We need a new model
Mostly to take the place of traditional employment. It's going away, and fast. Replacing that's just a start, of course.
But without a start ... we're finished.
I'm not talking about jobs going away. Or not just that. Because of course they are, and they're going to go faster.
(Just a side note: all those economists and pundits you see or read talking about "recovery"" aren't idiots. They're paid liars. Specifically, they're being paid to keep us cattle headed peaceably down the chutes to our dates with a hook and a sharp knife.)
No. What's going away is the entire concept of jobs, as traditionally thought of and constructed. And what's more, it needs to.
We need a new model to replace the old, dying ways. And I need you to help me figure out what it is. What they are, because one size never fits all. And then put all those new models into action. Soon.
The Cause of the Crash
The current economic implosion results not from market failures, but government success. Government exists purely to centralize benefits and socialize costs; anything else is pure marketing.
The most effective means of transferring wealth from the productive classes to the plutocrats is inflation. Government is now dealing with the inevitable consequences of long-term inflation. Of course, the only thing they can do about it is what the US is in fact doing: inflate more.
All the bad behavior by Wall Street, the banks, and the other usual suspects was subsidized, hence encouraged, by the US government, whose partners in crime they were. (The US is massively subsidizing such behavior again, under the guise of "stimulus," i.e. direct transfer payments to the rich.)
How much of this is "capitalism" is a matter of semantics. I'm inclined to agree with Kevin Carson's "free-market anti-capitalism" formulation myself.
The collapse certainly has nothing to do with the markets being "too free." They've been manipulated every step of the way. Meanwhile it was the hard money and real free market types (not the neocons and their conjoined equally-evil twins, the neoliberals, passing off their mercantilism-warmed-over as "free markets) who predicted the meltdown all along.
Mainstream economists, who cheer-led the inflationary bubble and predicted it would expand forever, now tout the Bush/Obama Rich-Only Recovery as "green shoots." One wonders how much of this is innocent stupidity, and how much is paid.
Progressive Taxation: Cementing Aristocracy
Progressive taxation has first and foremost the effect of cementing the existing wealthy into an unassailable aristocracy. It's sold, of course, as somehow benefiting the poor. But its actual intent is to make it difficult - in time, impossible - to rise in economic status, by making it difficult to accrue wealth. Thus the Old Rich, who already have theirs, protect their positions of privilege and power from arrivistes, and in time transform themselves into a nobility in everything but name.
That's not the narrative we're taught, of course. Nor what most of us believe. Even "libertarians" and other believers in the real free market tend to accept that progressive taxation is meant to ensure more equal outcomes ... when the truth is the very opposite.
Why? Habit. Time to break it.
The simple singular fact of politics is that anything government does, it does for the primary purpose of increasing the wealth and power of its proprietors. Who, by the way, are never "the people" at large - the very fact democracy is designed to hide.
What "everything" means here is everything. If taxes are raised - and if taxes are lowered. If regulations are imposed - or abolished. All of these actions, apparently contradictory as they are, represent at the most the temporary ascendancy of one or another faction of the ruling class.
More usually, it's a shell game: mountains of paper designed to do nothing but hide business as usual. If it's not meant to cover another ruling class grab at power and wealth.
Here is the Big Truth, that I'll repeat over and over - a million times, if need to - until it actually enters your awareness:
The only purpose of government is to centralize benefit and socialize cost.
Anything else is a lie.
Ethics-free hacks
So "prominent Berkeley economist Brad DeLong" calls opponents of the stimulus plan "ethics free Republican hacks." (Hat tip to Jesse Walker at reason, by way of Antiwar.com.)
Good one.
Given that what DeLong and Paul Krugman and their fascist troll ilk are peddling - economic "stimulus" and the nonsensical notion that we can spend ourselves rich - is nothing more than a slathering of whore's makeup over history’s greatest known transfer of wealth to the very wealthy. Which wealth, by the way, is going to be ripped off our bodies like skin, through the miracle of hyperinflation.
To be sure, the Republicans clamoring in opposition to the bailout are ethics free hacks. Leaving aside the fact that's a truism - nobody gets elected to national office without being one - let's recognize their stance for the cheap ploy it is. The Republicans know the American people are largely wise to the fact this is all egregious socialism for the rich (a tautology anyway); they're just pandering. Of course they favor the bailout: they're employed by the same people the Democrats are, and that isn't the voters.
And after all, the bailout was one of the final pet projects of George W. Bush.
This is a trick the Democrats have proven adept at: vocally opposing Bush's war against American liberties at home and todo lo mundo abroad - and then voting for every stinking scrap of it, from funding the war waged against Iraq in total opposition to US strategic interests, to the confirmation of whatever torture monkey the Busheviks threw up to be Attorney General. Few were more assiduous at that than the new puppetoon President - whose definition of change, you should be realizing now, means "more of the same, only bigger and harder."
“We owe it to ourselves.”
For all those who like to believe that people today are dumber than they used to be, the above statement ought offer fairly compelling counter-evidence.
Once upon a time otherwise intelligent (and educated, which isn't the same thing) people apparently believed that statement, uttered decades ago by John Maynard Keynes, among others, in reference to the national debt.
But what does it even mean? On the face of it, isn't it transparent nonsense? Let's see you borrow $100 from yourself. Does that mean you suddenly have $200?
Ah, but let me explain how it really works.
I take from you $100. That shouldn't bother you, because "we" - necessarily including you and I - owe it to "ourselves." Yes?
Now, to pay back that debt, I take from you $100. Because you and I are still part of "we." And we owed that $100 to ourselves, yes?
So now we're square. The debt has been repaid. Only a greedy bastard could possibly complain. Gitmo for you, Gordon Gekko!
Isn't that simple?
Not convinced? I give you the "bailout" - the largest single wealth transfer from the proletariat to the wealthy in known human history. In this case, the transaction above works out as $100 (plus a whole lot more) borrowed from you, and repaid to J.P. Morgan.
Which cosmic larceny, of course, is heartily supported by both presidential candidates.