The Mayhem-flower

I was going to do a cartoon about the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling, but I couldn't think of anything good. It worked out for the best, since the Opinions section of The Scarlet was awash in pro-SJC commentary. Instead, I did a cynical Thanksgiving cartoon:



My column this week was "Energy Bill: Pro Capitalism Or Pro Capitalist?," and has its very own cartoon. I had been meaning to write something for this space about the energy bill, but this commentary will do instead. I'm curious in a way what my fellow grad students would make of my implicit approval of capitalism in this piece. Granted, I'm not taking a libertarian or neoliberal stance -- indeed, some of my arguments depend on the reader accepting my brief case that things like environmental regulation are a necessary part of well-functioning capitalism. But I still decline to point to capitalism as the problem, and instead hold it up as a standard that Congressional policymakers fail to meet. I imagine one response would be that the cronyism that I decry is an essential feature of the inner logic of the capitalist system. Such a view would be consistent with the often-expressed opinion that what people usually call Communism -- a system that institutionalized corruption and cronyism -- was in fact capitalism taken to its logical conclusion.