The Economics Book Reviews - Page b12
January 18, 1997 GLOBAL CLASS WAR ADVOCATED BY RADICAL SOCIALIST
by Howard Hobbs Ph.D.,Economics EditorWASHINGTON DESK - During the past four years of the Clinton administration there have been a number of books coming into the market about vanishing jobs, insurmountable trade deficits, plummeting real wages, and predicting world-wide social and economic catastrophe by the year 2000.
Now, there is 'Rolling-Stone" writer Bill Greider's new book, One World, Ready or Not(Simon & Schuster, 528 pages, $27.50). He is a reporter, not an economist. But he has read economics, in depth.
Greider's Secrets of the Temple (1987) was a very comprehensive analysis of the Federal Reserve. In the 1987 work, Greider hyped a liberal partisan pro-inflation stance. Now, in Greider's One World, Ready or Not (1997) he advances his earlier argument and calls for a global class struggle by a global radical Socialist-led labor union movement.
Greider thinks the world has a global crisis of overproduction. He writes that multinationals'profit seeking is an effort to capture ever expanding markets. To accomplish a larger market share multinationals then use a downsizing strategy. So, he opines, the social contract breaks down as the labor class is sacrificed by corporate owners seeking profits.
Greider attempts to argue that this is the worst of all possible worlds. He readily ignores the benefits and returns to U.S. business and society. He writes from a narrow and uninformed 'world view' of a mythical corporate office that ignores the industrial workers back home and traders away their jobs.
Greider fails to recognize the fundamental social benefit of capital formation and accumulation. Corporate expansion is generally made possible because of millions of small stock holder investors. Often these investors in the corporation are the very workers Greider forgets in the Socialist equation.
Greider writes, in Asian countries, Americans are invariably considered the 'best' bosses, Japanese and Koreans the worst.
Greider depicts free-market principles but hypes Karl Marxs' welfare economics as the way the word will go.
Of course, the fatal flaw of welfare-state economies, is the failure to create and accumulkate wealth through individual capital formation activities through indiviidual effort and reward based upon risk taking.
Greider writes that when Socialist welfare-state programs become too expensive, we should interfere with the economy to cause inflation to decrease the value of the debt accumulation. This is laughable.
Greider wants an end to laissez-faire capitalism but offers no sound economics theory to support an alternative system. place. He's just hoping for a world-wwide revolution that will ddisplaace the current system. He offers a confused idea of what he sees as 'environmentalism' and 'feminism' and 'tribalism' to help the world find its way back to the 'dark ages'.
Greider's reporting of economics and political science is as misleading as is his questionable understanding of his subject.