Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [76]
Here is the dynamic between the productive middle class, democracy, the State and its global Empire:
1. Democracy offers the middle-class some modicum of power. If democracy is undermined, the middle class has essentially no power. The fall of Rome provides an excellent template.
2. Empire costs a great deal of money that must be raised by taxes, mostly on the middle class. Thus Imperial over-reach in the form of costly wars in defense of the Empire's reach/control (a classic example of marginal returns) end up overburdening the middle class. While over-reach reaps huge profits for the Imperial Elites, the productive domestic middle class receives rapidly diminishing returns on their "investment" (taxes paid) in the Empire. This is precisely what occurred in the decline and fall of Rome.
3. Central planning/government control of assets and revenues favors the politically influential Plutocracy over the middle class, as government ends up serving the Plutocracy's interests under the cover of expanding benefits to the less productive.
4. Government (State) regulations intended to rein in global corporations end up strangling middle-class entrepreneurs as the Plutocracy arranges for loopholes and exclusions which the middle-class cannot exploit.
5. State over-reach domestically insures that multiple agencies and regulatory bodies create conflicting, overlapping layers of authority and decision-making, crippling middle-class entrepreneurship with bureaucratic sclerosis.
One example of too many governmental stakeholders resulting in bureaucratic sclerosis is the astonishingly time-consuming and arduous process of adding a new railway station in California. Everyone agreed that "smart growth" and common-sense transportation planning required an additional railway stop to serve commuters living in a new medium-density community on an existing rail line.
Despite the obvious need and the will of the people as expressed by a general plan voted into law, the process is now in Year Nine with no resolution in sight due to the staggering number of governmental and private "stakeholders" /agencies with some say over the rail lines and station.
It is amazing that anything at all gets accomplished in the U.S. when situations such as this are examined in detail. As always, the proper context is the high cost to the middle class when political approval by various overlapping governmental stakeholders and Elites is required. Democracy has in effect been undermined by an ever-expanding government of overlapping authorities and ever-higher fees and taxes and a Plutocracy that gains exclusions and loopholes via political influence.
The Fantasy of Self-Regulated Markets
The fantasy that markets can be effectively self-regulated is encouraged by the self-serving Plutocracy and its "free market" enthusiasts in the MSM, as unregulated markets enable the fullest expression of greed, fraud, legerdemain and chicanery. No better proof of this can be found than the insiders' exploitation of the mortgage/housing/credit bubble's excesses of lies and leverage. Please read Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader, Greed, Fraud & Ignorance: A Subprime Insider's Look at the Mortgage Collapse and It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street for more on these topics.
Put another way: "free" markets require transparency of inputs, competitors, pricing, value, ingredients, etc. Without transparency, then customers/participants' decisions cannot be sound. Yet transparency offers no competitive advantage, while secrecy and obfuscation offer tremendous competitive advantages. For example, an arcane and duplicitous property appraisal