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The Forum > Article Comments > Is the 'Third Way' the right way? > Comments

Is the 'Third Way' the right way? : Comments

By Peter Gibilisco, published 7/7/2009

Central to the 'Third Way' is the neo-liberal belief that unfettered markets will benefit all of society.

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There is no Third Way. Either goods and services can be produced and provided on the basis of profit-and-loss; or they can be provided on the basis of steal-and-spend. The latter is just as unworkable and unethical now, as it was when it was tried under different names.

The basic idea behind the third way, is that markets will provide some services, while the state will provide others. But this is no different to all the other forms of socialism.

Even the original old-guard communists did not assert that the state should provide all services for which valuable consideration is or may be given, for example sexual services. Some autonomy was always left to the private sphere.

And after the first faltering steps of Russian communism, when Lenin tried to abolish money and millions of people starved, the state relegated to private ownership a significant part of food-growing. Without the continued existence of these and other private markets, the experiment would have collapsed much sooner.

I have no argument with voluntary socialism. But coercive socialism of all kinds entails nothing but using the state’s power to take other people’s property and spend it. Plus a serving of fake moral superiority and pained solicitude on top. That's it.

As each attempt fails, the socialists, not understanding the original problem in their assumptions of omnipotent government, give the program a name-change, because *they* think that will make it something different. And so it goes, from communism, to socialism, to democratic socialism, to social democracy, to the third way, to social entrepreneurism. Each step retreats from socialism’s own unsustainability and unworkability. Each step assumes that forced redistributions will work the magic of making society fairer and more productive, blaming individual freedom and private property for whatever the socialists don’t like about human society.

The ‘third way’ is neo-socialist, not neo-liberal. It is not neo-liberal to beg the state’s gracious permission to be permitted to own property and enter into consent-based exchanges.

Exactly the same flaws underlie the intellectual foundations of the Third Way, as underlie those of full-blown socialism.
Posted by Wing Ah Ling, Tuesday, 7 July 2009 11:28:16 AM
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I propose a 'Fourth Way'. The Fourth Way is to objectively evaluate all proposals for social change and innovation in terms of their costs and consequences, and put the best ones into action, without any regard for the ideological pedigrees of the people proposing them or the rationality of any other ideas they may also propound. The Fourth Way does not exclude competent people from positions of influence because they happen to belong to the wrong party; nor does it permit power to remain in the hands of time-serving lackeys as a reward for toeing the party line.

The Fourth Way rewards our leaders for cooperative effort and punishes them for juvenile point-scoring. It takes the principles of evidence-based science and medicine and puts them to work in the realm of social welfare and economic achievement; and it regards the old distinctions between Left and Right as childish and redundant. By embracing the Fourth Way we may for the first time be able to go three steps forward without having to take two steps back at the same time.
Posted by Jon J, Tuesday, 7 July 2009 7:41:01 PM
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Jon J, This philosophy of yours sounds excellent and one that the powers to be should look too!
Posted by drpetergin, Wednesday, 8 July 2009 12:36:42 PM
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Yep, John J, could agree with your fourth way if we could scrub idiotic terms like deregulation out of the economic system.

Even Free-Market echo's like a term that sounds too much like an economic free for all from the colonial days.

Certainly it came in when piracy was still well alive with blacks transported to America like cattle, our Aborigines treated not much better.

It is probably why so many over-smart businessman these days don't think much of historians because historians like detectives have been taught to sort out the truth from the doubtful.

Regards, BB, Buntine, WA
Posted by bushbred, Monday, 13 July 2009 4:35:31 PM
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Peter,

The "problem" with third way ideas is the same problem that neo liberals have and that is to confuse the efficient operation of markets as also being an efficient way to DECIDE what activities we as society do.

Markets are an efficient mechanism to get the most output from a given set of inputs.

Economic markets are NOT an efficient mechanism to decide what outputs to produce.

The political market however can be a good way to decide the outputs to produce.

What is a political market? It is one where the currency is votes and information and the outputs are decisions on what to produce. Votes is obvious. Information is a little more subtle but we all know that knowledge is power and so access to knowledge can be seen as having similar characteristics in a systems sense to votes as it informs choice.

Choice of course is the reason why free markets are good at resource allocation.

So giving more opportunity for people to influence decisions by votes and knowledge by opening up society and the political process is a good way to increase the efficiency of the political process which is charged with deciding WHAT to produce. This is why so called Government 2.0 is so important http://gov2.net.au/ as it will help us make better decisions as a society on WHAT to produce.

Having made the decision on what to produce we then let economic markets work out the most efficient manner of producing what it is we have decided we want.
Posted by Fickle Pickle, Thursday, 16 July 2009 3:38:55 AM
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