Americans must decide if they want a government or a business. From around the mid-’70s we have leaned toward business, and business, at least in America, has no empathy, conscience, or soul. This is why we keep getting leaders who also have none of those things. Soulless people with no empathy or conscience always excel in business as those are exactly the things that will hold one back in American capitalism.
In fact, business and government almost always function in directly opposite directions because it is the purpose of government to work for the largest possible number of people, not just the elite shareholders and CEO’s of business. Americans, not being econ literate, for the most part, believe that someone who managed to become wealthy will know best how to make them wealthy as well.
This couldn’t be more wrong because in making themselves wealthy they likely made very many people poor, or poorer. Business cannot create a single dollar and only shuffles money around between winners and losers with the goal of creating as many losers as possible to feed the voracious appetite of themselves and those they identify with, psychopathic personalities. Only Congress can create money, and it does so without regard for revenue since we left the archaic gold standard.
Everything possible is done to prevent the people from realizing this fact, but it is really just simple logic and knowing how our monetary system functions. Given that one cannot collect or borrow what doesn’t yet exist, dollars must be created into the private sector before the government can do either. Logic would then position spending, the only way government can create money, as “funding” both taxation and borrowing, not the reverse. All modern governments follow this order of process to enable provisioning themselves without needing a revenue stream.
This means that a government pursuing a “balanced budget”, where all money created is clawed back in taxation, the holy grail of politicians, not only leaves nothing to store value from commerce or net retire private bank debt but steals any resources and labor that it utilizes from the private sector. By vilifying the creation of money, a necessity for any economy that is a net importer and allows wealth accumulation, not to mention growing, the people are starved of any public support and must turn to credit to fund their necessities and lifestyles.
Banking then only has to manipulate the interest rate (by paying investors more for “loaning” government the money Congress created in excess of taxation) to keep workers subject to the whims of business. Borrowing has never been a “funding” operation for government and only served to level out the money supply between spending and collecting taxation, even when we used the gold standard. Selling the people on the concept that “their” money funds the government was a major part of the takeover of our economy by the oligarchs and neoliberals, but it was made easy by the fact that it mimics the way anyone who “isn’t” the creator of the national currency must budget.
This has given extreme advantage to the wealthy who are mistakenly seen as necessary for any funding of government spending that benefits the people. The idea of the monopoly issuer of the currency having to go, hat in hand, to the wealthy to beg for crumbs is absurd and dangerous. The only outcome possible from such a grand error in assumptions is fascism, as we are witnessing now. Only a fascist would cage children in conditions that often lead to their death and celebrate a mass murderer by giving a grinning “thumbs up” while holding the orphaned infant of his slaughter.
This will likely be cheered by those who are most harmed as they see the fascist as someone who wants to “save” them money by not having to “fund” their government, causing themselves further degradation and misery. The fascists have now harvested all available middle-class wealth and are sucking at the government teat directly via bailouts and perpetual war. The people are now totally irrelevant to them, so don’t look for any improvement until we revolt, peacefully at the ballot box or otherwise.
