With its crusading tone and almost total absence of argument from fact, Rudd’s essay is more of a religious sermon than a work of serious political and economic analysis. It involves three articles of faith: first, that the past 30 years has witnessed the triumph of extreme capitalist ideology; second, that this kind of capitalism has comprehensively failed; and third, that only social democratic political parties can be trusted to shape the future. All of these propositions are demonstrably false.
Ultimately it is an argument over whether the current economic crisis justifies the bureaucratic demand for more power over our money.
Nobody wants to talk about which government policies got us into this problem in the first place. The conversation seems to be confined to ways in which government can get us out of it. And that is an incomplete analysis. To the extent that “political risk” — bad policies — got the world into this mess it makes sense that government must get us out of it.
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