The trajectories are clear, regardless of “fault”, given global macro forces and clear severe systemic problems. Aggregate standard of living will go down, regardless of tweaking the system one way or another. In fact, finding “fault” is kind of like trying to find the beginning of a circle. Unsustainable means exactly that, it can not be sustained. Though, I can’t imagine those that were recipients of the biggest concentration of wealth in history are too upset with policies over the past several decades. People that still do hold tremendous sway over shaping policy.
I think, looking at many of the comments here, that one needs to seperate, and be aware, of the differences between political ideology, dogma, predujice, faith, self-interest and and, for want of a better term, I’d call, rationality, or an objective, scientific way of looking at the world.
This is, of course, extremely difficult, as it’s the ‘lies’ that we believe that scare me most of all. One of them is the ‘label game’. Calling one economic/political system, ‘free’ or ‘democratic’, or ‘capitalist’ compared to ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’.
The utopia, or public ideology of capitalism and ‘free markets’ is miles away from the reality of how the system functions in practice, and is comparable to the psuedo-socialism practiced in the great totalitarian dictatorships of the Soviet Union, or present day China. Regardless of imaginary “lines” we put between ownership status
Personally I believe the United States, as witnessed by the current ‘socialist’ bailout of the financial system, has definitively abandoned the core principles of official, capitalist ideology and dogma, and replaced it with the corporate state, where increasingly the market and the state, become one and the same.
Clearly, capitalism, no longer really works in the United States, if it ever did, but this is a massively complex subject to get into here, so I’ll step back a bit from that historical can of worms!
What I find amusing, no perhaps grotesque is better, is how free market ideologues, in their increasingly desparate attempts to defend their corner at all costs, even to the point of self-contradictory absurdity, and if only capitalism was allowed to evolve into a pure and uncorrupted form, how everything would be fine.
Capitalism, is, I believe, at heart, like the other major ideologies, about Power and how it is distributed in society, not primarily about economics or markets. The collosal concentration of economic power and wealth which characterises the modern United States, also has profound implications for our concepts of democracy and how society is ruled. It would appear to be close to impossible to have a healthy and functioning democracy and at the same time vast disparities in power relationships.
So, in the United States, as an example, one has not only pushed old-schoool capitalism to one side, but ‘democracy’ as well.
This brings us to the thorny question of how exactly one introduces profound change in a society ruled by an incredibly powerful elite whose interests are so different from the rest of the population, so that they, the elite, de facto, live in an alternative society, a virtual, global, Versailles, compared to the great mass of humanity.
