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“Despite the rhetoric of market absolutism embraced by every U.S. president from 1981 to 2008, Washington had to bail out the financial services industry eight times.” As the reader explores further the contents of Pat Choate’s book “Saving Capitalism: Keeping America Strong,” one reads of the numerous misdeeds and legislative changes that led up to the financial crisis we are currently in.
Some people may have heard of Pat Choate, who is a prominent political economist, and was the 1996 Reform Party vice presidential candidate and running mate of Ross Perot. In this volume he writes simply and clearly how the present crisis arose, and how he thinks it can be solved. His book should be praised on that merit alone, regardless of the innovative and thought-provoking ideas he has on how to fix the economy.
Choate concentrates on six main areas that America needs to take drastic changes in order to save capitalism, which include oversight regulation and tax reform, reinvesting in infrastructure and encouraging innovation, to fair trade and helping America’s workers. He approaches some of these in very unexpected ways, especially tax reforms which would possibly eliminate the current tax system in favor of taxes on consumer products and value added taxes for exports.
He presents an interesting case regarding what needs to be done to change America for the better. Personally, I liked Perot when he ran for president, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Choate puts together a good plan. Like all third party platforms, it probably won’t be implemented because the current system is so hopelessly corrupt that it will resist all reasonable changes up to the point where it has to either change or die. Since we haven’t reached that point yet, only time will tell.
He lashes into laissez-faire capitalists with incisive clarity and spares neither republican nor democrat from their shady dealings while in office. He puts it bluntly when he writes, “In sum, Wall Street controls and runs those parts of our federal government that affect it.”
Likewise, he charts the outcome of what many working class people have begun to see firsthand: “Consequently, starting over became impossible for millions of Americans who became legal ‘debt slaves’ to the money industry.”
Choate summarizes the thrust of his book thusly: “Rebuilding the U.S. infrastructure, providing universal health care, guaranteeing every worker an adequate and portable pension plan, strengthening unemployment insurance and providing education and job-training opportunities are elementary necessities for people in a functioning, flexible market economy. Any indignation about such investments should be because the United States failed to put them in place long ago.”
So far America has weathered this economic crisis as it has in the past, but it is fast approaching a point where the government can no longer solve its economic woes through the same methods. Choate imparts this precarious position when he writes, “The salvage program put into place by both the Bush and Obama administrations is designed to restore the U.S. financial system to the way it was before the crash of 2008, with the same oligarchs in control but with a bit more regulation. If that is all that is accomplished, we will have learned nothing and can be sure that we will have a repeat of the behavior that brought us to this crisis.”
Whether we can save capitalism as Choate outlines is another question entirely, to be grouped in the category of how long will the burning house take to fall down?
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