Independent investors need to determine the objective of current political-economic activity to protect their capital from the fully intended predations of classic economic modeling--to consolidate the capital (your savings and the value of your investments).
The intention to confirm practical application of the classical economic model well into the future is fully indicated by innovative political means that correlate directly with the innovations within the financial sector. Federal Reserve chairman, Bernanke recently refered to innovative financial instruments and practices as a healthy market efficiency that needs to be closely regulated to both prevent this deep recession from getting deeper and prevent innovation that is systemically destabilizing in the future.
Bernanke is confirming the intent to support the predatory results of allowing the capital to consolidate into innovative market mechanisms that are a function of massive money flows and momentum that CAUSE "bubbles" (extreme overbought conditions that lure investors into a false-positive with the valuation being speculative and not fundamental--like $135/bl for oil and eight years of false economic growth policies--only to burst the bubble and consolidate the monetized value). The next phase of the business cycle, neo-classically refered to as the "infusion" phase in which new capital is injected by monetary expansion (monetarism), is when the unconsolidated capital intended to restore liquidity with minimal redistribution from the consolidated value (the distribution phase of the cycle) is carefully regulated to that end and allowed to be innovatively consolidated later in the accumulation phase of the cycle. (Buy-and-hold is a good strategy at this point of the cycle when the Dow dips below 7500 which has become a false support beyond which the market is overvalued in the next six to twelve months).
Bernanke is applying the Hamiltonian model of ensuring the welfare of the rich in priority (what is too big to be allowed to fail) that CAUSES the systemic crisis, ensuring the organization and operation of the systemic risk in order to prevent it (?). Capital is allowed to consolidate, antithetical to the legitimate means of a free-market (pluralist) mechanics. Expert (elitist) adjustment of the negative externalities occurs at the end of the process since financials will innovate to avoid non-market regulation. The result is an ends-justifies-the-means legitimacy of a command economy with a false free-market legitimacy.
Causing crisis, and the systematic mechanism of predation, in the name of innovative technical management of the systemic risk by operation of careful regulatory authority (state capitalism) administered by a professional class of MBA's is a confidence game intended to conserve the consolidation of the capital and a defeat of the free-market mechanism it pledges to ensure. This is where the political economy becomes so complex, so difficult to understand and confirm, that the machinations of the elite easily achieve the consolidation of power with a false pluralistic legitimacy.
That the political economy is being reinvented (innovated) to ensure the fair and equitably legitimate outcome of a free-market economics by public regulatory authority just indicates one thing: the market is being rigged so that the small investor will always be at a systematic disadvantage with a free-market legitimacy by operation and declaration of public authority.
The practical philosophy that we must replace the free-market mechanism with the operation of a public authority is not paradoxical, it is a contradiction. It indicates a fraud, not the operation of a genuine civil service acting in the public trust, but a bureaucratic political economy of elits entrusted to conserve the distribution of wealth and power in a continuous crisis proportion that always demands its elite management and the "bonus" compensation of a sub-elite class of loyalists to administer it.
The bonus payments to retain the elite talent to administer state capitalism (to administer a non-free-market organizational technology with a free market legitimacy, or to perpetrate the fraud) buys the loyalty of what is otherwise a tendency to be free and fair, rewarding the most corrupt and morally incompetent. For the investor, this affects the bottom line. It is not just an ethological and ethical consideration. It indicates what the macro-economic model will look like despite the recent political changes, and I am sorry to say it is a faux political change that will not ensure the cure for what ails us: a regulatory authority that ensures a free and unconsolidated marketplace in priority (pluralism).
Recent political change is an innovation that conserves the consolidation of wealth and power by systematic predation and a means of managing the retributive value (the full value to be distributed to recover from, and prevent, liquidity crisis) shammed as technocratic management of systemic risk and punctuated crisis that will ensure the probability of its recurrent accumulative and distributional macro-economic value. The classical economic model of capitalism in which the measure of success is to defeat free-market mechanics as a function of organizational size is conserved with the pluralistic legitimacy neo-classically administered, and carefully measured in posteriori, rather than ensuring its legitimate means, and the probability of fair and equitable results, in priority.
Ensuring an organized deconsolidation, and the plurality of opportunistic investment that will naturally occur, is a pragmatic priority easily set to be accomplished in the first 100 days. The Democratic party executive and legislative leadership, however, do not understand the economics well enough to effect the needed change even if they could see beyond the self-satisified dictates of their ideology and the thrill of politically gaming for it despite the president's penchant for pragmatism.
The change we really need (pluralism) is highly improbable. So, load up and hold on to equities of companies that are too big to fail the liquidity crisis they are organized to cause both now and in the future with the very highest probability being very clearly indicated.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Saturday, April 4, 2009
The Economic Stimulus Legislation
There has not been a lot of confidence in the congressional delegation, and the president's pragmatism seems to have devolved to a partisan deference to the congressional leadership. He will find that, despite what Emanuel tells him, to be a mistake, already showing up as a waning popular support.
If we can fully embrace pragmatism over partisanship, The People will be much better served. The economic stimulus legislation is a monument to old-school Keynesian economics and monetizing the debt. Nothing new about that except the size of it.
Without a more progressive tax code, and all we have seen is a penchant for regressive tax measures, the middle class will be hammered with the debtor assignment on this colossal debt. If this is intended to be anti-recessionary legislation, we have not seen anything yet!
The speaker of the house says Democrats did not gain a majority to compromise The People's business. That would be meaningful if there was confidence in the ability to recognize what that is. It does not appear to be a confirmation of pragmatism over partisanship that avoids outmoded, Keynesian technical measures. Rather, it appears as typical tax and spend legislation that will leave the least able to pay holding the big bag of debt.
Does anyone really believe the speaker of the house and the congressional delegation is really interested in change We The People need?
What I see is an old-school stimulus program that will be highly inflationary, setting up the realignment toggle switch to the Republican Party. Demand-reduction measures (a highly regressive tax code with a rising rate of interest--Reaganomics) will be used to then control the inflationary trend. We will just be churning the problem.
So much for building a pragmatic coalition for change we need.
You don't have to be a Republican to be part of the neo-conservative coalition.
If we can fully embrace pragmatism over partisanship, The People will be much better served. The economic stimulus legislation is a monument to old-school Keynesian economics and monetizing the debt. Nothing new about that except the size of it.
Without a more progressive tax code, and all we have seen is a penchant for regressive tax measures, the middle class will be hammered with the debtor assignment on this colossal debt. If this is intended to be anti-recessionary legislation, we have not seen anything yet!
The speaker of the house says Democrats did not gain a majority to compromise The People's business. That would be meaningful if there was confidence in the ability to recognize what that is. It does not appear to be a confirmation of pragmatism over partisanship that avoids outmoded, Keynesian technical measures. Rather, it appears as typical tax and spend legislation that will leave the least able to pay holding the big bag of debt.
Does anyone really believe the speaker of the house and the congressional delegation is really interested in change We The People need?
What I see is an old-school stimulus program that will be highly inflationary, setting up the realignment toggle switch to the Republican Party. Demand-reduction measures (a highly regressive tax code with a rising rate of interest--Reaganomics) will be used to then control the inflationary trend. We will just be churning the problem.
So much for building a pragmatic coalition for change we need.
You don't have to be a Republican to be part of the neo-conservative coalition.
The Tyranny of Liberty
The conservative element, busily remaining relevant to the dialectic of cyclical economic crisis and the demand for change in a post-industrial society, argues that correcting for the detriment experienced by the vast majority of Americans in the current crisis is a tyranny of liberty that must be reversed in order to preserve the fundamental principles that our nation was founded, has made us strong and will keep us strong.
The conservative principles refered to by the conservative element as fundamental are derived from pre-industrial society when making a profit was the entrepreneurial adventure on the wild frontier. Society has since progressed into a post-industrial productive capacity that is even beyond the classical economic problem of crisis of overproduction being just a lack of demand caused by surplusing value, but sheer productive capacity.
Post-industrial capacity is far beyond the conditions that produced the American Revolution. At that time, the tyrant was the king preventing the businessperson (the bourgeoise, the middle class) the full market value of their work in the marketplace to achieve economic growth and a peaceful prosperity--the profit. The middle class fully intended to replace the king's inherited right to rule with their inherited right to rule, or the natural right to liberty that the tyrant was preventing.
Once the king's power was supplanted by the bourgeoise, a private propertied ruling "class" emerged, no longer middle class. The productive capacity of neo-classical capitalism monetizes the retributive value and allows for the extension of credit for a burgeoning middle class now demanding the retribution of value (the revolution) Keynesian innovations are designed to prevent.
