Walking back to YearlyKos from lunch, a companion complained that there is very little discussion on the site of structural economic change. I remembered a piece on how Norway deals with oil profits and wanted to send him a link as a counter example. The piece exists but I was wrong about the source. Here is the best quote:
Our oil profits go to robber barons who give it to their wastrel children to subsidize lives of insane narcissism, but Norwegian oil profits go mostly to the Norwegian people and subsidize the little villages and the roads and rails needed to connect them -- Norwegians are in favor of provincialism -- and also go to the largest pension fund in Europe, $300 billion, which is forecast to more than double in the next 10 years.
The source, after the fold:
The story was not in DailyKos, it was an opinion piece by Garrison Keillor in the Chicago Tribune (and other places).
At another point he notes that the Norwegian immigrants to the US
had no idea America would fall into the hands of a failed oilman who would waste the country's pension money on a war for oil while Norway, the world's most peaceful country, enjoys a very sensible prosperity.
But why is there so little discussion of structural economic change? Have we bought into the Grover Norquist line that anything the government does is a failure, even though almost the only part of our health care system that has been moderately successful has been government programs? Have we accepted Tom Delay’s position that any regulation of business is communistic? Have we bought into the DLC line that the only thing government can do in the economy is a market mechanism, such as tradable carbon taxes, when the energy industry and the environment are crying out for more radical solutions?
Or have we learned just enough from Ec 101 to know that a competitive market is one mechanism for creating and distributing wealth, but not enough to know that the interesting questions in economics are about the well recognized (at least at Harvard where I studied) failures of that system, such as monopolies, externalities, and inadequate information?