economics

Neoliberal economy performs poorly.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

The idea of government picking winners and losers (under accelerationist policy) isn’t a good way to run an economy. Because when the government picks losers there are fewer winners. Also, no one is wise enough to decide who should lose. In a market economy, the market decides winners and losers based on profits and losses. When the government tries to replace the market, based on what consumers want, need and can afford, with government influence exchanges, you end up with all kinds of wasted potential. Because influence testing isn’t as good as market mechanisms. When you get carried away with picking losers and then add cancel culture for political reasons, you start eliminating whole swaths of potential economic contributors.

How did accelerationist policy come about? It has been through buying influence in government. People with more money buy influence. When influence is for sale in our government, it increases the number of factions that vie for power. In the neoliberal era, big money access has spawned some big winners that are always buying influence for a surer win, but it has led to a lot more losers than we would have had.

When you go looking for a job right now, there are a lot of websites that advertise phony positions which aren’t really available. Also, the jobs are advertised from the perspective of employers not employees. In fact from the employees’ perspective phoney job ads are really terrible and they persist because it makes employers look more prosperous than they really are. That’s very discouraging to job seekers and it makes online job ads into unattractive time wasters. I keep hearing that there are a lot of jobs that need to be filled and also that American job seekers are discouraged more now than ever. As AI screens out applicants, people who don’t get a call-back begin to wonder how they would ever know what to do to get hired.

Neoliberals like making everything into a profit-center. They want globalization and financialization. They want organizations to be dominant over individuals. They want unrestricted global capital flows and they like warfare. They like economism where everything has an economic motivator. They like big monopolies and big government and smaller-always-less-important individuals and families. They hate religious motivations and ethical behaviors. They don’t like restrictions on big power.

To make our society better, I think it helps to see neoliberalism’s shortcomings. We need strong families because the family is a great place to nurture children and grow them into society’s doers. We need ethics in society and the family is a great place to teach the difference between right and wrong. We need to be motivated by our caring hearts and our connections to each other. We need rule of law to apply equally to all: even the most powerful. Neoliberals don’t support what we need and in fact work to undermine it.

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The neoliberal economy creates too many losers. It’s a wreck. Taxes keep going up but economic activity is down. We have numerous unfilled jobs. We have failing universities where credentials serve money interests instead of the public good. Prosperity overall is waning as the rate of economic exchanges slows and fraud increases. Investors owning real estate has led to monopoly price influence raising the prices of houses. Bigger hospitals and medicare and medicaid have led to price increases in healthcare. Government and corporate grants in our universities have led to research conclusions that are up for sale from climate change to covid drugs. Crime on our streets has grown as homeless and unemployable people become renegades and people in city government try to make political dividends out of desperation.

In a better economy, economics doesn’t overshadow our lives in the way the neoliberals are trying to do. Our healthcare has been taken over by greedy profiteers who want people to be sick. Our neoliberal money making goals don’t allow doctors to cure disease anymore the way that they should. Everyone needs a place to live that’s affordable and investors in our real estate markets keep raising prices beyond what any one person or family can afford. We need affordable food but inflation in food is making it too expensive for many to eat properly.

The neoliberal economy is a disaster that will continue to fail as long as capital is emphasized over wealth, rule of law spares the powerful and influence money is more important than markets. Neoliberalism is power for power’s sake. Unlimited partnerships between government and corporations leads to failure.

Can we salvage anything?

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Let’s say a big storm comes into town and a tornado sweeps away a whole block of houses. People will rebuild because, we hope, they have insurance to do so. Some insurance policies have loopholes that cover wind damage but not flood damage. Some of policies will have large deductibles. But even if the whole house is lost, usually it will be rebuilt even if not all the costs of the rebuild are covered. Also, people have jobs and a way to begin again by slowly paying off the costs of a catastrophe over time. That’s often true even without insurance.

Bad governance is worse than a tornado. Why? Because all the strengths that a person would bring to build up their life are diminished by taxes, regulations, and policies that undermine an individual’s chance to get ahead during life’s many challenges. The economy itself is harmed by overgrowth of government which takes money out of the economy and uses it for political influence. We have seen that government charges seem to multiply and never end.

