I don’t believe we can effectively make decisions, politically or economically, until we can better define our system than simply shoving it into one of two boxes, socialism or capitalism. Doing so has only muddied the waters and allowed the lesser intellects to gain control of our democratic process. People in America who couldn’t begin to describe socialism will threaten you with bodily harm if you try to give them healthcare or a guaranteed job.
Socialism has become a slur word in America in spite of the fact that every time capitalism has failed it was socialism that brought us back from the brink. However, America never adopted true socialism, choosing instead to selectively socialize the money supply to bail out the failed parts of capitalism. Those who rail against brown people getting any kind of government benefits have no clue that the government doesn’t care about brown, or white, people either. America’s government is fully committed to supply-side economics and only views people as consumers that enable profits, bringing resources to the capitalists as a lamp’s wick brings oil to the flame.
Government cares about supply chains and production imploding to the point of making its crony capitalism impossible, so it funds them via the consumers. Doing so simply injects public money into the consumer economy where it can be scooped into the bank accounts of the oligarchs. WalMart could pay its people more and remain profitable, or lobby the government to provide them with food stamps so it can accrue that public money as profit.
The only thing Wal Mart’s employees don’t enjoy some level of discount on as a benefit is groceries. Why cut your profits from the one item being socialized for/through the employees, especially if you are in the top three employers? A logical society would see this dynamic as unhealthy and anything except true capitalism, but few have ever accused America of any degree of logic. Americans blame the employees in some perverse concept of meritocracy that is self-defeating in its denial of reality.
If they could affect the society they imagine Wal Mart would have no employees because who would work full time just to starve to death a little slower? It could be argued that this would be a good thing and would allow competing businesses to regain their market share and hire Wal Mart’s employees at a higher wage that would support them. Doing so would be closer to the capitalist model, but that model isn’t what the oligarchs and their government puppets want.
The present model, only remotely related to capitalism, is neoliberalism, the socializing of costs of business while offering no benefit of public money generation to the larger population. With such a model it is beneficial to privatize as much of the economy and society as possible, allowing a path to profit for every facet of life.
Utilities and infrastructure, long since paid for and now facing decay, are contracted to private companies to avoid facing the cost of replacement and taking advantage of the false assumption that business is “more efficient”. Finance is given “hands-off” status by the government in a similar assumption that we can do nothing right collectively but the “markets” will always self-correct and do the right thing. Privatized education is allowed government support in a self-fulfilling process of stratification of society via an assumed meritocracy that conveniently breaks down along racial lines.
This mass delusion depends upon two false assumptions that are pervasive in American society and quickly spreading to infect the rest of the world. The first is that banks, not the government, create the money supply, and second that government costs are paid for by taxation or borrowing, both burdens on the people. Such a system, if true, would justify a watchdog political party to restrain government from any unnecessary spending that the people would have to “pay for”. That it resonates with mostly ignorant voters because it is how their own budgeting functions makes it even easier to promote.
This is how brown babies become viewed as threats at our border and are incarcerated without Constitutional protections or right to representation after being forcefully removed from their parents and siblings, often forever. They will, after all, need financial support and may someday compete with “more deserving” people for jobs and a piece of the limited money supply, or force more debt on “hard-working” Americans. Never mind that one must give up any pretense of owning a soul to carry out such maniacal orders given by a President who is obviously mentally challenged and has zero accomplishments that he can rightfully claim as anything but winning the birth lottery.
Neoliberalism is defeated when the truth of America’s monetary system, very similar to the rest of the modern economies in the world, becomes known. That truth is that the federal government, specifically Congress, has complete control of the creation and deletion of money via its spending and taxing policies. It never has money because it has no need for it, creating it on demand as it provisions itself and pays for programs with appropriations. No one’s tax dollars are involved, as they were canceled when they met the debt that created them upon entering the government sector.
This simple truth is the reason for the constant drumbeat of fear of the debt and deficits, as anyone moderately familiar with dual entry spreadsheet accounting should see it from their training. The nation’s currency is a no-cost commodity that Congress is Constitutionally mandated to create “for the common welfare” to enable the promises and liberties the document enumerates so clearly. It is only by neglecting in this mandate that suffering and austerity is created. Both are strictly political decisions, not economics. America, and its victims in constant resource wars, are dying because the oligarchs and politicians who suck from their foul teats, want them to.
