Distribution of wealth is the basic political question

The trouble is -- IMHO -- we still have the plantation owner mentality holding sway among powerful elements ... that of driving the cost of labor down to keeping a mule ... food, water, harness, stall, and medical care for breeding stock.

The basic political question in a system of democratically elected representative government is the fair distribution of the wealth created by labor -- human physical and mental effort. And fair distribution is NOT equal distribution, certainly not the absurd "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." There is no progress without a reward for labor, however when the reward accumulates to the slave-owner ... and the nation becomes a banana republic with gated communities ...

The distribution of wealth created by labor is a political issue because markets do not always distribute earnings and costs fairly at the time of the transaction due to at least one simple fact: while the transaction "price" is known, the "cost" is not. The externalities of
smoking, of mountain top mining, of ghettoizing a city (the "cost" of the loss of labor) ... the list goes on and on.

Also, a huge factor in monopolistic capitalism augmented by financial instruments of debt -- further clouding the current transaction – is that markets stumble in determining the cost of a stable environment for the acquisition of wealth. Do we really want to lose our middle class and devolve into the current madness of Mexico? And if this is caused by the transfer of future wealth (through these financial instruments of debt) to the current market ... further distorting current prices because the future costs of servicing that much debt are beyond the ability of the current market to determine ... and it keeps getting out of whack ... bubbles anyone?

And the absurdity of mathematical models to "impose" constraints on chaos, the zillions of individual transactions – without understanding the limits of the models -- is like pouring sand through a funnel on the beach below the tide line ... then saying it is an
Invisible Hand that shapes the cone of falling sand ... and the tide is no longer a factor in building sand castles.

But even more basic, we do not have a political party that represents the interests of labor in our nation ... and the unions don't either. The results are obvious ... and so is our future course until we get a labor party to represent us in determining the fair distribution of the wealth we create.

Note: First written as a comment in response to a Paul Krugman column on the New York Times OpEd page.

Let's get real about the economic recovery

As Paul Krugman writes in his OpEd column in The New York Times today, Monday,July 13, Boiling the Frog, that we are boiling two frogs simultaneously, economic recovery and climate change. And because of current policy we are killing the frogs. Things are not looking good.

The irony is that by harnessing what is required to "stop boiling the frogs" in a dynamic synergy we could reverse our disastrous course for both.

Let us remember that WWII got us out of Depression of the 1930's by putting people to work at jobs that paid wages that supported a middle class. And we can think of the products they produced for the overseas wars as being taken to the water's edge and dumped in the ocean. What if we had a WWII mobilization that produced green infrastructure right here?

It's almost a no-brainer.

Bubbles are criminal conspiracies as cancerous for labor in a society as slavery

Bubbles are criminal conspiracies as cancerous for labor in a society as slavery, sucking up ""the useful, deployed wealth of society."" (Note: Read read Matt Taibbi's article on the financial history Goldman-Sachs since 1920's in Rolling Stones Magazine. Is this fraud writ large? http://bit.ly/P6uvP) Another quote from Taibbi's article:

"The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals."

The dynamic motivation of United States-style liberty is that individuals will be fairly rewarded for their efforts. And it is when the opportunity to do so is available widely that we thrive. There are a whole bunch of caveats to that, but we know it is productive work — labor that produces goods and services that have value in the marketplace — that builds a strong people.

If we give the highest rewards to individuals who devise ways and means to literally steal for themselves the wealth our labor creates, rather than those who devise ways and means to fairly distribute that wealth ... then we have what we have.

That being said, the evil inherent in the financial services elite gurus' design and use of instruments of debt to suck up the wealth labor creates, should be outlawed as a criminal conspiracy as cancerous in a society as slavery.

This whole charade of the new highly leveraged instruments of debt is philosophically supported by the age-old concept that the best society is one where an elite is able to pursue the "good life" by living off the labor of others ... the masters and slaves, lords and vassals, imperialists and their colonies, financial services sector gurus and their instruments of debt. They figure out a way to suck up the wealth produced by labor.

This is the concept of an elite and is the antithesis of our revolution and the birth of our nation. It is traitorous to our ideals — these self-evident truths; "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" — while it ultimately saps our strength, dragging us down to banana republic status.

Is anything going to change until enough people who matter start going hungry? Was it Karl Marx who surmised that the people don't revolt until the belly hits the backbone? But because I mention a communist guru, does not mean I sympathize with communism. I believe firmly in fair market capitalism.

And, how can we believe this crap that calling for fairness in wages is calling for equal wages? Of course, that's one of the "values" of religion, to get the people to accept the status quo of whatever elite is in charge ... even to the point of accepting slavery, or sheiks and mullahs in the Middle East, or ... financial services sector gurus on Wall Street ... as greed becomes our god.