Save Capitalism??????????

The Economist recently published an opinion piece that began with an analysis of Pres Obama's response to the BP Oil Spill.   In this piece, they called for Obama to seize the political moment to make the larger point.  That point is that two of his crises, the oil spill and the financial meltdown, were both due to the same problem.   That problem was identified as capitalism's inclination to act through a level of greed that was ultimately destructive to the world, its peoples, and to capitalism's own survival.   And specifically the Economist cited the last thirty years in which regulatory rules in the U.S. were systematically rolled back, allowing business to be its own worst enemy.   Obama was advised to connect the two crises and note that unregulated business was not good for America and that we needed to revive reasonable regulations.   Again,  according to Economist, the reasoning was not just to make political hay for Obama, but to save capitalism from imploding.

I also read Business Week, which also takes "liberal" positions on finance and corporate greed (Business Week has been editorializing against excessive executive salaries for more than a decade..)

The idea that forward looking capitalists or business men would desire reasonable social compacts, reforms, and regulations was eloquently stated by James Weinstein in his book Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State.   In his introduction, Weinstein states:

"This book is not based upon a conspiracy theory of history, but it does posit a conscious and successful effort to guide and control the economic and social policies of federal, state, and municipal governments by various business groupings in their own long-range interest as they perceived it. Businessmen were not always, or even normally, the first to advocate reforms or regulation in the common interest. The original impetus for many reforms came from those at or near the bottom of the American social structure, from those who benefited least from the rapid increase in the productivity of the industrial plant of the United States and from expansion at home and abroad. But in the current century, particularly on the federal level, few reforms were enacted without the tacit approval, if not the guidance, of the large corporate interests. And, much more important, businessmen were able to harness to their own ends the desire of intellectuals and middle class reformers to bring together "thoughtful men of all classes" in "a vanguard for the building of the good community." These ends were the stabilization, rationalization, and continued expansion of the existing political economy, and, subsumed under that, the circumscription of the Socialist movement with its ill-formed, but nevertheless dangerous ideas for an alternative form of social organization."

I guess we used to call this cooptations