city operations and transportation.

But just as physics notes a gas will expand to fit its container and Parkinson’s law states work will expand to fit the time allotted, bureaucracies expand to fit the size of their budgets. It is no surprise that little has been gained through increased funding of the priorities Galbraith noted, other than, of course, a massive increase in the size of government.

Galbraith’s book should be understood for what it was, a dalliance with socialism.

Galbraith suggested there should be a “bureaucratic symbiosis” between the federal government and the “planning system” of giant corporations and their “technostructure” of lawyers, scientists, engineers, and lobbyists.

Sounds a lot like Biden’s love of “public/private partnerships”, doesn’t it? 

Most people who know little of Nixon other than Watergate forget that under a Republican president, America came very close to real socialism. The wage and price controls of Nixon’s New Economic Policy, while they seem to fit the ethos of the time, perhaps were as close as America ever came to full‐​blown socialism (aside from rationing in major wars).

Until now, that is.

At no time since The Affluent Society was published has any presidential administration made the battle between the socialist leaning Keynesian economists and those of the capitalist leaning Austrian School clearer than that of the Joe Biden White House.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the contemporary Democrat Party under Obama and Biden, like Galbraith, finds a “socialist imperative” for virtually every product or service of any significance – and that means government must be integrated into everything.

It does prove one thing – that old socialists just continually rebrand themselves as “new socialists” and continue on with the same old failed ideas in bright new packaging.