Re: GLOBAL KEYNESIANISM

At 09:01 AM 4/28/2000 +0300, you wrote:
>Unfortunately, without the threat of socialism you won't get social 
>democracy
>:--)

Without the threat of state socialism, you might well not have gotten the
welfare state and a broad social-democratic consensus, yes. That's one of
the paradoxes of our era -- how could a totalitarian system such as the
state socialist operating in the Soviet Union and its satellites have
produced such a generally productive economic system elsewhere?

The threat of a radical transformation may have been useful in its time.
Based on the historical record, though, I generally prefer evolution (i.e.
Keynesianism) to revolution (i.e. state socialism). Revolution simply has a
way of getting out of hand. The French aristocrats who initiated the French
Revolution weren't expecting the course of events that would lead to a Reign
of Terror, and a French emperor cloaked in some of the trappings of the
Revolution waging aggressive imperialistic war over Europe at a tremendous
human cost. Likewise, I think it fair to say that most of the Bolsheviki
didn't want to make Russia a totalitarian police state that happily
liquidated kulaks by the millions and ended up making a repressive European
empire.

Why wouldn't the threat alone have sufficed?

>Jeff


>--
>Jeffrey Sommers
>World History Center
>Boston/Riga
><www.whc.neu.edu>
>
>"Adam Smith started with a view of the forest but his followers lost 
>themselves
>in the woods."
>       --John R. Commons, 1934--