What defines the limits of power? It is not just a matter of saying yes OR no, but having the power to say yes AND no. Does, for example, the proposed health care reform empower consumers with the discretion of both yes and no to deter abuse of power?
If, for example, consumers find the cost of health care to be too high, paying the insurance premium, directly or indirectly, always says yes to the cost. If insurance is mandatory, not only is saying no not an option by organized default, it is illegal.
Without being able to say yes and no (to bid the price up or down), consumers are not empowered to control the cost. Prices inflate because there is no resistance. There is no deterence value--a reciprocal value of self-determination--in determining prices. Consumers have to pay the cost that providers can claim is set by a demand ontology. The accumulation of wealth, and the concommittant power to self-determine (deter and terminate, or define the limit of power), is claimed to be ontologically determined by a free-market process (supply and demand) and, thus, exculpatory (not retributively valued and subject to gamma risk).
Regulating markets (gamma risk) is all about deterence value--providing incentives or disincentives (creating a predictable, manageable, ontology of purpose).
The best deterence is, of course, to prevent the accumulation of power. Within that structure of power is the discretion to control (deter) costs and "determine" income.
For example, the short selling of our economy through credit default swaps expanded (leveraged) the limit of power. The gamma risk that accumulates results in a well-defined, "prudential" regulatory authority. The swappers were self-determining; they knew that if the capital was not being leveraged to cause economic growth, the mortgages were bad (toxic) debt.
Self-determination is not by definition exculpatory. The determinants that shorted our economy and caused the Great Recession knew investing in CDS and CDO's would result in a recessionary trend, causing a loss for everyone else's wealth and income for their own self-determined capital gain. It is completely the opposite of a free-market ontology and the gain can not in any way be considered exculpatory, beyond a punitive tax authority to retribute the value and reverse the deflationary trend.
We see then that the limit of power is to determine income. If the ability to self-determine is limited either by the public or private sector, the power to determine, and responsibility, is alienated from the self. The process of determination is then in a constant state of regulatory reform, aimlessly searching for prudence and responsibility that has been alienated into an authoritarian regime with an affirmative power that is too big to fail.
Health care reform legislation, for example, is for consumers an alienation of power. The ability to "deter" or "terminate" the extent of power is limited to government authority based on the distribution of the risk-to-reward.
The dispropotion of low risk to high reward of a collusive consolidation makes the credible case for a public utility, like a national health insurance program.
Big profits, if not checked by price controls appropriate for something the consumer is commanded to have, can be reinvested to expand the supply and control the costs of the entire sector. With the immense consolidation of wealth and power, however, the probability it will not be corrupted is very low, something that a free-market economics prevents if ensured in priority.
Given the need to spread the risk, health insurance presents a good case for government providing what people cannot provide for themselves, (something free-market economics does very well, by the way, if income is adequately distributed to allow for it). However, solving the problem with organized consolidation (with the problem) is as irrational as consolidated organizations are likely to be, always acting with an affirmative too-big-to-fail economy of scale.
Whether the public or private sector, or in combination, the evaluation of a too-big-to-fail economy of scale is always affirmatively "yes" since its "subjects" do not, by design of the leviathan, have the power to deter, or limit, with the right to self-determination. That Constitutional right, rather than being empowered by government authority, is deterred.
A government healthcare program, for example, is by definition too big to fail. What defines its success or failure? Are the processes of power close enough to readily access the incentive to change its delivery for a facile fit to the wants and needs of individual consumers like a free-market system? The probability favors a power elite embellishing its progressively oversized sense of self, dictating consumer preferences right down to the fingernail.
Rather than encouraging the growth of consolidation, which maximizes the negative, non-productive effect of the zero-sum and the need for government, America can be credibly organized for economic growth without massive government spending and the massive tax liability to fund it. The liability, rather than accumulated and shifted to the public by large corporates into a crisis dimension, can be organized, and spread out, into a manageable ontology with a very close and easily verifiable accountability.
Without expansion of the pie, and a "disinflationary" tendency, the capital gained is not "verifiably" legitimate and needs "validation" of government authority. Using this illegitimate gain (gaining the profit without assuming the alpha risk, which is the product of the consolidated brand of growth), the investors, (by claiming an inherent, constitutional right to their property) induce a "deflationary" cyclical trend like we have now instead of economic growth with low inflation.
It should be clear, by even the most casual observation, the organizational legitimacy (the prescribed benefit) of allowing for an unobstructed "organic growth" of an ever-bigger corporate is critically flawed. The cost (massive unemployment and transfer of wealth to the investors) to benefit (big profits and salaries to the corporate) is overwhelmingly obvious but is being afforded constitutional protection. How, pray tell, can this possibly be regarded as the utilitarian ethic of promoting "the general welfare?"
This "general welfare" is supposed to "trickle down." The evidence, however, shows the welfare generally trickling up. The deficit between theory and practice literally, empirically, results in deficit spending which is explained as being the result of, as Ronald Reagan described it, government spending without the need.
If we are to rely on this kind of logic, it is not difficult to see why we face such a political-economic maelstrom. Stopping and reversing an extreme lack of good reason starts with properly identifying the problem, and the new admistration has, at this point, done that.
According to the president, it is time to "organize for America." So, then, what exactly has America been organized for?
It is no coincidence middle-class families face rebuilding their savings while too-big-to-fail corporates reap record profits. If your wealth was not plundered by this recession, it will the next one, or the next. Your wealth was not lost, it was consolidated. The value still exists, just not in your bank account. There is, however, considerable risk to this conversion and consolidation of value that is being busily managed by our two parties and our public/private corporate bureaucracy.
Where there is reward there is risk and the assigment of that risk/reward, its distribution, legitimately won or lost. We are politically organized to manage, and conserve, the risk our economy has organizationally evolved to accomplish--liquidity crisis.
Crises result from the accumulation of risk. It is, then, necessary to dissipate that risk.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment