The only problem with capitalism are the capitalists

Karl Marx didn't have to be right, but the capitalists went out of their way to prove him right. Supply Side Ponzinomics turned the economy into a zero sum game between labour and capital, cannibalizing long-term demand. Game over.

"As Karl Marx explained, capitalism is a revolutionary force, it commodifies everything, human beings and the natural world - which it exploits for profit until exhaustion or collapse" 

[Chris Hedges, Oct. 10, 2011]

Kevin O'Leary: "Don't take this the wrong way, but you sound like a left-wing nutbar"
Chris Hedges: "I don't usually go on shows where people descend to character assassination"
[The CBC later apologized to Chris Hedges for O'Leary's comments]

The Burden of Proof is now on the "True Capitalists" whoever they are...

Beyond the layer of buffoons still defending the status quo, there are many who would rightly so defend the rights of citizens to go about their own private interests and otherwise barter, buy, sell and trade for profit. Fine by me. However, somehow this issue of self-cannibalizing greed has to be brought under control, otherwise, there is no way to distinguish laissez-faire capitalism from corporate fascism i.e. the system we all live under today.

The interesting factoid of the week came from Ha-Joon Chang via Zerohedge: 

7. Capitalism did best between the 1950s and the 1970s, an era of high regulation and high taxes

"Despite what we hear these days about the detrimental economic effects of high taxes and strong government regulation, the advanced capitalist economies grew the fastest between the 1950s and the 1970s, when there were a lot of regulations and high taxes.Between 1950 and 1973, per capita income in Western Europe grew at an astonishing rate of 4.1% per year. Japan grew even faster at 8.1%, starting off the chain of 'economic miracles' in East Asia in the next half a century. Even the US, the slowest-growing economy in the rich world at the time, grew at an unprecedented rate of 2.5%. Per capita income for these economies collectively have since then managed to grow at only 1.8% per year between 1980 and 2010, when they cut taxes for the rich and deregulated their economies."

Mass Consumption, amplified by Financial Engineering and Outsourcing, crowded out the balanced economy i.e. the one where supply equaled demand

Capitalism self-imploded when it ate its own seed corn. The age of growth was when savings were high and debt was low. Now debt is high and savings are low. Profit margins are at all time historical highs as everything in sight gets consumed for profit:

Personal Savings

Debt to GDP

FWIW, I'm not personally in favour of large amounts of regulation. I think regulations should be relatively light but HEAVILY enforced. Without strict enforcement, any amount of regulation is pointless.

The Only way Forward to save Capitalism from the Capitalists

> Statutory separation of all benefits from the employer: medical, retirement, vacation/time-off

> A living minimum wage

> A consistent safety net that incentivizes work while mitigating extreme poverty

> Tariff barriers to prohibit foreign dumping and balance the trade deficit
> Statutory limits on Federal debt accumulation

> Reform of the massively corrupt political system, beginning with campaign finance limits and curtailment on the ability to create new laws ad infinitum

The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies (Chris Hedges)

"Our financial system—like our participatory democracy—is a mirage. The Federal Reserve purchases $85 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds—much of it worthless subprime mortgages—each month. It has been artificially propping up the government and Wall Street like this for five years. It has loaned trillions of dollars at virtually no interest to banks and firms that make money—because wages are kept low—by lending it to us at staggering interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent. ... Or our corporate oligarchs hoard the money or gamble with it in an overinflated stock market. Estimates put the looting by banks and investment firms of the U.S. Treasury at between $15 trillion and $20 trillion. "

"The ecosystem is at the same time disintegrating. Scientists from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, a few days ago, issued a new report that warned that the oceans are changing faster than anticipated and increasingly becoming inhospitable to life. The oceans, of course, have absorbed much of the excess CO2 and heat from the atmosphere. This absorption is rapidly warming and acidifying ocean waters." 

"All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward economic, political and environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed."

"The corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored, frantic Cassandras who are viewed as slightly unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. We are consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth."

"It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast-food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt. "

Speaking of Revolution
A lot of revisionist amateur historians like to say that FDR took advantage of the Great Depression by subverting capitalism with the "New Deal". What these people don't realize - having never gone through a real Depression themselves, is that FDR didn't subvert capitalism, he SAVED capitalism from the gathering mob. Which gets us to economic lesson #1 also from this week:

1. "Economics is politics and it can never be a science"
"Yet the dominant neoclassical school of economics succeeded in changing the name of the discipline from the traditional 'political economy' to 'economics' at the turn of the 20th Century. The Neoclassical school wanted economics to become a pure science, shorn of political (and thus ethical) dimensions that involve subjective value judgments. This change was a political move in and of itself."

This willful divorcing of economics from morality is the ultimate undoing of modern day Ponzinomics. Today's econo-dunces are oblivious to the long-term (now short-term) political implications of their textbook alchemy. This will be their last and most important lesson. Not a lesson they learn on campus but one they learn while opening up their account statements and watching their 401k balances turn to dust...