Free-market-capitalism is fairly straight-forward. The strong shall flourish and the weak perish. Relatively speaking.
So who are the strong? Many things can make you stronger. Education, but more essentially, approved and accepted qualification. Skills of various kinds. Networking.
But what has you really on the strong side is money. Money can get you anything. Most of all - more money.
But oh no who would have thought that - the gap between rich and poor is growing. S-h-o-c-k-i-n-g.
After all, the market is free, so it is fair, so it is just, so everyone can succeed or fail and that means social mobility and that means a just distribution of wealth.
O wait, this is all BS.
A growing gap between the rich and poor seems to be wired directly into what the free capitalistic market is - or not?
So what do we do about it? We can soften the trend, but we don't seem to be able to actually stop it. And while in relative terms the majority has less and the minority more, debt is pilling up and debt creating money demands to be served.
Is this system in dire need of periodic resets? Is it bound to spiral out of control? Am I a dirty communist?
Every singe aspect of the economic stress we are witnessing today can be attributed to two things.
1. The trend to global trade and global capitalism.
2. The reflexive and spasmodic attempts of our political system to counter the negative effects of the consequence of the trends.
You can simplify the first to the analogy of a see saw. First with a fixed inoperative fulcum and then with one that moves more and more freely. The inbalance of living standards and wages have exerted ever greater pressure to move the West's (and Japans) indexes downward as the developing world has moved upwards. It was inevitable that living standards in the West would decline relative to the rest of the world and the inverse is true even though it was and is equally true that world standards float upward in toto.
The problem is that it manifested more quickly than our politics could adjust and frankly more quickly than the mores of our society could absorb.
Just to pick a random example, we still labor under the agricultural structure for education of a long absent world. In order to bring the West into the new reality we must embrace a new dynamic educational system that brings kids into the workplace at age 16 while providing lifetime educational advancement. This is just one aspect of necessary change.
We must also accept the new model of productivity that is techno-prodo and with that embrace the redistribution of productivity not through the antiquated views of modern liberalism that seek to redirect wealth to the unproductive and in effect subsidizes sloth and apathy but move to redistribution in and to the full range of the productive including women that produce and nuture a replacement population in the domestic role.
This, a national profit sharing program, in which those who work are rewarded and those who do not are not is the only possible method by which we can restore
an egalitarian prosperity.
The see-saw will trend to a state of equilibrium in any case. But the cost of that global creative destruction has been breathtaking so far and is by no means over.
