ROBERT REICH SLIPS ON A BANANA.

Two score and five years ago, Alfred E. Kahn, who the Carter administration rewarded for introducing commercial freedom into air transportation by making him the "inflation tsar," decided to head off talk about an impending recession by calling it a banana.

The reason, he amiably explains, is that references to recessions seem to make people nervous and irritable. He hardly needs to add that one of the people made most irritable is his employer, President Carter.

In the peculiar atmosphere that frequently precedes a recession, the CVI -- the Candor and Veracity Index -- takes a sharp dive, and everyone in official positions is required to pretend that the probable is impossible. It is one of the conventions of American politics that no president can ever acknowledge any chance of a recession ahead. That custom is now adding another element of murkiness and uncertainty to public discussion of the coming year's prospects. High officials are permitted to speak of slow growth ahead. But all references to recessions are forbidden -- as noted by the effervescent Mr. Kahn, who likes to live dangerously.

These days, you have Raggedy Ann and Buckwheat to stomp on the Candor and Veracity Index, and you still have the problem.

Once again, inflation threatens a Democratic presidency, and the Biden White House does not have many more effective tools at its disposal than Carter’s did during Kahn’s stint as the hapless chairman of something called the Council on Wage and Price Stability.

As Kahn predicted, it took a sharp — how do you say? — downturn, engineered by Federal Reserve interest rate hikes and marked by unemployment that peaked in 1982 at 10.8 percent, to crush inflation. A similar Fed rate-raising campaign that began in March is why many worry about the risk of a banana now.

While Carter’s inflation-fighting efforts did mostly fail, in one area they did some good. That was the deregulation of passenger airlines, trucking and freight rail, which exposed long-standing government-protected cartels in those industries to competition, resulting in lower costs throughout the economy.

That's not the way the Jarrett regency will roll.

There was a time, in other words, when a left-center spectrum of Democrats paid attention to the supply side of the economy, not in the Republican tax-cuts-for-the-rich way, to be sure, but in a pro-consumer sense of enabling efficiency, with the goal of promoting abundance and, eventually, lower prices. Kahn, Kennedy and — yes — Carter deserve credit for this contribution to easing long-range inflationary pressures.

Biden’s treasury secretary, Janet L. Yellen, advocates “modern supply side economics,” which, as she put it, “prioritizes labor supply, human capital, public infrastructure, R&D, and investments in a sustainable environment.” She argued that the Build Back Better plan’s “investments” in child care, family leave and the like would have advanced that policy.

Whether all that spending really would have raised productivity — or poured more gas on a raging inflation fire — is a good question, to which we will likely never get the answer since the bill is essentially dead. Meanwhile, the administration should look, as Kahn did, for opportunities to fight inflation by loosening the government’s grip on unduly regulated markets.

That Build Back Better is the new banana.

Don’t get scared. I’m going to talk about something that’s caused a lot of fear mongering.

You see, advanced countries, like the United States, pool resources for the common good. How? Well, governments enact taxes and then spend that money on things that benefit everyone. Think of national defense, schools, highways, healthcare, unemployment insurance — basically government spending that protects the well-being of the people.

But since some folk, like your conservative Uncle Bob, think ANY pooling of resources for the common good is…socialism.

And since socialism is apparently so terrifying…

I’m going to use a different word to describe this taxing of individuals for the common good. Let’s use.. I don’t know.. How about…Banana! That’s not scary, right?

There is no such thing as the, singular noun, common good, and the very litany Mr Reich chants demonstrates as much.  Is nation building "national defense?"  Why have school board meetings become so contentious?  To what extent has highway construction been captured by rent-seekers?  What effect do third-party payments have on your medical bills, and can a monopsony really contain prescription drug costs?

For that matter, is there even a "conservative Uncle Bob?"  When people take their money to the grocery store to buy groceries, is that a "pooling of resources?"  Free enterprise is socialism?  Ignorance must be strength.  Note further: there is a common purpose in going grocery shopping, in the provision of sustenance.  But if you don't like the prices or the varieties at one store, if there are open markets, there are choices.  The wrangling over the curriculum or the Medicare reimbursement rate or the latest stealth submarine is what happens when there is a monopoly on the pooling of resources.  We don't have to call that socialism, we can call it politics.  To Alter Net's Uncle Bob, though, politics is fine.

Great. So, there are essentially three purposes for which governments banana.

First, social insurance against the possibilities of misfortune and neediness, such as unemployment, poor health, disability, and so on.

Second, public goods that we all benefit from, such as parks, highways, public health, and national defense.

Third, public investment in our future, such as basic research, education, and efforts to address pollution and the climate crisis.

We don't have to call "Social Security" socialism to recognize that it is neither social nor secure.  Might we have opportunities to bet on emergence and allow for more, rather than fewer, insurance markets?

You'd think Mr Reich, who has hung around economics departments for at least some of his academic career, would grasp "nonexclusive and nonrivalrous" and recognize that parks are congestible club goods, and you can put a fence around green space, charge admission, and perhaps provide beer gardens or roller coasters to add to the experience.  Highways?  Productive assets that aren't priced properly, while providing playgrounds for rent-seekers?  Please.  If we're going to talk about public health, do we have a rubric for soft on crime prosecutors?  National defense, yes, once the rockets are up and all that, but the difficulties we contend with whenever there is a defense budget ought to caution against introducing politics into those other areas.

Internal improvements?  Yes, that has long been a state activity, and it is subject to being captured by rent seekers or entrenching the current set of special interests.  But Mr Reich has more fun creating a straw man to deal with that mythical Uncle Bob than he does contemplating the possibility that state action is often ... bananas.

Whether bananing is “socialism” or not is a useless argument. Every country bananas. Capitalism requires banana’ing to ensure a degree of fairness and stability.

So the next time your Uncle Bob decries any pooling of private resources for the common good — or bananaing — as “socialism”… share this video with him.

And give him a banana.

The issue is not whether state action is socialism.  Public employees collect wages.  It's whether the state action is productive, and whether improvements can be found by rolling back the state action and relying more on markets.