How to Reshape America’s Economy

The following summary of socialist ideas for reshaping the American economy is taken from testimony that Michael Harrington, chairman of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, gave before the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress last November. Harrington began with a discussion of the Hawkins-Humphrey bill (the Equal Opportunity and Full Employment Act of 1975).

The basic presuppositions of the bill before us assert a fundamental—to my mind, erroneous—Keynesian principle: that the private corporate infrastructure of the American economy is sound, so that the role of government is to supplement and facilitate its decisions with regard to what investments should be made, what kinds of jobs should be created, and how the benefits of this process are to be distributed.

My rejection of this thesis is not the unique consequence of a socialist analysis, though it is shaped by such an analysis. In a just published book, The New American Ideology, Professor George C. Lodge of the Harvard Business School asserts similar criticisms of the Lockean assumptions about the American political economy, including our faith in a benign providence that somehow is thought to have created an economic universe in which private greeds interact to achieve a public good.

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