Most of America’s problems begin with a lack of understanding of how it funds itself and the economy. The concept of rugged individualism and bootstrap work ethic is great within the private sector, but in the public sector, it simply gets in the way of distributing the money supply with any semblance of equity.

Money flows upward in a healthy economy, and this provides workers with leverage in their employment. They simply stop buying products made by companies that don’t pay and respect their workers enough and let the market work its magic with competition. This requires awareness among consumers and solidarity among workers that America has never achieved, and a willingness of the government to take the side of labor over capital, even becoming the employer of last resort to assure full employment that is necessary to combat natural advantages that capital will always have.

Realizing the full benefit of government requires that we abandon the foolishness of thinking that “we” fund our government via commerce. Our government funds us and our commerce as the monopoly issuer of our currency that is not restrained by revenue. An economy starved of currency with velocity will display all of the symptoms we are currently seeing as a result of our dependence upon bank credit in the private sector.

Decades of vilifying the currency-issuing government as a “cost”, not admitting the reality of it as the source of our money, has created an economy that views workers and consumers as throwaway commodities that exist only to serve the wealthy. Only in such a hostile environment could the goal of maintaining a set percentage of unemployment to avoid inflation even be considered sane, much less efficient.