A crise continua a aprofundar e por isto mesmo, é um bom motivo para parar e refletir um pouco sobre a visão de um capitalismo auto-regulado. O texto do Sibley, publicado na Commonweal, apresenta uma boa análise de Hayek e dos católicos neo-conservadores americanos. Não concordo, necessariamente, com todas às criticas ao Hayek e tão pouco considero a dualidade mercado auto-regulado versus estatização correta.
"When laissez-faire economists believe in God, they are usually certain that he is one of them. The invisible hand of the market is, they think, also the hand of Divine Providence, which anoints and protects those who manage to provide for themselves.
In 1835, the American economist Henry Carey complained that Britain and France, in restricting trade between themselves, were “doing all in their power to frustrate the designs of the Deity.” (Carey later converted to protectionism.) In the 1840s, English politician Richard Cobden claimed that “free trade is the international law of God.” Thus, those who opposed free trade were not only mistaken; they also lacked faith. Today, many American Christians, including Catholics such as Michael Novak, Thomas Woods, and Robert Sirico, proclaim similar ideas. Novak quarrels with the church’s official teachings on social justice, disparaging in particular the traditional emphasis on distributive justice. He argues that state power should be used minimally and only as a last resort in promoting economic justice.
Novak and other contemporary free-marketeers owe much to the “Austrian school” of economists, and especially to one of its founding members, Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992). A professor at the University of Chicago from 1950 to 1962, Hayek was one of the chief instigators of the wave of libertarian economics that has swept the world since the 1970s. The late Milton Friedman frequently acknowledged Hayek’s influence, and Novak celebrated the economist’s 1999 birth-centenary with a fervent eulogy, “Hayek: Practitioner of Social Justice.” Hayek’s theories underlie the economic policies that have allowed income inequalities in the United States to revert to levels not seen since the 1920s, while similar policies in Latin America have provoked widespread leftward reactions. The “shock therapy” of Boris Yeltsin’s economic strategists Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais was also a product of such non-plus-ultra capitalism. Russia never quite recovered from the shock, and the chaos it set loose eventually brought a return to authoritarian rule under Vladimir Putin."
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