[Peace-discuss] Some serious economics

[C. G. Estabrook]

Why, I can't imagine anyone's being flip about economics or politics...

David's example points up real exploitation: we don't usually think of chores on 
a family farm as exploitation. (I admit I didn't grow up on one).

But the alienation of what makes us human - our conscious work of head and hands 
- is the essence of the modern economy; hence it is literally de-humanizing: in 
this society, we have to give up control over what makes us human to eat regularly.

To humanize society is therefore to recapture control of our work, and that 
can't be done individually (altho' wealth & privilege looks like that - that's 
why my emerita interlocutor thinks she's not subject to alienation).

Democratic control over productive work - rather than the present arrangement of 
control by the rich - has been the common-sense demand over against capitalism 
since capitalism began. That's what socialism really is, and socialism predates 
and goes beyond the work of the old man in the British Museum (who spent most of 
his time trying to figure out how capitalism works):

"All modes of production in class societies prior to capitalism extract surplus 
labour from the immediate producers by means of extra-economic coercion.  
Capitalism is the first mode of production in history in which the means whereby 
the surplus is pumped out of the direct producer is 'purely' economic in form - 
the wage contract: the equal exchange between free agents which reproduces, 
hourly and daily, inequality and oppression."

And I don't have any theoretical objection to the community's exercising 
democratic oversight over work - particularly that work we call  
"professional."  A free market in e.g. medicine is not efficient, at least from 
one POV ("Don't go to him when you're sick: most of his patients die from his 
ministrations...").

Obviously it can be corrupted - especially under capitalism.  "All professions 
are conspiracies against the laity," wrote G. B. Shaw a century ago.


On 2/1/11 10:39 AM, E.Wayne Johnson wrote:
> It's probably not reasonable for me to be so flip about it.
>
> The other farm boys and I grew up thinking that town kids were a bit weak and 
> silly.  We could drive a farm truck to the elevator at age 13 but couldn't get 
> a license to do so.  The town kids actually learned to drive in driver's ed.  
> I drove a car 200 miles to Urbana when I was 15 and didn't think too much 
> about it, but it was my longest trip at that time.
>
> I worked on an oil drilling rig at age 13.  The shift indeed was 12 hours.
>
> Lou Costello said his uncle ran away from home as a young boy and joined the 
> Navy.
> He was only 5 years old but he lied about his age.
>
> The over-regulation of your medical-pharma-insurance peddler industrial 
> complex for its competition-limiting benefits as a closed guild holds your 
> people hostage at the threat of their very lives.  The law perverted for 
> plunder as Bastiat might have said.
>
> The notion that the licensing of lawyers, stockbrokers and other such vermin 
> makes society better is absurd.
>
> Interventionists unfortunately don't clean up their own house, they just want 
> to use their wealth and influence to tell others how to live. Fortunately, the 
> power of evil is not infinite.
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Johnson" <dlj725 at hughes.net>
> To: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>; "E.Wayne Johnson" 
> <ewj at pigs.ag>
> Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2011 10:53 PM
> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Some serious economics
>
>
>> " d)  Child labor must be a very bad thing indeed.  Growing up on the farm as
>> I did, we worked pretty hard beginning about age 8 or 9.  It is a horrible
>> thing. "
>>
>> It is one thing helping your family and / or neighbors work at age 8 or 9, or 
>> even having a part-time paper route delivery job.
>> But it is quite a different situation when 8 or 9 year olds are forced to 
>> work 12 hours or more a day under unsafe and often brutal working conditions 
>> in order to help feed the family and as a result are unable to attend school 
>> and sometimes die before age 25.
>>
>> David Johnson
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "E.Wayne Johnson" <ewj at pigs.ag>
>> To: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>; "Peace-discuss" 
>> <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
>> Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 11:33 PM
>> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Some serious economics
>>
>>
>> My immediate knee-jerk responses are probably more toward the remarks of the
>> editor than the author of the book but I can't be sure about it.
>>
>> a)  This, the Greatest Depression, is hardly getting warmed up good.  Such
>> pretentious nonsense to look at it in retrospect.  The big lollapalootza is
>> up ahead, just over that hill, there, on the horizon.
