[Pen-l] LRB · Slavoj Žižek: Don’t Just Do Something, Talk

[ravi <ravi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The darling of LBO offers his thoughts on the crisis:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v00/n03/zize01_.html

> The standard ‘trickle-down’ argument against redistribution (through  
> progressive taxation etc) is that instead of making the poor richer,  
> it makes the rich poorer. However, this apparently anti- 
> interventionist attitude actually contains an argument for the  
> current state intervention: although we all want the poor to get  
> better, it is counter-productive to help them directly, since they  
> are not the dynamic and productive element; the only intervention  
> needed is to help the rich get richer, and then the profits will  
> automatically spread down to the poor. Throw enough money at Wall  
> Street, and it will eventually trickle down to Main Street. If you  
> want people to have money to build, don’t give it to them directly,  
> help those who are lending it to them. This is the only way to  
> create genuine prosperity – otherwise, the state is merely  
> distributing money to the needy at the expense of those who create  
> wealth.
>
> It is all too easy to dismiss this line of reasoning as a  
> hypocritical defence of the rich. The problem is that as long as we  
> are stuck with capitalism, there is a truth in it: the collapse of  
> Wall Street really will hit ordinary workers. That is why the  
> Democrats who supported the bailout were not being inconsistent with  
> their leftist leanings. They would fairly be called inconsistent  
> only if we accept the premise of Republican populists that  
> capitalism and the free market economy are a popular, working-class  
> affair, while state interventions are an upper-class strategy to  
> exploit hard-working ordinary people.


	--ravi

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