Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [135]
8. As a result, inequality--as measured by shares of the national income and wealth--widens, furthering the divergence of interests between the productive class and the Elites/States' unproductive fiefdoms and dependents.
9. The State/Elites seek to counter these growing imbalances by extracting more from the productive class via taxes and "theft by other means" and masking this rising inequality by manipulating the politics of experience via relentless mass media propaganda.
The goal is four-fold: nurture complacency and fatalism in the citizenry; divert their attention from the concealed parallel system that benefits the Plutocracy and State Elites exclusively; legitimize simulacrum democracy and delegitimize protest.
10. To keep the State dependents passive and unthreatening, the Elites/State placate this class with "bread and circuses," State-funded entitlements paid for by raising taxes on the dwindling productive class. Under the guise of entitlements, the State (and the Elites who control it) has in effect bought the passive complicity of its dependents in the Elites' growing dominance of national income and wealth.
11. Having over-promised entitlements to the unproductive and garnered the majority of national income and wealth for themselves, the Plutocracy/State Elites can only tax the productive class so much lest they kill the horse they ride so majestically. Their only alternative to loss of income and power is to debauch the currency by printing money and debauch credit by borrowing far in excess of what can possibly be paid back.
12. The debauchery of credit and currency and rising inequality/diverting of national income to the Elites continues in a process of devolution until a phase shift/tipping point is reached and the status quo collapses in insolvency.
This process is both post-Marxism (that is, occurring outside the framework of Marxist theory) and post-Neoliberal State Capitalism--in other words, these broad intellectual frameworks failed to predict or account for the coming devolution and collapse of the State/rentier- monopoly capital Power Elite partnership.
The grand experiment of the State controlling the private economy has failed.
Both the Marxist/Socialist model of government control and ownership and the Neoliberal State Capitalist model of the State controlling the economy via monetary and fiscal manipulations have failed, for in each model there is no negative feedback to State over-reach and expansion.
In the Marxist Model, there is no negative feedback to limit extreme concentrations of power via State control and ownership of national assets and income. As the State Elites gorge on the national wealth (windfall exploitation), the State's interests radically diverge from those of the citizenry.
In Neoliberal State Capitalism, there is no negative feedback to limit State manipulation of monetary and fiscal inputs (i.e. borrow and/or print money). In theory, the global bond market should act as a counterforce to fiscal over-reach (excessive State debt and spending), but as recent events have shown, the U.S. is effectively unhindered by market forces: the U.S. Treasury sells bonds to primary bond dealers, the Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air, and a few days after the bond auction the Fed buys the Treasury bonds from the dealers.
The circle is complete: when the State creates money to buy its own debt, it establishes a simulacrum of an "open market" which in reality is utterly opaque and manipulated by the financial Elites and State to maintain their wealth and power.
But such perfection in positive feedback (there are no restraints on the State's ability to print, borrow and spend money) leads not to stability but to instability and collapse.
Exacerbating this devolution and eventual collapse are unprecedented external pressures on increasingly vulnerable FEW resources (food, energy and