POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY NEIL REYNOLDS IN TORONTO'S G:LOBE AND MAIL
Never has it been the mission of the NDP to "eradicate
capitalism," whatever that portentous phrase is supposed to mean.
Neil Reynolds here displays his ignorance or prejudice, and
perhaps both. Certainly he presents a straw-man argument, feeble as virtually
all his mental meanderings are.
The NDP is typical of the kind of social democratic parties
that we've seen in Europe for many decades: parties committed to easing the
huge disparities which just naturally arise under the powerful operations of unregulated
capitalism.
Capitalism - in the likely case that Neil Reynolds doesn't
understand the meaning of the word - involves the accumulation and
concentration of capital in private hands.
It is from this concentration that we get the great
investments which make our society richer in material goods over the long term.
Communist societies long ago proved that you dismantle this
mechanism at your peril.
But the mechanism is so ruthlessly efficient in pure
economic terms that large numbers of less able competitors are left with
little, including what humane people regard as basic services.
All genuine social democratic parties represent is
sufficient re-distribution through taxes to pay for social programs to prevent
the natural outcome of raw, unregulated capitalism which is unarguably a
tendency towards Dickensian England or the two-fisted ugliness of the Mafia.
Franklin Roosevelt's government in the United States proved,
for any who care to study it, that social democratic measures can actually work
to preserve the basic dynamic mechanism capitalism in times of immense stress
and impending revolution.
