(no subject)
Oct. 27th, 2008 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaYeah, more politics. Only a few more days, folks.
Some guy named Ken Hines in Athens, Alabama, made this interesting observation in the comments to Krugman's NYT column today:
"As societies have grown from tribes to nations to an international community of billions we have come to rely extensively on two tools to accomplish our goals. The private sector is the way we accomplish goals competitively, and governments are the way we accomplish goals cooperatively. We can only be truly creative if we skillfully use both tools."*
There's something really satisfying to me about this formulation. It echoes the principle that opposing ideas (and strategies), working in tension, produce good outcomes. In other words, it's dialectical thinking, and I like it.
I know of no serious progressive who wants to do away with the private sector or the incentives that open competition offers. Conversely, though, the right wing has responded utter hysteria to the mere idea that cooperation and the public sphere also have a place in civil society. To listen to the howling, you'd think the Mayflower Compact had been written by Lenin.
*Full text here: http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/10/27/opinion/27krugman.html
Some guy named Ken Hines in Athens, Alabama, made this interesting observation in the comments to Krugman's NYT column today:
"As societies have grown from tribes to nations to an international community of billions we have come to rely extensively on two tools to accomplish our goals. The private sector is the way we accomplish goals competitively, and governments are the way we accomplish goals cooperatively. We can only be truly creative if we skillfully use both tools."*
There's something really satisfying to me about this formulation. It echoes the principle that opposing ideas (and strategies), working in tension, produce good outcomes. In other words, it's dialectical thinking, and I like it.
I know of no serious progressive who wants to do away with the private sector or the incentives that open competition offers. Conversely, though, the right wing has responded utter hysteria to the mere idea that cooperation and the public sphere also have a place in civil society. To listen to the howling, you'd think the Mayflower Compact had been written by Lenin.
*Full text here: http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/10/27/opinion/27krugman.html
