[Oe List ...] articulating underlying contradictions of government

[R Williams]

Good article, John.  On this same subject see Robert Reich's Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future.  Reich states that "the" contradiction is an ever deepening economic disparity.  (We've heard that one before.)  He deals with this, not as a moral issue, but as an economic and political contradiction with deep social implications.
 
His thesis is "that our fundamentals are profoundly skewed, that the Great Recession was but the latest and largest outgrowth of an increasingly distorted distribution of income, and that we will have to choose, inevitably, between deepening discontent (and its even nastier politics) and fundamental social and economic reform."  He believes reform will occur but not until there has been a crisis of major enough proportions--economic depression, enveloping war, profound threat to our civil liberties--to cause us to put partisan politics and abstract ideology aside and come back together as one nation.
 
Randy

--- On Tue, 10/26/10, John Cock <jpc2025 at triad.rr.com> wrote:


From: John Cock <jpc2025 at triad.rr.com>
Subject: [Oe List ...] articulating underlying contradictions of government
To: "'Order Ecumenical Community'" <oe at wedgeblade.net>, "'Colleague Dialogue'" <dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
Date: Tuesday, October 26, 2010, 9:58 AM



excerpts from Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt (March 2010): 
Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest. 
All change is disruptive. We have seen that the specter of terrorism is enough to cast stable democracies into turmoil. Climate change will have even more dramatic consequences. Men and women will be thrown back upon the resources of the state. They will look to their political leaders and representatives to protect them: open societies will once again be urged to close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for “security.” The choice will no longer be between the state and the market, but between two sorts of state [which he begins to articulate]. It is thus incumbent upon us to reconceive the role of government. If we do not, others will….
As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed….
~excerpts from the opening chapter of Ill Fares the Land (3/2010) by Tony Judt, as published in New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/ill-fares-the-land/ via Bruce Lanphear, who read this book out loud to Fred during his last few months (he died of ALS about four weeks before Fred)

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