Fear or Loathing: Do Economists and Business Leaders Lack Expertise to Manage the Economy?

There has been criticism that our technocratic elite have shown considerable incompetence to predict, prevent, and now control and abate the economic crisis.

The criticism, getting a loud voice from a wealthy class of new rich who are now being branded in the media as "less rich," is incorrect. The economy has and continues to be managed with competence to define class distinction, or the measure of "success" that occurs with the deflationary phase of the macro-economic business cycle.

The "class" dimension is absolutely critical to understanding the measure of success or failure. What appears as a political failure--a maldistribution of wealth to the upper class--is an economic success. That is what the Hamiltonian (elitist) model of power and political economy is supposed to do: operate to clearly confirm class distinction, defining just exactly who the elite are. At this point within this elitist model, there is, of course, the impetus for a political solution to catalyze a recovery phase of the cycle that is the antithesis of deflation, or inflation (an economic metric).

As long as the recovery phase is managed within the Hamiltonian model, the political measures taken will be inflationary: monetizing the debt with a regressive tax code that produces a budget deficit. The alternative to the budget deficit (inflation) is an equally massive economic detriment, like people starving in the streets, that no one can tolerate, not even the elite because it accumulates too much retributive value to be managed at one time.

At this phase of the political-economic cycle we can choose to finance the recovery with a regressive tax burden that confirms operation of the practical elitist model, or we can choose to progress the tax code and modify the working model to a more pluralistic effect.

Progressing the tax code will not destroy our nation or the free market as all the conservative rhetoricians, that have all the access to media form the margin because the elite can afford to own it, say it will. The fearmongering is an expression of this marginal disproportion of power that the elitist model produces and is designed to maintain with a level of competence that is the best money can buy.

The experts are busy telling us that the prospect of progressing the tax code is keeping the economy in a deflationary trend. We should be afraid of that prospect. It will spoil recovery by discouraging the reinvestment needed to trickle down to the masses and overcome their fear of having no income to spend. Nevermind, of course, that expert implementation of this theory led to their having less income to spend, record depreciation of household net worth, and the fear (the prospect) that it will get worse. What is bad about the economy, what is to be loathed, is being expertly attributed to the fear the elite have of probable change that occurs with the depth and breadth of the cyclical trend and the unequal distribution of wealth and power it is intended to conserve. What the elite fear is, by the absurd reduction of the 18th Century collective utilitarian argument, what we all really fear in our collective self-interest.

What is the elite's fear is the non-elite's triumph of a constitutionally endowed pluralism. The fear that our technocrats are telling us is driving our economy into the ground is a misattribution. The fear factor is the political will to switch to a more pluralistic model that threatens the status quo of power a la Thomas Jefferson.

Our economy is not continuing to trend deflationary out of fear of the largely non-elite consumer who is not spending. The spending is inadequate because the income is not there to support it. It has been consolidated as per the elitist model in operation, and being very competently applied. The trick is now to fool us into believing that choosing the means for a more pluralistic model of power--a more progressive tax burden that will enhance non-elite spending--is antithetical to the basis of our constitutional form of government that protects our freedom. The argument is, of course, absurd.

Operating with the elitist, Hamiltonian model causes the lack of income because it has been accumulated in the upper class to now be consolidated through political process of a regressive tax burden so that the recovery will be financed by borrowing from the consolidated wealth with interest (a budget deficit) instead of taxing it.

The elite of power are afraid, they fear The People will realize that the practical model can be easily changed so that instead of financing the means of consolidating power, We finance the means of real freedom we are all endowed.

Instead of financing the means to defeat free-market economics, We finance the means to allow for it in the fullest measure. We may then confirm what it is we have to fear: a free market or the lack of it?

The expertise being used is being mistaken for the lack of it because the complexity of the problem is being used to convince us all that the cure for our loathing is to be feared: that the problem is the solution; to identify the fear of the elite--the solution--as the object of the loathing, or a fundamental error of attribution. It is a deliberate error, a fallacy, being detected but erroneously interpreted as, attributed to, incompetence of the technocrats instead of the successful operation of the organizational technology--the elitist model of power and political economy.

The bad economics we all loathe is not the result of free-market economics, merely the lack of it. Realizing that is what the elite fear and will do whatever it takes to turn what We loathe into what they fear with the highest level of expertise.