>>
>> b)  It's pretty damn clueless to fix blame on the Evil Party or the Stupid
>> Party.  The Stupid and Evil bailouts and corporatism are a bipartisan
>> effort.  Ain't it grand when politicians work together?
>>
>> c)  Hardly an ill event occurs that doesnt give the left-right paradigmers
>> an opportunity to blame the contralateral ideology.  The progressives are
>> immoral and the TeaParties are corporate shills according to their pundits.
>> Fortunately, neither of these stereotypes are accurate.
>>
>>  :)  You can see how it warped me into thinking that some of the
>> problem with Americans is that they dont know how to work.
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
>> To: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
>> Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2011 12:16 PM
>> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Some serious economics
>>
>>
>> 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
>> By Ha-Joon Chang, Bloomsbury Press
>> Posted on January 31, 2011, Printed on January 31, 2011
>> http://www.alternet.org/story/149688/
>>
>> Editor's Note: Many books have tackled the great recession of 2008, the
>> second
>> worst economic crisis in history, after the depression. But I doubt there is
>> one
>> book, written in response to the current economic crisis, that is as fun or
>> easy
>> to read as Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell you About Capitalism.
>> I'd
>> never heard of this Korean economist, probably because he lives in England
>> and
>> teaches at Cambridge, but he is well known in economic circles, and well
>> respected.
>>
>> It is no secret that the American society is dominated by the super rich,
>> held
>> for hostage by the banks, dominated in the Nation's Capital by the tens of
>> thousands of lobbyists and their big bucks, as the Republican party and
>> their
>> corporate Tea Partyists provide cover for giant theft of many billions of
>> wealth
>> for the very rich, with of course the cooperation of the Democrats who
>> supported
>> the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy (Check out Rachel
>> Maddow's op-ed, which explains why Dwight Eisenhower, who taxed the rich to
>> balance the budget, which be a radical in today's political reality). In
>> this
>> very discouraging environment it is hard to imagine scenarios where normal
>> folks, every day voters, the non-rich, who are not represented by lobbyists,
>> can
>> have much influence.
>>
>> On top of that, making change even harder, is an enormously effective
>> propaganda
>> system that perpetuates inaccurate and often destructive myths about
>> virtually
>> every element of capitalism and the US and global economy. And top economic
>> officials in the Obama administration and leading mainstream economists
>> often
>> perpetuate these myths, and the corporate media marches along side repeating
>> them like the gospel.
>>
>> So, as far as I am concerned there never can be too much truth-telling to
>> attempt to pull away the curtain of propaganda and disinformation that
>> shrouds
>> our economic thinking and actions. I am not under the illusion that the
>> facts
>> will set us free. As research has shown, when people connect their opinions
>> to a
>> set of values or leaders, they will not be open to changing their mind, and
>> presentation of contrary "facts," may make them dig in more clinging their
>> their
>> misinformation. But when it comes to the economy, the propaganda system has
>> been
>> so pervasive, and supported by conventional wisdom that people who need to
>> know
>> better, buy into it, and yes that includes liberals and progressives who
>> have a
>> kind of inertia of the mind of their own. It is hard to change one's sense
>> of
>> things.
>>
>> AlterNet's Economics editor Joshua Holland made a nice contribution to this
>> public education effort this Fall with his book: The Fifteen Biggest Lies
>> about
>> the Economy Now we have the funny, and sharp Chang. What follows is chapter
>> one
>> of his book: "There is No Such Thing as a Free Market." Other chapters are
>> quite
>> revealing such as: " The Washing Machine Has Changed the World More than the
>> Internet;" "More Education, in Itself, Is Not Going to Make a Country
>> Richer;"
>> "The U.S. Does Not Have the Highest Living Standard in the World;"
>> "Companies
>> Should Not Be Run in the Interest of their Owners."
