Structural Disease and Solutions of the Political Economy

Managed market economies, which is the reality in the United States, go through ebbs and flows. Macroeconomics, while not an exact science, can recognize patterns, make some predictions, establish some ordered processes, and result in likely outcomes in the relationships between capital, labor, money, and property. The current crisis, in which the subprime mortgage collapse is a signal and symptom, has no definite future path or end-stage.
This “millennial” macroeconomic problems are full of potential danger and the cause of anxiety and uncertainty throughout the world among those who have the awareness of its full impact. The human instincts of fear and greed, the causes of conflict and struggle, play a large role in this crisis from the size, scope, and scale of the problems and their consequences in an age when the entire world political-economy exists connected as never before.
Structural flaws in the political-economy caused this threat of the “greatest depression” since the fall of Rome almost1600 years ago. Those flaws include: special interest political corruption that transfers greater amounts of tax revenues upward to the wealthy instead of downward; lack of competitive smaller enterprises due to legally sanctioned near-monopolies granted to special interests (these taken together might be the real problem with the health care system which is never mentioned); unsound monetary policy of paper currency inflation and its result of diminishing return of value; accumulated government and personal debt and its “consumption” of disposable income and recapitalization investment (this includes everything from unfunded future liabilities like Social Security, etc., transportation infrastructure, and energy systems); extremely high government purchases of goods and services on things other than investment which brings return and growth of capital (i.e. national security and “wars of choice”); and, finally, most important of all, the entire American tax system dependent on wage and property theft instead of consumption, trade, and capital gains.
Politics, the struggle between competing, unorganized factions or useful alliances of temporary interests, can be defined throughout history very simply as “determining, by consent or force, who gets to have what, when they get it, and how much do they get.” That applies to rights, wealth, justice, and peace, or their absence. Partisan politics of populism and ambition succeed well in a democratic process when leaders abuse and play the fears and the greed natural to the people who ignore reality and refuse to take responsibility. Everyone wants more and they want someone else to give it to them.
While a system of little democracies, the United States of America has a republican structure of government. That means no one person or minority of the few rule on their own whim. We the People are sovereign. We have no king, no prince, and no church that claims any power from divine right or universal authority to make our choices for us. A republic only survives if the sovereign people recognize the common interest and exercise their power–in concrete, personal ways. Voting for a message of hope without a plan, or knee-jerk reaction against it, is still expecting someone else to fix the problem so people don’t have to worry or do it themselves.
The flaws in our system outlined above are symptoms of a disease called “ignorance and apathy.” Treating the symptoms can be done, but we must cure the disease. Changing the holders of office is incomplete without rethinking and restructuring everything required to save not only our economic future, but our natural political rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The implications are severe beyond those stated here.
Spending less on cars, clothes, and toys; cleaning up our yards, streets, and parks ourselves; volunteering at the school instead of complaining that kids are not taught well enough; bringing food to the hungry families of our neighbors; these types of changes in thinking and action, if we all do these at the point where the “people meet the land,” in the community and not in Washington D.C., are the real solutions. We are doomed in so many ways if everyone does not do their own small part. Informed citizens taking action NOW, beyond voting every two or four years, can create a Post-Historical Political Economy better than any known before.
In short, YOU, I mean We the People, are the real problem. And what are YOU, We the People going to do about it?