Is it the Dragon or the Draggin' Ass?

Critical Economic Theory says let's stop being stupid

Wrongly attributed to Napoleon: "Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world."

China got woke. India did too. They now compete in global markets and with so many more people in their labor forces, it’s not surprising if they become the most productive.

Remember the capitalistic view: free the markets and competition will the development of successful products. There was no caveat that said ‘hey, competition is great unless somebody bigger dominates the marketplace.”

Most historians estimate the population of the thirteen US colonies when the Declaration of Independence got writ was the size of today’s Houston: about 2.5 million. 1,800,000 free people plus 700,000 Black slaves. Eliminate the zeros in those numbers, and it’s equivalent to 18 free people directing the productive output of 7 slaves. Let the free market prevail, right? Kidnap people, ship them in utterly miserable confines across an ocean, sell them into a life marked by the continual loss of their children to the free market of the unfree, hop into bed for a romp without consent, plus there was chains and dogs and whips and lynchings.

Is capitalism for the sake of nothing but GDP a useful or successful strategy? It capitalizes on human greed and if the bottom line is economic, without human consideration, then yeah, slavery works. So does war. Both boost profits: how many corpses per hundred dollars are you willing to invest?

”A rising tide lifts all boats” is the promise that requires a lot of bottom dwelling boats until we take a full account of the human consequences. If you make a lot of moolah by making a lot of people live in misery, that always fails. Yet is oft-replicated.

We saw this at work again in the last year and a half of a pandemic. Essential workers in meatpacking plants and on farms took huge mortal losses because not enough consideration was given to those humans. By their employers.

War strategy is the same. Crappy employers willing to invest your life to protect their assets. When’s the last time that the US won a war? 1945. After 76 years, why can’t we learn better ways if peace and prosperity is the goal?

Maybe that’s not really the goal of the people in charge of the assets. While the war economy that bloomed while we warred with Iraq which begat the War in Syria, banks were so awash in cash that some were heisting the funds of account holders to create fake investment accounts. Real estate scams abounded. The housing bubble collapsed. In multiple economies: capitalist ones, socialist ones, and communist ones. In dictatorships and democracies and monarchies.

During the Great Depression, consideration of human suffering caused the creation of the minimum wage and the Civilian Conservation Corps and Social Security. In the decades that followed, Medicare and Medicaid came into being. Along with the EPA. All designed to alleviate human misery. When one closes their business at the end of a workday, doors are locked and alarms are set to protect the business owner’s assets. Protecting the human labor force should be as valued. They’re more likely to value employers who demonstrate good human consideration skills and habits.

It becomes a cooperative effort if both pursue profits and benefits are gained by all.

Instead, after the housing bubble collapsed, the bankers got bailed out and prosecutions were as thin as gauze and Congress didn’t pass even a nickel increase in the minimum wage for the longest period since its 1938 inception. Congress let it slide for 13 years and it continues even now. It was raised 21 times in 43 years. From the 1981 Congress to the current one, it’s only been raised 7 times in 40 years. The rising tide didn’t come close to lifting all boats.

And we reaped an increasing political division that now features Q-Anon and insurrection efforts with mobs storming the US Capitol to block the completion of a legit election. When economic justice isn’t just that guarantees a system will collapse and disorder will be the new world order. Who was it that invented capitalism to deliver chaos and random orbital cannibal and pedophile theories??

Economic theories be damned, all of them. Put the economics profs to work on the Human Protection and Uplift theory as there’s gotta be a better way. Doesn’t competition compel us to produce a more successful product?

Why is it anyone’s concern if there’s more Chinese shopkeeps than there are USA ones? Their profits or ours misses the point that valuing humans is the foundation and roof of any successful economic and political structure. And for 40 years, it appears we’ve lost the competitive edge in building a symbiotic society. No sleeping Asian giant took that from us. We surrendered.

So please spare us the alarm reset.

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The light is there if you’re willing to see it.