Whose Money Is It?

If you are a bourgeois entrepreneur in the old days of an emerging capitalist eonomics, the new economics is in direct conflict with mercantilism--economic expansion financed by the king (the sovereign ruler, or government). Since you did all the work to expand the pie, you claim full ownership of the reward (the profit) that is value generated in the marketplace. The only value legitimately owned by the king is the initial investment, but the king claims the entire reward because he is the ruler.

By definition, it is the ruler that decides the distribution of rewards and deprivations. If the king allows the bourgeois class to keep the profits without it passing from the royal, ruling class, the bourgeoise is the defacto ruling class. In order to retain the status of ruler, the king must claim the wealth as public, sovereign property to be accumulated and distributed by the operaton of sovereign (government) authority--mercantilism. For the entrepreneur, the value, and the power it confers, is expropriated and is destined to be retributed to the private sector. The distinction between what is the public and private domains of power, and what is public and private property, is born.

The dialectic continues today with the private sector not wanting to relinquish ownership of the wealth to the sovereign which, after The Revolution, became The People. While it is illegal to be publicly confered the title of king, it is not illegal to behave like the sovereign ruler in the private sector--to become "successful." The best way to do that is to, like the king claiming public power, organize into being "too big to fail" which, as we have recently observed, commands a public sector investment that rivals a king's wildest dream of avarice and greed that the bourgeoise of old so strongly objected to.

Now that The People are claiming the value (the profit) produced in the marketplace, the bourgeoise are claiming, like the king, the value, and the power it confers, must pass from the private sector to The People (it must trickle down). So, we have the struggle of who is in control of the use of the "bailout money." Is it a public or a private function? Technocrats (the philosophes of old) have decided it needs to be legitimately both, with the value to be trickled down.

The stakes are high for the private-sector power elite. Either they capitulate to public power, or risk the entire value (what confers the power to rule) being retributed. Thus, we have the "public-private partnership," or what Marx called, anti-socialist socialism.

So, whose money is it?

The value has been historically retributed.