I will add, that it is a good thing I have no issues with being alone, or being the only one saying something. I have to be perfectly honest and admit that I consider a lot of authors on the Right self-congratulatory jackasses as well.
Can I be the only one who sees the patent abuses in front of our eyes? As far as I can tell, I am the only one to propose what I consider to be a solution that is in the right zip code, which takes both a moral and a practical approach to problems of poverty and structural inequality which WILL NOT BE SOLVED IN OUR CURRENT SYSTEM.
The present default assumption among our power elite seems to be that a massive failure of the American project–a large down-sizing of our standard of living, beginning now, and moving “progressively” forward over the next two decades, is the only answer. Bullshit. Bullshit. BULLSHIT!!!!!
The critical point you are missing is that our BANKING system is not Capitalist. It has never been Capitalist. It only amasses enough Capital to justify money-printing, which is its actual business.
Look at every economic crisis ever. With no exceptions I can think of, money creation through banking was the prime culprit.
To take the most obvious example, I just finished the book “Lords of Finance”, the principle argument of which is that the gold standard caused the Great Depression, because it was deflationary.
Why is deflation bad? Because it increases the cost of loans, which causes more loan defaults, which causes bank defaults which furthers the deflationary spiral.
But if the money supply were not constantly being expanded, it would not hurt anyone if it contracted. If everyone were not leveraged to their eyeballs, the cost of loans would be relatively unimportant.
Put simply, did we not have a fractional reserve banking system, and a federally chartered but privately run Central Bank, the value of our money, of our labor, and of our innovation would have steadily increased over the course of the last century, making problems of poverty, unemployment, and healthcare disappear entirely.
Be bold. Think big. Given 100% reserve banking, we could not have had the Great Depression. We would not have had the 2008 crash. All these banks do is bet money, then cry to the government for taxpayer money when their bets fail.
Henry Ford put it roughly this way: Our banking system is very much like me parking my car in a garage, someone else taking it out for a drive without my permission, wrecking it, then asking me to pay for it.
How is this just? Socialists are quite eager to blame “Capitalism” for our failures, but their methods don’t work either. What they have going for them, though, is that their arguments are primarily MORAL. There is a MORAL case to be made as well that banks have NO RIGHT to take from people, through inflation, the wealth they create with their own hands.
Keynes noted after the First World War that not one person in a million really understood the predatory theft that monetary inflation implied. I would put the number in the billions. All these years later, and even ostensibly intelligent people fail to grasp what is being done, day in and day out.