>>
>> Chan's main point is the recent economic disaster wasn't by accident, that
>> active government can promote economic dynamism, that tax cuts for the rich
>> simply redistribute wealth upward, and that we will continue on the path to
>> economic disaster,with no end in sight, unless the collective wisdom, goes
>> in a
>> different direction. -- AlterNet Executive Editor Don Hazen
>>
>> The following is an excerpt from 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About
>> Capitalism
>> (Copyright © 2011) by Ha-Joon Chang. Reprinted with the permission of
>> Bloomsbury
>> Press.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thing 1: There is no such thing as a free market
>>
>> What they tell you
>>
>>
>>
>> Markets need to be free. When the government interferes to dictate what
>> market
>> participants can or cannot do, resources cannot flow to their most efficient
>> use. If people cannot do the things that they find most profitable, they
>> lose
>> the incentive to invest and innovate. Thus, if the government puts a cap on
>> house rents, landlords lose the incentive to maintain their properties or
>> build
>> new ones. Or, if the government restricts the kinds of financial products
>> that
>> can be sold, two contracting parties that may both have benefited from
>> innovative transactions that fulfill their idiosyncratic needs cannot reap
>> the
>> potential gains of free contract. People must be left "free to choose," as
>> the
>> title of free-market visionary Milton Friedman’s famous book goes.
>>
>>
>>
>> What they don’t tell you
>>
>>
>>
>> The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries
>> that
>> restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so
>> unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.
>> How
>> "free" a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political
>> definition.
>> The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the
>> market from politically motivated interference by the government is false.
>> Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically
>> motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an
>> objectively defined "free market" is the first step towards understanding
>> capitalism.
>>
>>
>>
>> Labor ought to be free
>>
>>
>>
>> In 1819 new legislation to regulate child labor, the Cotton Factories
>> Regulation
>> Act, was tabled in the British Parliament. The proposed regulation was
>> incredibly "light touch" by modern standards. It would ban the employment of
>> young children – that is, those under the age of nine. Older children (aged
>> between ten and sixteen) would still be allowed to work, but with their
>> working
>> hours restricted to twelve per day (yes, they were really going soft on
>> those
>> kids). The new rules applied only to cotton factories, which were recognized
>> to
>> be exceptionally hazardous to workers’ health.
>>
>> The proposal caused huge controversy. Opponents saw it as undermining the
>> sanctity of freedom of contract and thus destroying the very foundation of
>> the
>> free market. In debating this legislation, some members of the House of
>> Lords
>> objected to it on the grounds that "labor ought to be free." Their argument
>> said: the children want (and need) to work, and the factory owners want to
>> employ them; what is the problem?
>>
>> Today, even the most ardent free-market proponents in Britain or other rich
>> countries would not think of bringing child labor back as part of the market
>> liberalization package that they so want. However, until the late 19th or
>> the
>> early 20th century, when the first serious child labor regulations were
>> introduced in Europe and North America, many respectable people judged child
>> labour regulation to be against the principles of the free market.
>>
>> Thus seen, the "freedom" of a market is, like beauty, in the eyes of the
>> beholder. If you believe that the right of children not to have to work is
>> more
>> important than the right of factory owners to be able to hire whoever they
>> find
>> most profitable, you will not see a ban on child labor as an infringement on
>> the
>> freedom of the labor market. If you believe the opposite, you will see an
>> "unfree" market, shackled by a misguided government regulation.
>>
>> We don’t have to go back two centuries to see regulations we take for
>> granted
>> (and accept as the "ambient noise" within the free market) that were
>> seriously
>> challenged as undermining the free market, when first introduced. When
>> environmental regulations (e.g., regulations on car and factory emissions)
>> appeared a few decades ago, they were opposed by many as serious
>> infringements
>> on our freedom to choose. Their opponents asked: if people want to drive in
>> more
>> polluting cars or if factories find more polluting production methods more
>> profitable, why should the government prevent them from making such choices?
>> Today, most people accept these regulations as "natural." They believe that
>> actions that harm others, however unintentionally (such as pollution), need
>> to
>> be restricted. They also understand that it is sensible to make careful use
>> of
>> our energy resources, when many of them are non-renewable. They may believe
>> that
>> reducing human impact on climate change makes sense too.
