Archive - Opinion
ABOUT MONEY
The only acceptable role today for government regarding the economy is to strive to achieve an equitable deal for the poor – and for those middle class Americans being disenfranchised by the corporate outsourcing of jobs to other countries.
The corporate interests who dominate our political scene today have put together too good a deal for themselves. They abdicate responsibility for U.S. jobs, they abdicate corporate responsibility for paying taxes, they abdicate responsibility for maintaining the social integrity of the nation.
Those wealthy who deny government a valid role in helping the poor and the jobless may as well admit they have decided the country is simply a geographic place where people live, but is not a nation of people contractually responsible for one another’s well being.
The wealthy often accuse the poor of an inability to compete in a free market economy. The problem with this simplistic equation is that America is not, and has not been for ages, a free market economy. It is an economy divided into economic segments monopolistically dominated by certain large corporate interests.
At the highest profit levels, the monopolistic industries obtain special, highly socialistic handling by their compliant government. These industries have over the past two or three decades run most small businesses out of business. The remaining small businesses today are not small business; they are tiny business. They are almost hobbies [or at best, tax shelters] for many of their owners, their profits are so meaningless.
The wealthy have so brought under their economic control the average American small business and individual, that the free market, small business model has almost become a myth. I’m not going to argue details here. It is simply much harder today than sixty years ago to open and run a small business profitably. I’ve been a consultant to small business my entire life. I know.
Almost all industries made up of hundreds and thousands of successful small businesses sixty years ago are now dominated by a handful of gigantic companies. Their argument for existing is that their big businesses have lowered the price of goods. Yes, they have done so by casting many U.S. workers out of a job, while running up the costs of the most expensive and necessary goods: housing and medical.
The latter expenses effectively negate the positive gains in the consumer goods.
Repeatedly in America people today work for major corporations for wages so low that they literally in many cases are forced to live in rented rooms rather than even apartments, let alone being able to buy houses. Millions cannot afford health care.
Ours has become a controlled economy, which the big business interests market to us as a free economy.
How is it controlled?
The same people own the shopping malls, who own the banks, who own the newspapers and TV and radio stations who sell the advertising, who own the oil that fuels the cars they sell to us, who fund most political candidates who vote to help them own the media that sells us the idea of a free economy….you get the idea?
All I am saying is that the cards are now so highly stacked in favor of the corporations that the common person has it harder than ever acquiring any security. The wealthy, building their multimillion dollar homes, buying their expensive vehicles, selling their real estate deals, loaning the money, amassing more and more ownership, outsourcing more jobs to foreign lands, have become so insensitive to and unaware of the plight of the common person that their doings border on the criminal.
We all know that wealth buys immunity from both economic, as well as many judicial, ills that many millions of Americans must cope with all their lives.
How do we correct this? We must roll back the clock, I believe. Anti-trust laws need reviving, and corporations and the wealthy need to be required to pay their taxes. It is time the nation stopped paying for its imprudent excesses with the meager earnings of the poor and the middle class. On a larger level, America needs to be guided in conserving resources, reducing its rampant over-consumption, and motivating people to save. The country should have a more conservative energy program. It should have a more conservative oil program. It should have a more conservative military defense program.
What does this mean, this word ‘conservative’ in this context? It means we need to start living within our means. That means tempering our consumption habits. If we do not temper them, international economic pressures are going to continue to temper them for us. Oil prices are rising, are helping our dollar fall, and our national debt – which all of us must pay for out of dwindling relative incomes – is rising.
It is a powder keg. Each of us is one of the grains of powder about to help it blow. Redistributing wealth in our country is long overdue. We can keep our head in the sand and deny that fact, or we can do something about it.
You may reach me at the Contact button. I’ll get back to you, whether you’re Right, Left, In-between, or Beyond.
***
You may reach me at the Contact button. I’ll get back to you, whether you’re Right, Left, In-between, or Beyond.