The demand for equitable distribution of economic value by government authority (the sovereign people) in opposition to the old liberty to accumulate it and cause general economic crisis must be rendered a threat to the post-industrial middle class by the conservative element. Fear and loathing is the agendae--liberty is being destroyed by the tyranny of the plenary and complete, absolute power of government (the legal, constitutional sovereign).
For the conservative element, the legal sovereignty of The People is self-rule. The fate of The People is thus self-determined and, therefore, retributing the economic value accumulated can only be ex-post-facto and by bill of attainder, or by illegal, tyrannical means that are the antithesis of freedom. Choosing to retribute the value is tantamount to choosing tyranny and the Hamiltonian (elitist) form of government is thus confirmed as necessary to conserve the liberty the Revolution has confered.
If The People are inherently incapable of ruling, self-rule is naturally the function of, it is to be "attributed" to, the power elite--the "old" liberty that resulted in the accumulation of wealth and power by what was once the middle class.
This conservation of liberty renders the conservative element relevant to the current dynamic of power to redefine, realign, and finally, restructure the elements of the power structure as the value is naturally "retributed" to the middle class. The change that will occur is not to be feared and loathed. It will be a tyranny of liberty that replaces the liberty of tyranny.
The conservative principles refered to by the conservative element as fundamental are derived from pre-industrial society when making a profit was the entrepreneurial adventure on the wild frontier. Society has since progressed into a post-industrial productive capacity that is even beyond the classical economic problem of crisis of overproduction being just a lack of demand caused by surplusing value, but sheer productive capacity.
Post-industrial capacity is far beyond the conditions that produced the American Revolution. At that time, the tyrant was the king preventing the businessperson (the bourgeoise, the middle class) the full market value of their work in the marketplace to achieve economic growth and a peaceful prosperity--the profit. The middle class fully intended to replace the king's inherited right to rule with their inherited right to rule, or the natural right to liberty that the tyrant was preventing.
Once the king's power was supplanted by the bourgeoise, a private propertied ruling "class" emerged, no longer middle class. The productive capacity of neo-classical capitalism monetizes the retributive value and allows for the extension of credit for a burgeoning middle class now demanding the retribution of value (the revolution) Keynesian innovations are designed to prevent.
The demand for equitable distribution of economic value by government authority (the sovereign people) in opposition to the old liberty to accumulate it and cause general economic crisis must be rendered a threat to the post-industrial middle class by the conservative element. Fear and loathing is the agendae--liberty is being destroyed by the tyranny of the plenary and complete, absolute power of government (the legal, constitutional sovereign).
For the conservative element, the legal sovereignty of The People is self-rule. The fate of The People is thus self-determined and, therefore, retributing the economic value accumulated can only be ex-post-facto and by bill of attainder, or by illegal, tyrannical means that are the antithesis of freedom. Choosing to retribute the value is tantamount to choosing tyranny and the Hamiltonian (elitist) form of government is thus confirmed as necessary to conserve the liberty the Revolution has confered.
If The People are inherently incapable of ruling, self-rule is naturally the function of, it is to be "attributed" to, the power elite--the "old" liberty that resulted in the accumulation of wealth and power by what was once the middle class.
This conservation of liberty renders the conservative element relevant to the current dynamic of power to redefine, realign, and finally, restructure the elements of the power structure as the value is naturally "retributed" to the middle class. The change that will occur is not to be feared and loathed. It will be a tyranny of liberty that replaces the liberty of tyranny.
Resurgent Conservatism: Or How to Play Your Eight-Track Tapes with a CD Player
Proponents of conservative philosophy are frantically publishing to capitalize on the Keynesian stimulus program.
The program will be inflationary. Commodities will begin to retrace the valuations that caused the deflationary trend. The SEC and treasury will act to limit leveraging into options and futures, but $4 trillion of stimulus will be extra hard to control.
It is just a reinvention of the problem, and the leadership driving the Keynesian stimulus are setting up the resurgence of the conservative element, with the sum of all the parts being, neo-conservative.
Conservatism will not be rendered politically obsolete because the medium to play it back is being reinvented.
The program will be inflationary. Commodities will begin to retrace the valuations that caused the deflationary trend. The SEC and treasury will act to limit leveraging into options and futures, but $4 trillion of stimulus will be extra hard to control.
It is just a reinvention of the problem, and the leadership driving the Keynesian stimulus are setting up the resurgence of the conservative element, with the sum of all the parts being, neo-conservative.
