[PEN-L:28062] what if?

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: what if?

This strange silence from the left
Free enterprise flaunts its failings and social democrats say nothing

Roy Hattersley

Monday July 15, 2002
The Guardian [UK]

Imagine if you can a scandal - comparable to those sweeping through commercial America - infecting the economy of a genuine social democratic country. It is hard to construct a hypothesis which mirrors fraud on the scale which is alleged to characterise the six major companies - Qwest Communications, WorldCom, Enron Corporation, Tyco International, Computer Associates and ImClone Systems - which are now under criminal investigation by the US Justice Department. But let us pretend that, 10 years ago, the Swedish social fund - by which that country's trade unions helped to manage tax-financed investment in socially desirable projects - had been accused of publishing bogus balance sheets and lining the pockets of its directors.

There is no doubt what the reaction would have been. The chorus of excoriation would have been carefully orchestrated by the Adam Smith Institute. The scandal would have been denounced, not as an aberration but the result of socialism's inherent weakness. We would have been told that nothing better was to be expected from a system which disturbed the equilibrium of the free market. There would have followed confident, if not very carefully argued, explanations of why inefficiency and corruption is the inevitable result of tampering with a system which makes us prosperous. Now the six great companies - not to mention Arthur Andersen - have all demonstrated how fallible free enterprise is. And the world's social democrats have not said a word.

It is, I fear, an indication of social democracy's crisis of confidence. The Friedmanites and Hayekians have not won the intellectual argument. But they have shouted their opponents down. We have been bombarded with the undoubted truth that technology makes the global market irresistible. But that honest fact has been embellished with two corrupt and self-serving inventions. ...

JD