A person’s life and their ability to work is finite. Government these days is a constant attack on people’s vitality. It’s not like a tornado that shows up and wrecks things all of a sudden. Instead, it’s a constant drain. What are we getting for those government taxes? I see a government that refuses to account for its spending, refuses to stop spending when the treasury comes up empty…so spending nonexistent money into deficit, a government that is taking tax money and passing it around to NGO’s as a way of defrauding Americans, a well published group of government fraudsters parading their frauds in an unstopping brag of what evil they can do and never be stopped by the common man.

Just look at how things have gone since 2008. The government subsidized failing banks after real estate derivatives caused insolvency. That cash write-off was supposed to save the economy. But prosperity has never returned. A small group benefitted from the 2008 Great Recession. But the new policies that saved the banking sector led to an interruption in the rule of law for bad bankers. That failure of law has proceeded and worsened since then. Derivatives themselves were experimental and even though they have multiplied everyone’s problems, they have widened consequences which has seemed beneficial to the smaller number of people that should have been harmed by the derivatives losses. In any case, derivatives probably are illegal under the Constitution because they lead to money creation. We should stop derivatives trading.

Rule of law fails continue. More negative consequence results from that. Now lawfare in the courts seeks to interrupt any kind of repair to malgovernance. People in government positions continue making one bad decision after another. How do we salvage a mismanaged economy that continues to be mismanaged? Why is the government trying to manage the economy at all? Markets are supposed to do that. What happened to those? Those went away when the government started interfering by promoting some interests over others.

Human beings have never been perfect. We sometimes want to do crazy things. We sometimes want other people to do crazy things with us. Because of that, we need limited government where the government can’t mandate a bunch of crazy. When the nation started, there was a national dedication to limited government power. That was a better way. Limited governance power can get more accomplished along a safer and wiser course than unlimited power which under fascism leads to more bickering and more malinvestements that destroy resources and diminish our national strength.

Public private partnership is a kind of fascism. It is powerful people in positions of power over the less powerful. Rule of law governance is law applied equally to all. Under fascism, powerful people seek to be above the law. This is wrong. Or the law can weaponized to attack political competitors…lawfare. We should stop our fascism. End the partnership between government and corporations. Public private partnerships should end. Government should not decide economic winners and losers.

We need a return to representative voting where real votes aren’t manipulated through digital means. We should return to paper ballots and manual ballot processing. President Trump has signed an executive order to do this, but I’m seeing little change. Electronic voting persists despite its clear threat and past damage to legitimate voting.

We need to repeal bad laws. We need to avoid new laws being written by AI. The flood of bad laws we’ve been experiencing with thousand page legislation bills signed into law by a body of Congress that doesn’t read what it signs should end. Ridiculous legislation should end and we should return to necessary and proper standards.

The idea that government can do anything and the only road to prosperity is through government partnership, government programs, government interference in everyone’s life isn’t working out for America. We should end this overreach.

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Calling All Hands! Policy change can make life better.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Ever since the Great Recession, there has been struggle in America.

The Federal Reserve instituted policies that made life harder for most of us.

Many people have struggled even to maintain some sort of sanity in their life because of successive job losses during hostile takeovers. Others have struggled on the job front as some businesses closed their doors. Some have struggled to survive and thrive after the Covid Caper, facing challenges from an experimental vaccine requirement either as a recipient with side effects, a griever at the loss of a friend or a family member or a person fired for refusing the covid shot.

As real estate prices have soared, often up 33% from one year to the next, many have struggled to pay their property taxes or have lost their home. Grocery prices have inflated to the point that people have had to resort to skipped meals or the use of money-saver recipes, a strategy that will only temporarily lower the cost of food preparation in inflationary times.

Why call on All Hands to struggle more? Why? Because that’s how life will get better.

Return to sanity…Things to avoid doing: I hope for these things…

No more woke strategies in public schools. No more transgender education in schools. Reduced administrator salaries in schools to bring them in line with teacher salaries. Fewer administrators.