>>
>> If the same market can be perceived to have varying degrees of freedom by
>> different people, there is really no objective way to define how free that
>> market is. In other words, the free market is an illusion. If some markets
>> look
>> free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are
>> propping
>> them up that they become invisible.
>>
>>
>>
>> Piano wires and kungfu masters
>>
>>
>>
>> Like many people, as a child I was fascinated by all those gravity-defying
>> kung
>> fu masters in Hong Kong movies. Like many kids, I suspect, I was bitterly
>> disappointed when I learned that those masters were actually hanging on
>> piano wires.
>>
>> The free market is a bit like that. We accept the legitimacy of certain
>> regulations so totally that we don’t see them. More carefully examined,
>> markets
>> are revealed to be propped up by rules – and many of them.
>>
>> To begin with, there is a huge range of restrictions on what can be traded;
>> and
>> not just bans on "obvious" things such as narcotic drugs or human organs.
>> Electoral votes, government jobs and legal decisions are not for sale, at
>> least
>> openly, in modern economies, although they were in most countries in the
>> past.
>>
>> University places may not usually be sold, although in some nations money
>> can
>> buy them – either through (illegally) paying the selectors or (legally)
>> donating
>> money to the university. Many countries ban trading in firearms or alcohol.
>> Usually medicines have to be explicitly licensed by the government, upon the
>> proof of their safety, before they can be marketed. All these regulations
>> are
>> potentially controversial – just as the ban on selling human beings (the
>> slave
>> trade) was one and a half centuries ago.
>>
>> There are also restrictions on who can participate in markets. Child labor
>> regulation now bans the entry of children into the labor market. Licenses
>> are
>> required for professions that have significant impacts on human life, such
>> as
>> medical doctors or lawyers (which may sometimes be issued by professional
>> associations rather than by the government). Many countries allow only
>> companies
>> with more than a certain amount of capital to set up banks. Even the stock
>> market, whose underregulation has been a cause of the 2008 global recession,
>> has
>> regulations on who can trade. You can’t just turn up in the New York Stock
>> Exchange (NYSE) with a bag of shares and sell them. Companies must fulfill
>> listing requirements, meeting stringent auditing standards over a certain
>> number
>> of years, before they can offer their shares for trading. Trading of shares
>> is
>> only conducted by licensed brokers and traders.
>>
>> Conditions of trade are specified too. One of the things that surprised me
>> when
>> I first moved to Britain in the mid-1980s was that one could demand a full
>> refund for a product one didn’t like, even if it wasn’t faulty. At the time,
>> you
>> just couldn’t do that in Korea, except in the most exclusive department
>> stores.
>> In Britain, the consumer’s right to change her mind was considered more
>> important than the right of the seller to avoid the cost involved in
>> returning
>> unwanted (yet functional) products to the manufacturer. There are many other
>> rules regulating various aspects of the exchange process: product liability,
>> failure in delivery, loan default, and so on. In many countries, there are
>> also
>> necessary permissions for the location of sales outlets – such as
>> restrictions
>> on street-vending or zoning laws that ban commercial activities in
>> residential
>> areas.
>>
>> Then there are price regulations. I am not talking here just about those
>> highly
>> visible phenomena such as rent controls or minimum wages that free-market
>> economists love to hate.
>>
>> Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than
>> anything
>> else, including any minimum wage legislation. How is the immigration maximum
>> determined? Not by the "free" labor market, which, if left alone, will end
>> up
>> replacing 80–90 per cent of native workers with cheaper, and often more
>> productive, immigrants. Immigration is largely settled by politics. So, if
>> you
>> have any residual doubt about the massive role that the government plays in
>> the
>> economy’s free market, then pause to reflect that all our wages are, at
>> root,
>> politically determined.
>>
>> Following the 2008 financial crisis, the prices of loans (if you can get one
>> or
>> if you already have a variable rate loan) have become a lot lower in many
>> countries thanks to the continuous slashing of interest rates. Was that
>> because
>> suddenly people didn’t want loans and the banks needed to lower their prices
>> to
>> shift them? No, it was the result of political decisions to boost demand by
>> cutting interest rates. Even in normal times, interest rates are set in most
>> countries by the central bank, which means that political considerations
>> creep
>> in. In other words, interest rates are also determined by politics.
