A New Economy from Old Roots?

from OurFuture.org:



A New Economy from Old Roots?
By Dave Johnson

September 30, 2009 - 7:11pm ET


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How do we build a new economy out of the collapse of the old economy? How do we start fresh to begin creating jobs again, while building in economic and environmental sustainability, as well as workplaces that respect human needs and rights? How do we change things so that we all get to share the benefits of the economy rather than just contributing to the increasing wealth of a few vastly wealthy people?

While we look for a vision for a new economy, we should examine what has worked in the past. America had periods in which regular people enjoyed sustained increases in their standard of living. For a long time it was a conventional wisdom that each American generation would do better than the previous generation, more people would receive good educations, medical care would get better, the middle class would grow, leisure time would increase, poverty rates would decrease, retirement would be easier, etc.

But this pattern stopped. Beginning in the late 1970s and especially in the 1980s incomes began to stagnate, wealth increasingly concentrated at the top, working hours and workplace pressures steadily increased, availability of good health care started to decrease, etc. The standard of living of most Americans began to and continues to decline. At the same time corporations became more predatory as consumer protections vanished. Meanwhile outsourcing, deunionization and other anti-worker policies led to increasingly unpleasant, stressful and unrewarding worklives for more and more people.

Many of today's problems are traceable directly to the policy results of anti-government propaganda that was blasted out from well-funded conservative think tanks starting in the 1970s. The anti-government campaign led to defunding of many national, state and local government programs that improved education, helped the poor or enriched people's lives. We suffered deregulation in many areas where the government had protected consumers, workers, investors and the environment. Huge reductions in taxes for the wealthy were either offset by tax increases for the rest of us or government borrowing. And that borrowing has led to increasing problems of paying the interest and threats to funding even basic programs like Social Security and education. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009094030/new-economy-old-roots

Excuse my pessimism but I believe there will need to be a complete collapse for people to rethink things. Which is where we are headed.

It is difficult to destroy a myth and right now the myth that exist in America is that the public sector always screws things up and the private sector is awesome. Neither is really true, they both screw things up.

There will have to be a re-evaluation of our consumerism culture, but that again will require an economic collapse or catastrophe to shake up.

I'm no psychologist but I do know this, human behavior doesn't changed until it is forced to change.

Centralization creates single points of failure, bottlenecks, we need distributed, local economic activities. I know, I know, nobody gets filty rich that way, but it works better, people have jobs, they can buy things they need, they are happy and rarely think of voting against incumbents, it's a win-win for everybody except idle billionaires.

Very simply, a country that doesn't make things, that can't produce what it uses, is soon either dead or enslaved.