Ideology. Every time you think it has died, they bring it back to life. I’m saying that in my best Al Pacino voice.
Anyway, there has been a long tradition in politics, and in the political economy, of “pragmatism”, and most recently — starting about 30 years ago — of the end of ideology. An element of immediate post-Cold War “endism” was the belief that the debate around ideology had been settled.
It came with the rise in a type of permissible managerial tinkering, because big discussions, or grand narratives, as the postmodernists would have it, had no place in a late-capitalist world. In short, we’re all capitalists now, and plain pragmatism was required to “run the economy”. But, in the real world, outside fat textbooks, things have not been going according to plan.
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What am I on about? The recent announcement by the government that the plan to establish national health insurance (NHI) would proceed to implementation. Before you could say, “the market told me so,” the usual suspects rolled out the impracticalities of a national health system. As a naughty side note, very many of the naysayers have either strong personal or familial links and preferences for the social democracies of Europe and would have no qualms about using, say, Britain’s NHS. But never mind.
Many public intellectuals, from investment gurus hiding behind haystacks to experts embedded in newsrooms or think-tanks, have made the point that NHI cannot possibly be successful in SA. It is simply impractical, given weaknesses and a near total lack of trust in the state, a shrinking tax base and (medical) skills flight. These are fair points.
However, behind most of the responses lie barely concealed ideological biases. A quick survey would show that the same people who are opposed to NHI are generally opposed to black economic empowerment (BEE), affirmative action, paying workers a basic (national) income, and any number of state interventions since 1994. There’s a pattern visible here, one that is deeply ideological.
Just to drive home the point, I want to present a delightful passage by John Maynard Keynes: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
This provides one clue to the claim that most opponents of NHI, BEE, basic income and so on, essentially conceal their ideological bent, which is basically free-market fundamentalism, and associated beliefs that state intervention is anathema to effectively functioning markets — whatever that may mean. We can go on wild tangents about these matters — from 19th-century classical pragmatists to the “endism” of the post-Cold War world — but we may end up in yet another round of blame-shifting, pivoting and other anxieties of late capitalism.
The basic point I should make is that none of the interventions the state has made, or intends to make, are directed at proving economists right or wrong, nor are they made to affirm or reject what is written in academic textbooks. (Which does not mean policy should be made without considerable thought.)
The interventions are made to advance social justice, inclusivity, rolling back some of the iniquities of the past, expanding the public or common good, promoting stability and high levels of trust among citizens. “The market”, quite frankly, is not very good at these things.
I recall a provocation made by former IMF head Michel Camdessus when he visited SA in April 1996. Someone asked him whether he thought capital controls contradicted economic theory. Public policymaking, Camdessus said, does not always have to conform to textbook models. What he was saying is that each state, each society, had to look at all the evidence at a particular time (and over time) — not just that which is produced by beautiful models — and base public policies on real needs and real objectives of the publicum.
So, it really does not matter which side of the argument you come out on with respect to NHI, the least we may wish for is honesty and humility. One of the great fallacies of late capitalism is that ideology has ended. Consider this: when Alan Greenspan was questioned by Washington legislators after the 2008 global financial crisis, he admitted that his ideological beliefs had led him to make mistakes.
Representative Henry Waxman of California asked Greenspan: “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?” Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”
• Lagardien, a visiting professor at the Wits University School of Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank, as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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