Conservatism will not be rendered politically obsolete because the medium to play it back is being reinvented.
Case Study in the Efficiency of Not Being Too Big to Fail
Ford Motor Corporation, having divested itself of acquisitions has had the cash to avoid needing a government bail out.
The success is dubious considering that GMC, a company that was designed to be an automobile trust (the business model of "too big to fail"), will benefit from both the government funds (a huge line of credit no one else is likely to get) and the prospect of a structured bankruptcy settlement.
Nevertheless, becoming smaller has prevented Ford from needing government assistance, and as a general statement, a government that ensures firms do not become too big to fail first and foremost, rather than bailing them out with what the macro business model "too big to fail" refers to as the "infusion phase," is a partnership of efficiency that accrues both public and private.
Automobile manufacturers are victim of the financial sector. The leveraging that went on instead of investment in economic growth deflated our economy. Combine that with an outrageous inflation of the healthcare sector driven by gigantic pools of cash generated by a tobacco tax scheme, and we have one colossal recession with a strong deflationary trend.
Do not discount the deflationary value of rising healthcare costs by means of public finance for the economy generally, and the automobile sector in particular.
Despite the reduced number of smokers over many years, the cost of healthcare did not go down, but up. Way up! It was not the smokers that caused the high inflation, it was the tax. All the tax means to the healthcare sector is more money available for price increases (derived from a cohort that are addicted to a product with a tax hypocritically argued to be by volition on the one hand, and to be controlled as a highly addictive substance on the other). The result is an extreme accumulation of wealth that is a major cause of the depth and breadth of the current deflationary trend (and the highest level of cynicism that only the most self-satisfied and illiberal deserve).
It needs to be made perfectly clear that much of what ails us is the economics built into the healthcare sector operating with an inelastic demand curve and a huge pool of tax money to drive (push) the cost up.
The inelastic demand curve gives healthcare that too-big-to-fail quality of being indispensable, and the public financing will always push the cost up as long as it is made available without limitation. Again, that limitation should be by ensuring it is a free and unconsolidated marketplace first, then adjust for the externalities. Adjusting for the externality of having no income as the result of deflationary pressure (because of its accumulation into the hands of a few people) just increases the cost (an accumulation of income) and the deflationary pressure, like we are doing now despite controlling healthcare costs being a pillar of our plan for economic recovery and reinvestment.
With the accumulation of wealth, verifiably, comes the accumulation of power and the need, therefore, to deconsolidate it.
The divestiture that needs to occur with the healthcare sector is the tax subsidy.
The success is dubious considering that GMC, a company that was designed to be an automobile trust (the business model of "too big to fail"), will benefit from both the government funds (a huge line of credit no one else is likely to get) and the prospect of a structured bankruptcy settlement.
Nevertheless, becoming smaller has prevented Ford from needing government assistance, and as a general statement, a government that ensures firms do not become too big to fail first and foremost, rather than bailing them out with what the macro business model "too big to fail" refers to as the "infusion phase," is a partnership of efficiency that accrues both public and private.
Automobile manufacturers are victim of the financial sector. The leveraging that went on instead of investment in economic growth deflated our economy. Combine that with an outrageous inflation of the healthcare sector driven by gigantic pools of cash generated by a tobacco tax scheme, and we have one colossal recession with a strong deflationary trend.
Do not discount the deflationary value of rising healthcare costs by means of public finance for the economy generally, and the automobile sector in particular.
Despite the reduced number of smokers over many years, the cost of healthcare did not go down, but up. Way up! It was not the smokers that caused the high inflation, it was the tax. All the tax means to the healthcare sector is more money available for price increases (derived from a cohort that are addicted to a product with a tax hypocritically argued to be by volition on the one hand, and to be controlled as a highly addictive substance on the other). The result is an extreme accumulation of wealth that is a major cause of the depth and breadth of the current deflationary trend (and the highest level of cynicism that only the most self-satisfied and illiberal deserve).
It needs to be made perfectly clear that much of what ails us is the economics built into the healthcare sector operating with an inelastic demand curve and a huge pool of tax money to drive (push) the cost up.
The inelastic demand curve gives healthcare that too-big-to-fail quality of being indispensable, and the public financing will always push the cost up as long as it is made available without limitation. Again, that limitation should be by ensuring it is a free and unconsolidated marketplace first, then adjust for the externalities. Adjusting for the externality of having no income as the result of deflationary pressure (because of its accumulation into the hands of a few people) just increases the cost (an accumulation of income) and the deflationary pressure, like we are doing now despite controlling healthcare costs being a pillar of our plan for economic recovery and reinvestment.
