Benjamin R. Barber Quotes
Government has a perfect right, indeed a duty, to intervene in the economy in the name of justice, ecology, strategic interests, full employment, or other public goods in which the market has and can have no interest.
Benjamin R. Barber, Political Scientist, Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The prime minister had a political and philosophical position that government should not interfere with or set or control pricing in the economy. However, a scandal broke out involving payday lending—short term lending the working class does to tide them over till pay day if they run out of money. Lenders were charging huge interest rates beyond anything that is conscionable. Cameron’s government placed controls on interest rates and other facets of that industry as they might have lost a vote of confidence in Parliament had they not acted. He was then questioned about the hypocrisy involved in his regulation, and he gave this amazing quotation, which was the classic reason for government price controls on the private sector that had been given by the Labor Party opponents for years. This also distressed extreme conservatives, who argue that market controls are always preferable to government controls.
This rigid view left no room for regulation which is what almost every modern industrial democracy has chosen. To some of his extremist followers, any government regulation of business or the economy whatsoever, regardless of how little, means that the nation has embraced socialism. It is in this sense that many extreme right wingers viewed Presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama as socialists while they saw themselves as opponents of socialism.
This is a statement that in the early 21st century would be made only by ultra liberals. But in the in the late 1940’s this was not only standard democratic party thinking, but a large number of Republicans thought of the Government as the employer of last resort including their Presidential standard bearer.
Benjamin R. Barber was an American political theorist and author, perhaps best known for his 1995 bestseller, Jihad vs. McWorld, and for 2013's If Mayors Ruled the World as well as the classic of democratic theory, 1984's Strong Democracy (revised in 2004). He became a top-level international consultant on participatory democracy as well as an adviser to Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, and Muammar Gaddafi.
