Forum Post: The Impossible Dream

When I was five my three year old brother and I were killing Japs in the basement on a rainy day. Our older sister was taking clothes off the basement lines. We chanted "Yap yap yap, another dead Jap," as we fired our toy pistols. It was 1951 and our know it all older sibling pointed out that commies were the enemy now. We tried to fix our death song but ended up doing something else. I didn't find out till much later that the struggles against communism were in defense of the impossible dream of wealth created on Wall St.

Most trades and price increases of stocks, which originated in IPOs or other stock issues from a source business, invest nothing in the real economy. They make something out of nothing. Yet that pyramid scheme, like the real estate Ponzi, is responsible for the prices and height of the indices that everyone thinks indicates the health of the economy and the glorious victory of the Wall St Oligarchs over Socialism.

Sound familiar? If so, let me know? It would be a pleasant surprise to find out that someone actually reads my attempts to enlighten. Ok. Yes. That's self indulgent and I apologize.

But repeating the fact that much if not most economic activity is non productive and makes something out of nothing is absolutely necessary. Think about pharmaceutical and health care provider corporations price gauging, while wasting billions on advertising and creating proprietary products instead of cooperating with the people they serve and one another to create superior health care.

Think about every industry that funds university research that fifty years ago would have been shared in the public domain (like BSD, MIT's X-Windows, the IBM PC Architecture were) but now creates half a dozen nearly identical competing products that have superficial but proprietary differences. All the wasted money, energy and resources reinventing wheels over and over again and heating the economy artificially and ultimately destructively.

The business majors love this of course. They're getting rich as we get deeper in debt trying to keep up with the unnecessary price increases created by all the redundant activity. The Capitalist Economy is self destructive and a danger to the human community. No. Not central planning, except where that's necessary like interstate highways and such. But the people must have a say in what we work to produce. Our survival in communities at whatever level are the purpose and source of all economy. We must plan for our futures. We can not depend on Wall St. Oligarchs to care about anything but their own self interest.