With the accumulation of wealth, verifiably, comes the accumulation of power and the need, therefore, to deconsolidate it.
The divestiture that needs to occur with the healthcare sector is the tax subsidy.
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.
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.
Conservative Populist Rhetoric
The oxymoron of conservative populism is in full rhetorical swing as we assess the possible alternatives to a power structure that the vast majority are quite sure does not operate in their individual interest.
Conservative populism is to minimize the retributive value that accumulates with an accumulation of wealth and power, especially in a structured social environment that relies on a pluralistic legitimacy (like a free-market system) in which individuals collectively decide investment of the capital (what is produced) and at what price (the marginal utility, or the profit margin, that determines incomes for both consumers and producers).
An accumulation of power means that the majority of individuals have less power to determine their fate than a systematic pluralism is supposed to legitimately allow (that outcomes--distributions--are the result of "command" and not a legitimate "demand").
The demand for legitimacy by the populace is argued by conservatives as an assault on the primacy of individual liberty because it is a collective, a populist, demand. The argument is then this: if the elite (the accumulators of wealth and power) are not allowed to freely pursue life, liberty and happiness, the individual liberty being pursued by the populace will be lost. Of course, the very demand for populist action is the measure of individual liberty lost (commanded) in zero-sum to the elite (the retributive value). It is the plight of conservatives to "conserve" the illegitimate disequilibrium as the general will of the people, providing for (commanding) the general (collective) welfare instead of being defined as value misappropriated and to be retributed to the legitimate, the expected, outcome.
Moneterism, Keynesian spending programs, and pulbic-private partnerships are bureaucratically designed and ministered to at least approximate the legitimately expected outcome without retributing the full value.
While the vast majority of citizens in a populist outrage do not expect the system to be perfect, massive foreclosures, unemployment, accumulation of wealth and power to the point of global economic collapse is not a reasonable approximation of what is to be expected, despite the conservative rhetoric.
It is equally unreasonable to expect reforming, or reinventing, the system we have now to produce a better approximation of a stable, equilibriating, structure of power without ensuring the fundamental organizational elements that allow for it.
It is unreasonable, for example, to expect pluralistic, unconsolidated, fair-and-equitable results, like compensation, when we reorganize "too big to fail" (what accumulates the wealth to pay the inequity) into a public-private partnership that allows conserving the organizational size to achieve the "synergistic" (the accumulated, non-pluralistic) efficiency of an "economy of scale."
The best way to control risk-prone executive compensation is to not allow for the large-scale corporates that can pay it. The risk associated with the reward of the compensation is the effect, not the cause of the problem. The problem is organizational. Since it causes the effect, the solution can only be reasonably expected to eliminate the cause, not just reform the effect to allow for continued consolidation of industry and markets. Treating the effect (symptomatic treatment) ensures non-pluralistic, command type of outcomes that deliver short-term reward with a long-term risk that really is not a "risk" at all, but a fully predictable benefit created by the "synergy" (the efficiency) of consolidating that comes with cyclical (recessionary) trends.
It should be perfectly clear, at this point, that allowing corporates (the private sector of power) to organize to be "too big to fail," or to be tyrannical, is inimical. It should be equally clear that allowing the corporates to partner with government (the public sector of the power structure which is by definition absolute in its power with the force and legitimacy of public authority) is equally inimical. That absolute power needs to be operationalized to prevent "too big to fail" and the tyranny, and the false efficiency, it empirically verifies.
Each and every individual has the power together to command the fate of freedom we all legitimately, pluralistically, expect. It is not impossible, it is just not being allowed to happen.
A government for and by The People does not allow for the inefficiency, the tyranny, of "too big to fail" in priority, but allows for the individual to succeed in priority without having to join the dictates of the too-big consolidation of the corporate collective.
The People want to fully exercise the freedom prescribed by the Constitution, not proscribed by economic dependancy on a large, extortionate, corporate collective. The People choose freedom over feudalism, in liege to the happy pursuit of a self-defined individualism that far exceeds the value of having to join the collective identity of an ever-larger and demonstrably corrupt and incompetent corporate culture in order to succeed.
A private drone made into a public drone, or a public-private drone, is still a drone, in liege to the corporate self from the top down.
