Capitalism is overdue for an upgrade
by Tom Sullivan
I design factories for a living. When I get off a job, lots of other people get jobs: building them and working in them. And in this country, too. Does that make me a "job creator"? Or, as Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO suggests in the video below, is that really just "a polite term for plutocrats"? As he says, maybe that is why billionaires buy PR firms.
Mike Lux has a piece up at Huffington Post promoting a progressive economic agenda that just might be more important than the next loony thing a Republican candidate for president says. A video in plain-speak condenses a lot of progressive thinking on the economy to 7:25 min. Lux writes:
Contrary to the current trickle-down economic orthodoxy, our economy will only grow and strengthen over the long run if we focus on helping more poor people climb the ladder into an expanding and more prosperous middle class.
That is not happening today. It has not been happening much since the Reagan era introduced us to trickle-down. Capitalism is overdue for an upgrade.
"Rules are not the enemy of markets," Sen. Elizabeth Warren observes. "Rules are the necessary ingredient for healthy markets."
That is why my business law textbook is 2-1/2 in. thick. It is chapter after chapter of real-world examples of who did what to whom, who gets paid, and who gets left holding the bag, demonstrating precisely why rules exist in business. It only works if everyone understands and plays by them. Rules need to be enforced again.
All this government focus — or is it myopia? — on protecting the incentives of the investor class, on their rewards. Yet unless the carrots are sticks, no similar care for the incentives of the working class, and on designing an economy that rewards the people who actually do the work that adds the value that creates the wealth. What's wrong with this picture?
"Anything we can create we can reinvent," says Gabriella Lemus, president of Progressive Caucus.e The economy is not a product of nature. People designed it. People built it. People crafted the rules that govern it. If it no longer serves We the People as it should, we can and should improve the design. That is the American way, isn't it?
American Family Voices holds a conference in Washington, D.C. on Friday on building a new economy. Lux concludes, "We need to make our economy grow from the bottom up and middle out, rather than from the top down."
Building a factory from the top down? Now that would be a neat trick.