Obviously What The World Needs Now...

...are more patented David Brooks leprechauns-riding-unicorns economic homilies based on aggressive historical revisionism and a generous helping of magical thinking about how humans beings would behave if only the Almighty had gotten off Her ass and bothered to read more -- a lot more! -- David Brooks columns before whomping homo sapiens into existence.

So here comes another one...

The Battle of the Regimes
AUG. 4, 2014

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But Mwangi’s story is something else. It’s a salvo in an ideological war. With Equity, Mwangi demonstrated that democratic capitalism really can serve the masses. Decentralized, bottom-up capitalism can be the basis of widespread growth, even in emerging markets.

That theory is under threat. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the beginning of a global battle of regimes, an intellectual contest between centralized authoritarian capitalism and decentralized liberal democratic capitalism.

On July 26, for example, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary gave a morbidly fascinating speech in which he argued that liberal capitalism’s day is done. The 2008 financial crisis revealed that decentralized liberal democracy leads to inequality, oligarchy, corruption and moral decline. When individuals are given maximum freedom, the strong end up stepping on the weak.

...

Yeah, except following the Great Depression, our very own "decentralized liberal democracy" did, in fact, roll out a whole series of Liberal initiatives -- from Social Security to banking regulation to pro-labor laws to a tax structure that rewarded reinvestment to massive public spending on education and infrastructure -- all designed specifically as bulwarks against future economic and social catastrophes by limiting capitalism's natural tendency towards "inequality, oligarchy, corruption and moral decline". (From "How Roosevelt Saved Capitalism: The 74th Versus the 112th Congress ")

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As even this brief summary of the work of the 74th Congress shows, under FDR's leadership these and other New Deal measures dramatically expanded the scope of the federal government's responsibilities in American life. Where Washington had previously been only a distant regulator of economic and social affairs, it was now the government's responsibility to maintain economic prosperity, mitigate the worst effects of unfettered capitalism, spread industrial and agricultural development to impoverished regions of the nation, guarantee workers' right to choose their unions, protect the bargaining rights of those unions, and conserve and develop the nation's vast natural and artistic resources.

Contrary to some critics' views, the New Deal was not intended to radically change the foundations of American capitalism. Rather, it revised that system in order to save it. Moreover, it did so not by abandoning government, but by strengthening it. For as FDR and the 74th Congress well understood, they had inherited a nation that was dominated by the forces of wealth and privilege. As a consequence, and as FDR once remarked, "[f]or too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor -- other people's lives." "Against economic tyranny such as this," he went on, "the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government."

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And for all of the flaws and excesses of the New Deal, on balance that approach was working reasonably well...

...right up until David Brooks' Republican Party decided to make burning it all to the ground and pissing on its ashes their Holy Grail.

Weird how Mr. Brooks never gets around to mentioning that.