Government that ensures a free and unconsolidated marketplace in priority allows for a collective defined by a pursuit of individual happiness that is allowed to become without the limitations of an organized determinism subservient to an elite class of would-be feudal lords with the false free-market legitimacy of a consolidated capital and the false individualism of a collective corporate consciousness.
Conservative populism is to minimize the retributive value that accumulates with an accumulation of wealth and power, especially in a structured social environment that relies on a pluralistic legitimacy (like a free-market system) in which individuals collectively decide investment of the capital (what is produced) and at what price (the marginal utility, or the profit margin, that determines incomes for both consumers and producers).
An accumulation of power means that the majority of individuals have less power to determine their fate than a systematic pluralism is supposed to legitimately allow (that outcomes--distributions--are the result of "command" and not a legitimate "demand").
The demand for legitimacy by the populace is argued by conservatives as an assault on the primacy of individual liberty because it is a collective, a populist, demand. The argument is then this: if the elite (the accumulators of wealth and power) are not allowed to freely pursue life, liberty and happiness, the individual liberty being pursued by the populace will be lost. Of course, the very demand for populist action is the measure of individual liberty lost (commanded) in zero-sum to the elite (the retributive value). It is the plight of conservatives to "conserve" the illegitimate disequilibrium as the general will of the people, providing for (commanding) the general (collective) welfare instead of being defined as value misappropriated and to be retributed to the legitimate, the expected, outcome.
Moneterism, Keynesian spending programs, and pulbic-private partnerships are bureaucratically designed and ministered to at least approximate the legitimately expected outcome without retributing the full value.
While the vast majority of citizens in a populist outrage do not expect the system to be perfect, massive foreclosures, unemployment, accumulation of wealth and power to the point of global economic collapse is not a reasonable approximation of what is to be expected, despite the conservative rhetoric.
It is equally unreasonable to expect reforming, or reinventing, the system we have now to produce a better approximation of a stable, equilibriating, structure of power without ensuring the fundamental organizational elements that allow for it.
It is unreasonable, for example, to expect pluralistic, unconsolidated, fair-and-equitable results, like compensation, when we reorganize "too big to fail" (what accumulates the wealth to pay the inequity) into a public-private partnership that allows conserving the organizational size to achieve the "synergistic" (the accumulated, non-pluralistic) efficiency of an "economy of scale."
The best way to control risk-prone executive compensation is to not allow for the large-scale corporates that can pay it. The risk associated with the reward of the compensation is the effect, not the cause of the problem. The problem is organizational. Since it causes the effect, the solution can only be reasonably expected to eliminate the cause, not just reform the effect to allow for continued consolidation of industry and markets. Treating the effect (symptomatic treatment) ensures non-pluralistic, command type of outcomes that deliver short-term reward with a long-term risk that really is not a "risk" at all, but a fully predictable benefit created by the "synergy" (the efficiency) of consolidating that comes with cyclical (recessionary) trends.
It should be perfectly clear, at this point, that allowing corporates (the private sector of power) to organize to be "too big to fail," or to be tyrannical, is inimical. It should be equally clear that allowing the corporates to partner with government (the public sector of the power structure which is by definition absolute in its power with the force and legitimacy of public authority) is equally inimical. That absolute power needs to be operationalized to prevent "too big to fail" and the tyranny, and the false efficiency, it empirically verifies.
Each and every individual has the power together to command the fate of freedom we all legitimately, pluralistically, expect. It is not impossible, it is just not being allowed to happen.
A government for and by The People does not allow for the inefficiency, the tyranny, of "too big to fail" in priority, but allows for the individual to succeed in priority without having to join the dictates of the too-big consolidation of the corporate collective.
The People want to fully exercise the freedom prescribed by the Constitution, not proscribed by economic dependancy on a large, extortionate, corporate collective. The People choose freedom over feudalism, in liege to the happy pursuit of a self-defined individualism that far exceeds the value of having to join the collective identity of an ever-larger and demonstrably corrupt and incompetent corporate culture in order to succeed.
A private drone made into a public drone, or a public-private drone, is still a drone, in liege to the corporate self from the top down.
Government that ensures a free and unconsolidated marketplace in priority allows for a collective defined by a pursuit of individual happiness that is allowed to become without the limitations of an organized determinism subservient to an elite class of would-be feudal lords with the false free-market legitimacy of a consolidated capital and the false individualism of a collective corporate consciousness.
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