Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all agree on a vision for the future and just begin working together to achieve it ─ instead of getting stuck in ideological arguments before we begin?
Think, for a moment, about what this nation accomplished after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In less than four years, we managed to transform an economy crippled by the Great Depression and producing few war-related products (soldiers initially had to train using broomsticks to simulate rifles and trucks in the place of tanks) into the most awesome war machine in history. By the end of those four years, this country had produced almost 300,000 planes, more than 70,000 ships, and millions of guns and bombs.
In terms of complexity, that transformation from a peacetime to a wartime economy was at least as complex as most problems we face today. Yet today we have lost confidence in each other and our government to resolve these problems. What is the single most important difference between then and now? We were united then. We are divided today.
The purpose of this website is to provide a basis for us to come together again so that we can solve the significant problems that confront us. How? The name of the site ― Centrarian ― hints at the answer: by centering politics and economics. But centering politics does not mean this does not mean centering politics in the conventional sense of Triangulation between the two sides as in the Third Way. What it does mean is that the skewed perspectives of the left and the right must be “unskewed” by correcting the faulty assumptions on which they are built. And politics cannot be centered without also centering economics. As this is accomplished, the two sides will come closer together and a new “centered” perspective will begin to have both a coherent justification and a natural constituency.
To fully communicate what this means will take time but hopefully it will be accomplished as this website is developed and expanded. What follows represents a first attempt to condense a complex argument into a few lines. Read it over quickly and then explore the website:
The Right has claimed that the market system optimally allocates scarce resources and roughly represents a merit system.
The Left, failing to directly confront this argument (thereby implicitly conceding the point), has chosen to advocate a different set of goals: equality, environmental protection and “social justice” through government programs and regulation.
As a result, the current political debate has become repetitive and dysfunctional, with arguments reduced to the form, “my goals are better than your goals.”
But if one looks closely at the market system that the right idealizes, it becomes apparent that there are fundamental flaws: externalities, a lack of mechanisms for public goods and public costs to be effectively included, a concept of private property that allows individuals to collect, not just merited compensation for their own labor, ideas and contributions to the economy, but non-merited shares of natural resource rents and the output of people now dead. Correct those fundamental flaws and you get a more equitable system: a true merit system. Perhaps then we can waste less energy fighting against one another and work together to prepare for the future.
© 2007 by Centrarian.com
About Centrarian@Centrarian.Com: I have a B.S. in engineering and a Ph.D. in economics.
