It is about time I did a series, and what better a topic to analyze than the one that is on everybody's mind nowadays; the economy. The very URL to this site gives a hint to my personal opinion about the best form for a National/International economy as it includes the name Keynes; I think it is time that I justified exactly why I included that as part of the title.
Blog posts do not come out of thin air, and the prompting for this specific post was some malcontent that I had towards news that the stock market closed very near to its starting point a year later at the end of 2011. This may not seem like a large development to those who do not watch the market clearly, but it is an indication that the very progress that so many Americans are holding dear to their hearts is just not happening.
What I will try to prove in this series of blog posts is that in a world in which the rich are allowed to eat the poor, money will never trickle down. Thus the anarchical capitalist monolith cannot self sustain without regulation.
By regulation, I mean a strong government hand that will make sure that profit never overcomes hunger - that people's own greed never causes a person enough hardship to not be able to have enough money to feed her own family.
The rich eat the poor when they are allowed to. The current fiscal catastrophe is a testament to this very fact, and exactly what the ninety-nine percent occupy rallies are protesting. To provide some statistics, in the past five years, the income of the top one percent of America has increased by two hundred thousand dollars a year, to near two million dollars of NET income per year. This is contrasted with the decrease in net income of an average person that is considered under the poverty line being two thousand dollars.
In these harsh economic times, the rich are allowing themselves to get richer and the poor are being forced through the gutter, so to speak.
In the next part of this series I will provide a few more statistics to describe our current economic times, as well as delve into the flaws of the system, and how an alternate economic state could benefit all aspects of society.
Wow. Well, I've been reading a lot about economics lately and I'm going to have to disagree with just about everything you said. First of all, it does us no good to blame the economy on rich people and their supposed greed. You have to recognize that each and every exchange/transaction is voluntary and thus benefits both sides, and the only way that people can (legally) become rich is by enhancing people's lives and raising their standard of living. So rich people benefit society by offering products that people want. Also, wealthy people are the engine behind economic growth - investment comes from the money that they put in banks and save. So once again, as opposed to hurting other people (as you claim), they enhance everybody's standard of living. Now, the reason that so many people are struggling is because the government engages in crony capitalism, giving special privileges to the people on wall street and bailing them out. At the same time, the poor and the middle class are hit with the inflation, so while the big guys on wall street get artificially low interest rates, protection through regulation, bailouts, subsidies, and other benefits, the average people suffer. That's the problem with our system today. It has nothing to do with capitalism - in fact, it's because we've abandoned capitalism. As far as I can tell, Keynes has been discredited and his proposed solutions (more government spending) don't work. Why do you think Japan has been suffering for twenty years? And why do you think the Great Depression lasted for over fifteen years? I think it would do you some good to try and understand the virtue of freedom - where the people get to engage in whatever voluntary exchanges they want and the government has no role in taking money from one group and giving it to another. I view that as theft.
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