No more deregulated banking without Glass Steagall and with Holding Companies as a trap door to escape fiduciary duty. No more Too Big to Fail Banking (reduce the size of large banks). No more derivatives trading.

No more deregulated communications where Fake News is normal. If a falsehood is published, a retraction and a potential fine. No more censorship or propaganda.

No more regulatory mayhem in transportation with regulations requiring a new kind of car that costs more than people can afford. No more inflating car insurance costs.

No more regulatory quibbling about using natural gas energy to heat homes or cook with.

No more monopoly influence in the U.S. medical, pharmacy, education, banking.

No more woke military.

No more climate change dogma.

No more bribes in Congress to help foreign nations to get the deals that undermine American interests.

No more digital currencies that threaten cash as legal tender.

End unfunded mandates of all kinds. That would get rid of a lot of legislation that requires people to do things that they can’t really afford to do.

No more interventionist Congressional policies to pick economic winners and losers.

End and repeal all previous legislation that exceeds 100 pages. Future legislation will never exceed 20 pages. No more Think Tank legislation. Congress has to write the legislation and each Congress person who sponsors legislation has to justify it based on their constituency.

No more off-shoring tax advantages that lead corporations to invest in foreign rather than domestic labor, causing unemployment at home.

No more federal subsidy for Universities. Allow students to use a new low cost online training system that allows a person to prove competency by passing a basic test that proves mastery. No more tuition. Universities have failed America.

Instead we need so many things that require an All Hands effort:

We need new businesses. There should be a tax moratorium on new businesses with stepped gradual taxation of new businesses after 5 years. This allows new business to form because of new tax free advantages for small business.

Also, new businesses need an end to all regulatory renovation requirements for newly purchased or leased business buildings for the first 5 years of operation. Leaving in place only basic safety requirements, new businesses should not be required to meet a city’s latest huge expense requirement for new plumbing and wiring and many other details that really is all about graft.

Homes should cost what people can afford and therefore, there should be an end of monopoly price interference in real estate; investor ownership of American homes should end.

The wheels of government can do more good if We the People can draft and pass a a new Constitutional Amendment to further limit Congressional power with term limits.

We need less warfare and in that interest I suggest that we should reduce the budget of the Pentagon and DOD and require a yearly audit with no new funds until the audit is completed. We should close foreign military bases. We should bring our soldiers, sailors and airmen home.

We the People need to draft and institute a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Congress should forego any salary payment until a balanced budget is submitted for the coming year.

We the People should put an end to all previous emergency powers. Emergency powers just call for disaster capitalism. Future emergencies without special powers will never last more than one year: no matter what the circumstances, emergencies must end.

People who commit crimes against government while holding government office must be kicked out of office and brought to justice. Their monies if obtained through crime should be seized and doled out to their victims.

We should end vaccine requirements. Vaccines have proven harmful. A new study of vaccines may be in order since the CDC just admitted that vaccines haven’t been properly studied but the CDC shouldn’t do it. Instead of mandating vaccines, we should make sure that they are available if they are safe but there should be no more vaccine requirements.

We the People should end electronic voting. We should also end mail-in voting since it has led to voting fraud. We should make sure voting reflects the public’s votes.

Americans need better than what we have. Neoliberalism has led to an overgrowth of malignant organizational politics and that has harmed individuals. We the people are not grist for the neoliberal mill. We have a dysfunctional unaccountable government. We have banking that’s been subsidized for failures. We have untrustworthy media and censorship. We have overregulation and a broken justice system.

We would all like to see a healthier America that’s prosperous and sensible. Reining in the worst abuses caused by deregulation in the areas of finance, energy, communications and transportation would be a start. That deregulation happened in the 1980’s and 1990’s and it was followed by reregulation in favor of corporate interests. Changing that set of policies would go a long way to improve American prosperity. Stop hurting the little guy and allow willing hands to improve our nation’s economic performance by reregulating towards balanced economic protections that also prevent largescale malinvestments.

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