Jane Smiley Says Goodbye Cruel World

In a piece on Huffington Post, Jane Smiley says “The world would be a better place if the American right wing had never existed.” She elucidates a number of points as to why that is the case, a few of which are accurate; however, the liberal position that she takes makes a mockery of the valid points she brings up. I’m going to try to, relatively briefly, quote and refute:

Smiley: “The American economy would not have hopped from bubble to bubble if the right wing had not put all of their faith in deregulation, and American jobs would not have been sent abroad.”

I’m sorry, but what is it about liberals that they cannot see that bubbles are not caused by deregulation? Bubbles are caused by government intervention in the market, which is a policy agreed upon by 99% of those in Washington. The policies which lead us to this point started with Democrat and liberal FDR, who extended the Depression with a combination of communist and fascist moves . Barney Frank is one of the biggest recipients of money from Fannie and Freddie, yet Democrats rallied behind him to save a bubble from bursting. I liken it to building a levy, and when the levy is near the breaking point, building the levy up higher. As my geology professor pointed out, the build-up will eventually spill over. The market works because the levies are natural and small, allowing for small spillover. It also allows for both the rapid and gradual change of the surface of the earth, or the economy, but usually in small stream and isolated locations. Government intervention creates artificially high levies, and thus puts off the small flood in favor of the deluge.

Smiley: “We would have retained the respect of other nations, and not aroused the absolute hatred of those we have attempted to bomb into submission.”

Smiley here forgets American history. We’ve been trying to bomb peoples into submission since Roosevelt, and if we had bombs to drop a few decades before then, they would have suited our policies perfectly. America has been imperialistic for a century or more now, from Vietnam to Korea to Cuba to Iraq. If she thinks that policy is in play because of the right wing, she should remember that it was borne largely out of the Wilsonian left. The peaceniks on the left (one of which Obama is certainly not) and on the right know that hawks are allied not in one party, but one city, and that is Washington DC.

Smiley: “In the capitalist world, you are not just supposed to starve, you are supposed to deserve starving -- insult added to injury, humiliation added pain. Of course, as Naomi Klein has shown, the "free market" is never free at all, it is fixed, by dictators and armies and oligarchs.”

The free market, in this country, has also been fixed, but Senator Obama promotes that fix. He does not want a free market for the same reasons other politicians and Wall Street executives don’t: they are the top dogs in the status quo. They have the most power, and thus they bail out the rich who fund them and desire an increase in government spending and control over people’s lives. The liberals in this country think Obama is some sort of Cinncinnatus, reluctantly thrust into power by the will of the masses. The truth is he is as McCain once tried to portray him, but failed: a pragmatic candidate from a party machine which has been in place for decades. Obama may be new, but his policies are the same.

Now, I agree with the author that the right has been bad for America, and I'll not pretend to have the writing skills or fantastic career she does. The right's fear-mongering, authoritarianism, extreme religiosity, war-hawking and class warfare are frightening. Neo-conservatism has taken this country to new lows. Just don’t be surprised if Obama turns out to be more of the same, or worse, a new FDR.