Give the people with money free markets, little regulation, and even less taxation, so the argument went, and you will see prosperity as you have never seen it before.
What is not surprising here is that there has been unprecedented prosperity for the top one percent. What is surprising is that a lot of economists don't seem to know what to do about it.
Huge gluts of cash and nowhere for it to earn safe returns because interest rates are, in some cases, down to even negative numbers low.
And yet, our country has infrastructure that is deteriorating to third world status. Our schools prosper only where the upper classes live. And what is left of the middle class, whose former purchasing power, worked a productive juggernaut of things people actually had money to purchase.
One part of the problem is, as Kevin Phillips indicated in "American Theocracy," that the emphasis of Big Money turned from entrepreneurs and risk taking, to one of "Financialization," and the avoidance of risk where ever possible.
The other part of the problem has not only been the greed inherent in wanting the benefits of government when it suited you, while not paying your fair share of keeping it going, but also the very fact of a continuing foreign policy that has always placed getting at supply sources, as well as unregulated markets, a priority well beyond any human suffering that might cause.
The various degrees of colonialism that this created, as well as the ever more desperate search for supply sources, has made for a world environment hardly conducive to the stability Big Money so often harps about in order for there to be incentives to investment at all. Which is nothing more than to say that they have been on the road of poisoning their own wells for a long time now.
And here they are now. The poor dears. So much money and so little they feel good about in doing anything with beyond keeping themselves comfortable, and sufficiently disconnected from the harsher aspects of their collateral damage. How can we not but feel pity for them.
Perhaps its time for an intervention. Tough love and all. You might want to give it some serious thought.
The global economy’s bizarre problem: Too much money
No comments:
Post a Comment