Can Obama Help Move America Beyond Mindless Consumerism?
Reform cannot just rush parents and kids back into the mall, it must encourage them to shop less As America, recession-mired, enters the hope-inspired age of Barack Obama, a struggle for the soul of capitalism is being waged. Can the market system finally be made to serve us? Or will we continue to serve it? George W. Bush argued that the crisis is “not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.” But while it is going too far to declare that capitalism is dead, the philanthropist George Soros is right when he says that “there is something fundamentally wrong” with market theory. The issue is not the death of capitalism but what kind of capitalism – standing in which relationship to culture, to democracy and to life? President Barack Obama’s Rubinite economic team seems designed to reassure rather than innovate, its members set to fix what they broke. But even if they succeed, will they do more than merely restore capitalism to the status
