Chicago School Nonsense

This post clearly spells out what in the hell is wrong with our economy, and that is the belief by our elected officials, including Obama, in the discredited and debunked economic insanity blathered by the likes of the despicable Milton Friedman.

A tiny snip:

But the problems in our economy right now run very, very deep. Since Reagan started our grand experiment with Chicago School doctrine, we have seen our major corporations engage in the behavior espoused so forcefully by Milton Friedman, who regarded it as an axiomatic truth that businesses that act in the public interest are stealing from their shareholders if such actions interfere with profits as expressed in quarterly reports. Expenses, including employment expenses, must be cut if the value of resulting production is reduced by less than the amount of the expenses that have been cut. Production must be moved to wherever the overall costs are cheapest. The health of the communities where those businesses had been located, or the well-being of their labor force, is not their concern. Labor is an expense, not a reason for the operation of the business. Workers are not stakeholders in the business.

This has led to a steady decline in American manufacturing capacity and in American ability to turn low-value raw material into high-value finished products, which is the only valid way that "wealth is created" (to borrow a favorite phrase of the supply siders, which they use to mean "create wealthy people," often by transforming a thousand middle class Americans into poor, unemployed ones).
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Addressing our industrial problem is an inherently difficult and will require an arduous long term effort to correct. It will require a return to some level of protectionism and considerable direct industrial subsidies combined with heavy-handed regulation aimed at fraud prevention and workforce protection. Addressing our disparity in income and wealth is POLITICALLY difficult but is relatively simple and much quicker to correct, by strengthening the power of labor through unionization and laws that protect employee rights and by the reimposition of genuinely progressive income taxes and perhaps even new taxes on existing wealth (remember, Adam Smith -- a GOD of the right-wing -- proclaimed that the only just taxes were taxation of PROPERTY) that exempts most of the taxes on actual labor that earns weekly or bi-weekly paychecks.

Of course, things have drifted so far out of kilter now that even the most draconian (and least politically possible) steps would take many years to restore our economy to any kind of balance and sustainability, but in any case it is not such things as Medicare and Social Security that are the problem, but instead it is TOO MANY TOO-RICH PEOPLE AND NOT ENOUGH DECENT-PAYING JOBS right here in the good ol' USA.