Gaming the Economy-Narrow Self Interests and U.S. Current Accounts Deficit

Recent data released inform us that 35% of U.S. wages are federal entitlement payouts including social security, Medicaid, Medicare and unemployment compensation. Perhaps 10% of U.S. jobs rely on getting that money indirectly through its spending.

Another 30% of Americans work in financial related services and a substantial number are government employees-so the number of Americans in productive material businesses is pretty small. Gaming the system though, and transferring material production offshore to global corporations that pay U.S. taxes, allows or even requires a U.S. economy with a vast distribution of tax dollars to keep the nation afloat.

One could fairly argue that if social security were treated like an insurance program and only the needy received benefits the cost of the program would drop. True, the cost to working people would be small if all paid into social security but only a minority used it. When everyone that pays into social security also draws benefits the cost rises substantially.

Cutting the cost of government is not more important to the U.S. economy than directing where the U.S. economy receives its income from. If only 10% of the U.S. economy is direct material production in-country, we might wonder if even much of that is not done by trans-national corporations. How secure can the U.S. economy be when it is essentially reliant upon foreign production?

Cheap illegal immigrant labor is another way of increasing the standard of living of Americans receiving government entitlements, government workers and those in the financial service sector not producing anything materially. If the present national economic is fundamentally incomprehensive of the empirical economic facts of life, neither is the prospects for redirecting its malfunctioning course good.

The left and the right equally support reliance upon foreign production for the bulk of U.S. economic function. The contemporary political rhetoric is lazily over-reliant on continuity of cold war era paradigms extrapolated into the post-cold war era. Western liberalism before the left-right split and the rise of Marxism had been a perennial economic battle of the masses against concentrated wealth and power. Power and wealth may be controlled and concentrated in a number of ways that repress individual social equality. Concentration of wealth and power remains the true threat to American nationalism still. Paradoxically however liberalism of the left and right have been transmogrified into supporters of concentrating power and wealth.

The right supports corporatism of a global nature and investment in China, India, the Middle East and etc, while the left support reliance upon tax dollars from global corporations paying U.S. taxes. State socialism is as authoritarianist as is autocracy.

Left and right may attack points of the other’s political self-interests while neither works to actually halt the center of effort being relocated outside the U.S.A. A prosperous, easier, uncreative national zeitgeist happy enough with bread, circuses, SUVs and federal borrowing needs more than budget cuts to change. The prospect of tax cuts sent both houses of Congress and the Executive scurrying for cover last December with a vote to renew the Bush II era tax cuts and extended unemployment benefits for two more years.

The U.S.A. today has 413 billionaires, China and Russia more than 100 billionaires each and the world total is more than 1200 this year. The concentration of wealth in the convergence of corporatism and socialism globally is a fact that drafts the world society through a maelstrom of non-renewable exploitation of natural resources while the masses increase in numbers and class consciousness. Eventually the logical development barring a change in economic rationale or significant space colonization is for a restive world proletariat in a stagnant world economy and dangerously declared global ecosphere ruled by concentrated wealth a variety of wise guys. That is a dangerous social circumstance.

The United States of America without a rectification of economic activity based on limiting the size of corporations and number of corporations any citizen may invest in will experience a continuing global corporatist-socialist outsourcing of political and economic self-determination such that national sovereignty is reduced. In the year 2050 the anticipated world population will be 9.5 billion people while the geographic area of the Earth is not anticipated to increase. With foreign control of the national economy the comparative degradation of the national standard of living is logically to follow. Global democratic pressures accelerated with live Internet will bring the new wave of revolutions not to North Africa, but to the U.S.A. as global fellow travelers redistribute wealth and power to a planetary proletariat.

The prospects for planetary economic and environmental security would be increased with American leadership into nationalist environmental economic change with low entropy use of natural resources. An American failure to lead into a disciplined economic direction will encourage a global, neo-socialist consumption of natural resources and decay f the environment with marketing strategies and gaming of advantage for collectivist and even racist self interests overcoming empirical reason politically.

A sustainable American economy seems far away from the ongoing development to globalism. If China and OPEC one day embargo America while the currency collapses, the national economy is likely to collapse like a spent, overly inflated soufflé without prospect for recovery. The present government and Wall Street orientation toward globalism is a product of a post-cold war illogic on many fronts including the badly thought out war against select Salifist and Khomeinist Muslims that tends to be an existential defense against Muhammadan world conquest. Simultaneous decline of U.S. national economic leadership in failure to restore nationalism and ecological recovery with new technology and full employment encourages the globes masses to look elsewhere for leadership.

The Wall Street, banking, mortgage and other finance scandals requiring federal borrowing of foreign money for bail out in 2008-2009 were developed as early as the Clinton administration to set the U.S.A. firmly upon a post cold war gaming of the national economy. That did not occur in a vacuum, there was global competition to scam profits globally through levered self-advantage. The poor and homeless in the united States might at least sympathize with the poor abroad who are the workers at the bottom level of the pyramid of classical economic gaming of economics in the new age of electronic globalism. When global subsistence agriculture is effaced and the world’s peons are peopling the Internet relying upon global corporate farming for food the dangers of economic collapse and planetary famine become even more stark than today. Continuing a gaming of the economy as a national value may bring consequences not even imaginable today to the U.S.A. of the future.

-note on the meaning of ‘concentrated wealth’ in the context of this essay.

Democracy and egalitarian opportunity for free enterprise have over-concentrated wealth and power as its enemy. That is, individuals may build up their own wealth and yet neither be oppressive nor controlling of the wealth and social opportunity of others, and that is good for society. One of the points of free enterprise and individual liberty is to secure and produce the articles personally valued useful. Overly concentrated power is an empirical phenomenon in which owning control of natural and social resources develops in minorities or majorities such that individual liberty for self determination and securing of fundamental resources is precluded for non-members of the ruling class of concentrated wealth. There are various shades of concentrated wealth and power of course. Democracy must determine for itself when concentrated wealth and alienation of political self-determination has reached such a limit that measures such as increased taxation, redistribution of resources or revolt are needed to end the power concentrating wealth.

Individual motivation and determination are fundamental facts of the creative energy that drives human economy. When that energy and individual effort are exploited and repressed, and when oppressive concentrated power and wealth bring dangerous degrees of decay to the ecospheric vitality, democratic rectification of the economic methods may occur to renormalize the economy toward a functioning state founded with individual self-determination within legal and equal effective ecospheric parameters.