Robert J. Samuelson

I don't like Reaganomics. I don't like the capitalist world that it created, with its massive and absurd inequalities in rewards for labor. I don't like the idea of medicine for profit, or the notion that people *should* retire at a give age willy-nilly.

So I was predisposed to dislike this book because it extols the risk/reward rules that I so frown on. I ended up not disliking the book, though I still dislike the system it praises. Samuelson sings the conservative aria that entitlement spending must come down, must must must, or the sky will fall and *cue horror movie music* profits will shrink!!! NOOOOOO say it isn't so!!!! Profits *sob* won't go to the investors anymore, no no not so much as a billion even, so they can consume more and, oh yeah, invest more to make more *salacious slurping sounds* profits!!!

Yeah, well, welcome to my world, investors. My income has gone down to zero, and I'm ineligible for unemployment "insurance" because employers have the right to deny it to you, and medical insurance? What's that? All because vampires getting millions in bonuses invented a creative way to snatch even bigger gobs of taxpayer money by throwing themselves a recession! (Luckily for me, the personal consequences are mitigated by my family situation, but if they had not been, I wouldn't be on this computer right now, I'd be on the street.)

So I am utterly out of sympathy with this tome's central assumption...that profits for the few belong solely to the few...yet the author makes some very good points. His analysis of the global warming problem is cogent and probably correct: Ain't gettin' solved, no one wants to pay the large and ever-growing price. Health care costs are, undoubtedly, out of control. Hey...anybody notice that there are (for-profit) insurance companies and hospital groups out there, paying executives tasty-big salaries that have to grow, and be earned somehow? Hmmm.

Where I absolutely march with the author is in his abhorrence for inflation, and the necessity of preventing it from recrudescing. Inflation amounts to a large tax on working people. What you get in your pay envelope has already lost some value by the time you get the money into your bank (for a fee, the size of which goes up as your balance goes down, hmmm). The nasty recession I lived through as a young worker was extremely unpleasant. It killed inflation, and so should be praised. Then came the idiot consumption-fest that's brought us to the place we are now.

Why is there no force in the public discourse saying "There is such a thing as 'enough' in every area of life, INCLUDING MONEY AND PROFITS"? Only things that make the least and the last among us safer, better off, more secure, are targets for the "enough" concept. Why is that? I suspect it's because the greedy mo-fos who have the commanding heights of the economy to themselves like it that way. No individual should have a billion dollars in assets. There is simply no conceivable justification for that kind of wealth in private hands. None. So hand it over. An extra billion in, say, Microsoft stocks in the hands of the fools at the Treasury is better than in the hands of Bill Gates. All of us are smarter than any one of us.

Oh well, I am not likely to be appointed to a government position, am I? Not with my confiscatory bent. So y'all're safe.

So far.… (meer)