Productivity, Efficiency & Decentralization — Part 3

View as PDF - - - Print Article

You can’t create a twenty-first century society based upon an educational system promoting the myth that you can be all you can be — by just showing up; enforced by an mediocre bureaucracy – which essentially just shows up; built on a twentieth century industrial model to create workers for factories — that no longer exist; and enforced by a geopolitical financial establishment — totally hedged against any risk.
— Jerry Bannon, The Wonder Springs Chronicle, 25 January 2012, Publisher and angry American citizen

By attempting to pick up where we left off last week and close out this brief series, this article runs significantly longer than I normally like, but I think the context helps provide a cogent framework to build toward a positive future economic path. Borrowing the outline, and placing it in a totally different context from what was presented in a Monday evening presentation I attended, the conclusion is: Make wine, not argument, and definitely not war.

When your first job after graduating from college is in military intelligence, the one universal law is to: Never believe anything you are told without verifying it from at least two other independent sources. Through experience, even in the more communications side of the spy craft, like the National Security Agency, contrasted with the real spooky dudes, you quickly learn that the real world does not operate as it is generally hyped and anything approaching the real truth is hard to come by.

This of course can quickly make you cynical, if not tempered with the most powerful force in the world — which is truth. Truth always comes with a cost and most of the time untruth grows not so much from its power, but from the naïve perception we do not possess the resources to dismantle the presuppositions of these lies.

One such untruth fostered through the media, especially at this time, is that we live in a global capitalist system of markets. This whole myth supports inductive extreme views that in order to move toward the shining city on the hill, we need either to restrain capitalism or unleash capitalism and markets will work their magic.

Neither view is able to grasp the reality that the industrial consumer age we experienced during much of the twentieth century is unsustainable, because all the productivity gains we have been able to achieve, especially in the last thirty years, have been offset with decreasing efficiencies and centralization.

Tags: capitalism, high marginal tax rates, Laffer Curve, Reagan Revolution, Glass-Steagall, debt, Alan Greenspan, GDP, globalism