>>
>> If wages and interest rates are (to a significant extent) politically
>> determined, then all the other prices are politically determined, as they
>> affect
>> all other prices.
>>
>>
>>
>> Is free trade fair?
>>
>>
>>
>> We see a regulation when we don’t endorse the moral values behind it. The
>> 19th-century high-tariff restriction on free trade by the U.S. federal
>> government outraged slave-owners, who at the same time saw nothing wrong
>> with
>> trading people in a free market. To those who believed that people can be
>> owned,
>> banning trade in slaves was objectionable in the same way as restricting
>> trade
>> in manufactured goods. Korean shopkeepers of the 1980s would probably have
>> thought the requirement for "unconditional return" to be an unfairly
>> burdensome
>> government regulation restricting market freedom.
>>
>> This clash of values also lies behind the contemporary debate on free trade
>> vs.
>> fair trade. Many Americans believe that China is engaged in international
>> trade
>> that may be free but is not fair. In their view, by paying workers
>> unacceptably
>> low wages and making them work in inhumane conditions, China competes
>> unfairly.
>> The Chinese, in turn, can riposte that it is unacceptable that rich
>> countries,
>> while advocating free trade, try to impose artificial barriers to China’s
>> exports by attempting to restrict the import of "sweatshop" products. They
>> find
>> it unjust to be prevented from exploiting the only resource they have in
>> greatest abundance – cheap labor.
>>
>> Of course, the difficulty here is that there is no objective way to define
>> "unacceptably low wages" or "inhumane working conditions." With the huge
>> international gaps that exist in the level of economic development and
>> living
>> standards, it is natural that what is a starvation wage in the U.S. is a
>> handsome wage in China (the average being 10 per cent that of the U.S.) and
>> a
>> fortune in India (the average being 2 per cent that of the U.S.) Indeed,
>> most
>> fair-trade-minded Americans would not have bought things made by their own
>> grandfathers, who worked extremely long hours under inhumane conditions.
>> Until
>> the beginning of the twentieth century, the average work week in the U.S.
>> was
>> around 60 hours. At the time (in 1905, to be more precise), it was a country
>> in
>> which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a New York state law
>> limiting
>> the working days of bakers to 10 hours, on the grounds that it "deprived the
>> baker of the liberty of working as long as he wished."
>>
>> Thus seen, the debate about fair trade is essentially about moral values and
>> political decisions, and not economics in the usual sense. Even though it is
>> about an economic issue, it is not something economists with their technical
>> tool kits are particularly well equipped to rule on.
>>
>> All this does not mean that we need to take a relativist position and fail
>> to
>> criticize anyone because anything goes. We can (and I do) have a view on the
>> acceptability of prevailing labour standards in China (or any other country,
>> for
>> that matter) and try to do something about it, without believing that those
>> who
>> have a different view are wrong in some absolute sense. Even though China
>> cannot
>> afford American wages or Swedish working conditions, it certainly can
>> improve
>> the wages and the working conditions of its workers. Indeed, many Chinese
>> don’t
>> accept the prevailing conditions and demand tougher regulations. But
>> economic
>> theory (at least free-market economics) cannot tell us what the ‘right’
>> wages
>> and working conditions should be in China.
>>
>>
>>
>> I don’t think we are in France any more
>>
>>
>>
>> In July 2008, with the country’s financial system in meltdown, the US
>> government
>> poured $200 billion into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage lenders,
>> and
>> nationalized them. On witnessing this, the Republican Senator Jim Bunning of
>> Kentucky famously denounced the action as something that could only happen
>> in a
>> "socialist" country like France.
>>
>> France was bad enough, but on 19 September 2008, Senator Bunning’s beloved
>> country was turned into the Evil Empire itself by his own party leader.
>> According to the plan announced that day by President George W. Bush and
>> subsequently named TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), the U.S. government
>> was
>> to use at least $700 billion of taxpayers’ money to buy up the "toxic
>> assets"
>> choking up the financial system.
