Sunday, September 4, 2011
Labor Day Has Been Rendered Completely Meaningless (Happy Serf Day)
Labor Day ... Or Serf Day?
As I noted in 2008:A highly-regarded economist (Michael Hudson, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, and who is a former Wall Street economist at Chase Manhattan Bank who also helped establish the world’s first sovereign debt fund) said:
"You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite."
In 2009, Foreign Policy magazine ran an article entitled "The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism", arguing that the power of nations is declining, and being replaced by corporations, wealthy individuals, the sovereign wealth funds of monarchs, and city-regions.
The Government Continues to Destroy Jobs ... Not Create Them
Despite pretty words and psuedo-jobs programs, government policy is unrelentingly destroying American jobs - instead of creating them - by:
- Encouraging companies to ship them abroad
- Sending a large percentage of the funds for bailed out banks abroad
- Encouraging mergers
- Paying banks to park their excess reserves, instead of deploying them as new loans to Main Street
- Encouraging redistribution of wealth upwards to the top .1% wealthiest
- Enacting policies which (1) turn a blind eye to Wall Street fraud, (2) prop up the too big to fail banks, asset prices and leverage at any cost, and (3) spend stimulus money on the military and huge Wall Street firms, instead of on average Americans
Labor Day Has Been Rendered Completely Meaningless
As Mark Provost has points out - the rich love high unemployment. Because all branches of government and the Federal Reserve are wholly captured by the top .1% (and see this, this and this), they are not very motivated to decrease unemployment.
And as David Rosenberg notes:The "labor share of national income has fallen to its lower level in modern history ... some recovery it has been - a recovery in which labor's share of the spoils has declined to unprecedented levels."Indeed, the government has made it official policy to protect the fat cats instead of helping the little guy.
Due to Americans' passivity in the face of those who act like lords, Labor Day has been rendered completely meaningless.
6 comments:
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Hi Washingtonsblog, the Hudson article seems to have moved.
ReplyDeleteGood post. Happy Serf day everybody!
ReplyDeleteThere is a vast difference between the popular image of the serf as a mere slave to the manorial baron and the reality of the feudal system.
ReplyDeleteIn many ways, there was a great deal of advantages to the serf then the average worker in the West today, and one big reason for the difference is that the chain of responsibility went both ways. The serf owed the Lord a percentage of his labor (at worst about 3 months compared to 4-5 for the average American taxpayer today), but the Lord owed the serf the right to his land, and even the responsibility to have a feast for his vassals.
Try out the Terry Jones series "Medieval Lives" for an eye-opener on the life of the Serf. The real comparison is to the economic system known as sharecropping, particularly at its worst in the U.S.
Your article contradicts itself. First, you approvingly quote Hudson advocating for interventionist government, then list a series of government interventions into the market and say how they're bad. Do you not see the contradiction?
ReplyDeleteThe government is the cause of the solution, and not the cure.
Go back to reading your Austrian economics. You quoted them approvingly before, but I'm not sure you've digested the lessons.
* Woops, cause of the "problem" I meant.
ReplyDeleteKill the bankers.
ReplyDelete