I’ve been reading Dean Baker’s stuff for a long time, first when he wrote Economic Reporting Review and Beat the Press since he moved to a blog format. He’s an economist with a liberal economics think tank. This book is less an economics treatise than a political polemic with an economic bent.
Baker’s premise for the book is that conservatives have characterized the political economy debates in the United States as government versus the market, with conservatives be pro-market and liberals being pro-government. This characterization puts liberals on their heels in the political arena. Baker’s argument is that the conservative vision depends as much or more on government intervention in the market than the liberal vision does.
The book is pretty convincing in making that argument. Examples include deliberate trade policy geared toward the wealthy, small business
incentives, and intellectual property laws that create property rights out of thin air. Baker does a bang-up job poking holes in the conservative myths as well as pointing out many of the problems with our governments economic policies.
Where he falls down somewhat is in his arguments for alternatives. Perhaps this is just a little bit of the devil you do know versus the devil you don’t in my case. For instance, one of his proposed changes to copyright law includes a voucher system. Give everyone in the U.S. a $75 voucher to be used toward the support of an artist, provided the artist’s work is placed in the public domain. Baker’s argument is that a flood of creativity would ensue. The first thing that comes to my mind though is a large number of non-artists gaming the system. For instance, my buddy loses his job so my circle of friends bands together and send our vouchers my buddy’s way, despite his lack of artistic creation. Baker is certainly right to want reform of the system, and his ideas might even form the basis for the way to do it. But I’m not entirely convinced.
Lastly, I wish he had titled the book differently. It’s an attempt to change the debate. The issue I have is that the nanny state
means something fairly particular as used by most intellectual conservatives. It means the government acting as a nanny to protect a person from themselves. Hence blocking the sale of trans-fats because people would become obese. In the book the term is used more generally to indicate government action. Some of the items in the book are in fact instances of the government protecting the rich from the own stupidity (the chapter on bankruptcy for instance). A lot of them are just actions of big government geared to benefit the friend of conservative, not necessarily to protect them from their own bad decisions.
Will Baker succeed in changing the debate? I doubt it. To do so he needs to get someone with media exposure to start espousing his ideas. That’s at the minimum. I haven’t seen the Democratic Party really have that kind of chutzpah.
Title: The conservative nanny state: how the wealthy use the government to stay rich and get richer
Author: Dean Baker
Imprint / publisher: Center for Economic and Policy Research
Format: Electronic book
Length: 113 p.
Publication date: 2006
ISBN-13: 978-1-4116-9395-1