>>
>> President Bush, however, did not see things quite that way. He argued that,
>> rather than being "socialist" the plan was simply a continuation of the
>> American
>> system of free enterprise, which "rests on the conviction that the federal
>> government should interfere in the market place only when necessary." Only
>> that,
>> in his view, nationalizing a huge chunk of the financial sector was just one
>> of
>> those necessary things.
>>
>> Mr. Bush’s statement is, of course, an ultimate example of political
>> double-speak – one of the biggest state interventions in human history is
>> dressed up as another workaday market process. However, through these words
>> Mr.
>> Bush exposed the flimsy foundation on which the myth of the free market
>> stands.
>> As the statement so clearly reveals, what is a necessary state intervention
>> consistent with free-market capitalism is really a matter of opinion. There
>> is
>> no scientifically defined boundary for free market.
>>
>> If there is nothing sacred about any particular market boundaries that
>> happen to
>> exist, an attempt to change them is as legitimate as the attempt to defend
>> them.
>> Indeed, the history of capitalism has been a constant struggle over the
>> boundaries of the market.
>>
>> A lot of the things that are outside the market today have been removed by
>> political decision, rather than the market process itself – human beings,
>> government jobs, electoral votes, legal decisions, university places or
>> uncertified medicines. There are still attempts to buy at least some of
>> these
>> things illegally (bribing government officials, judges or voters) or legally
>> (using expensive lawyers to win a lawsuit, donations to political parties,
>> etc.), but, even though there have been movements in both directions, the
>> trend
>> has been towards less marketization.
>>
>> For goods that are still traded, more regulations have been introduced over
>> time. Compared even to a few decades ago, now we have much more stringent
>> regulations on who can produce what (e.g., certificates for organic or
>> fair-trade producers), how they can be produced (e.g., restrictions on
>> pollution
>> or carbon emissions), and how they can be sold (e.g., rules on product
>> labelling
>> and on refunds).
>>
>> Furthermore, reflecting its political nature, the process of re-drawing the
>> boundaries of the market has sometimes been marked by violent conflicts. The
>> Americans fought a civil war over free trade in slaves (although free trade
>> in
>> goods – or the tariffs issue – was also an important issue). The British
>> government fought the Opium War against China to realize a free trade in
>> opium.
>> Regulations on free market in child labour were implemented only because of
>> the
>> struggles by social reformers, as I discussed earlier. Making free markets
>> in
>> government jobs or votes illegal has been met with stiff resistance by
>> political
>> parties who bought votes and dished out government jobs to reward loyalists.
>> These practices came to an end only through a combination of political
>> activism,
>> electoral reforms and changes in the rules regarding government hiring.
>>
>> Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be
>> determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a
>> science
>> like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise. Free-market economists
>> may
>> want you to believe that the correct boundaries of the market can be
>> scientifically determined, but this is incorrect. If the boundaries of what
>> you
>> are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not
>> a
>> science.
>>
>> Thus seen, opposing a new regulation is saying that the status quo, however
>> unjust from some people’s point of view, should not be changed. Saying that
>> an
>> existing regulation should be abolished is saying that the domain of the
>> market
>> should be expanded, which means that those who have money should be given
>> more
>> power in that area, as the market is run on one-dollar-one-vote principle.
>>
>> So, when free-market economists say that a certain regulation should not be
>> introduced because it would restrict the "freedom" of a certain market, they
>> are
>> merely expressing a political opinion that they reject the rights that are
>> to be
>> defended by the proposed law. Their ideological cloak is to pretend that
>> their
>> politics is not really political, but rather is an objective economic truth,
>> while other people’s politics is political. However, they are as politically
>> motivated as their opponents.
>>
>> Breaking away from the illusion of market objectivity is the first step
>> toward
>> understanding capitalism.
>>
>> Support AlterNet by purchasing your copy of 23 Things They Don't Tell You
>> About
>> Capitalism through our partner, Powell's, an independent bookstore.
>>
>> Ha-Joon Chang teaches in the faculty of economics at the University of
>> Cambridge. His books include "Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the
>> Secret History of Capitalism" and "Kicking Away the Ladder."
>>
>> © 2011 Bloomsbury Press All rights reserved.
>> View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149688/
>>
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