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Jose Luis Coraggio: Another Economy is Happening |
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Page 11 of 27
It is a reasonable expectation that a democratic polity will choose to encourage entrepreneurship in some ways to some extents. Experience with democracy so far indicates that on the whole voters do want the benefits of a society in which entrepreneurs are encouraged, although perhaps in its future developments democracy will lead to emphasizing entrepreneurship less and to emphasizing more other institutional arrangements, staffed by people with other mentalities, driven by other motives. Assuming that democratic politics is not in the foreseeable future going to be animated by the objective of eliminating the entrepreneurial sector entirely, the political problem is to maximize the benefits it confers on society. It is to enhance its function of organizing production efficiently, while weeding out the endless abuses of capitalism. It is to steer the entrepreneurial sector into providing high paid employment for workers, bargains for consumers, and a solid tax base for government, while weeding out the exploitation of workers, the stealing of natural resources, and the swindling of consumers.
Coraggio offers a solution to this political problem. Coraggio writes, “What is normal in a class society is contradictions of interests and conflicts, and not harmony; to promote the contrary concept is an exercise in demagogy, and a negation of reality.” (30) There is no way around the need for a political movement that promotes the people’s interests, including the people’s interest in making entrepreneurship work for it and not against it. A people’s movement can succeed; it can become hegemonic, because it can mobilize the vast majority of workers and consumers. Coraggio’s concept of a people’s economy is one that lends itself to the political unification of the great majority. Given the political success of a people’s movement, democratic political processes can increasingly shape institutions in the light of experience so that those, which in fact produce beneficial results according to criteria of social efficiency, can be perfected, while those which fail in practice can be discarded.
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