But Gintis remarks make me think that we have the same thing on the left: a ideological artificial flavor which involves some BS about coops to disguise the fact that the exact same mixed economy view is being sold.

"A mixed economy dominated by large firms, which are in turn controlled by power groups internal to those firms" is, however, a fairly big tent.

There is a substantial difference, to take one example, between a political economy in which organised labour is one of the internal power groups controlling the large firm and a political economy in which that control is reserved for upper management. There is even a significant difference between the political economy in which control is reserved for upper management and one where middle management is included. And there is a very important difference between a political economy that is dominated by industrial firms, a political economy dominated by extractive firms and a political economy dominated by financial firms.

Different policies promote different sectors of the economy, and different power structures within the large, powerful business firm. And it is in my view a perfectly legitimate leftist objective to favour industry over finance (and manufacturing over extractive industry), engineers over MBAs and line workers and middle management over executives when making the rules for which firms grow large and which groups dominate the large firms.

So claiming that left and right are fundamentally identical because both subscribe to a "mixed economy" is not wholly unlike claiming that French and English are fundamentally the same, because both are Indo-European languages. The premise is true, but the conclusion does not follow.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.