We have essentially moved out economy as a nation from an agrarian one, to an industrial one, to a post industrial, to a service one, to a financial services.

Capitalism creates wealth by exploiting labor (very simple) and now we don’t do that anymore because we don’t produce anything, but move paper, ideas and electrons around. This is harder to extract wealth from so it moved to the non reality based means of valuing “services” and trading these “intangibles”.

Wall street has so abstracted this practice that it essentially pure gambling, and hedging of bets related to unrelated activity.

What kind of economy is that? It’s the kind that can have 100s of trillions of “dollars” in play and nothing there.

First thing to realize, as I’m certain everyone reading this already knows, is that if you’re one of the ‘lucky’ few who has part of those trillions, then that’s the kind of economy you (think you) want.

Second, according to someone like Greenspan (sort of Libertarian except when helping Bushie anarchists) is that the financial ’side’ of things should reflect the real side of economic activity. So, all this paper shuffling *should* reflect something real, some real value being made or real commercial activities which serve a real purpose. If it doesn’t, then it’s gonna be like a house of cards. That’s the housing market, but not necessarily the rest of the market!

Third, there is labor being exploited in this *new* economy, it’s just not so much American labor. It’s a system going world-wide and Americans are being pushed aside.

Conclusion, we aren’t going to derail the success of the world-wide commercial boom. Instead, what we need to do is to focus on building another generation of American commerce and employ more Americans.

So far we’ve been using creativity and intellectual products like Internet stuff, music, software, product design, financial services, information (news & comentary) and the like to compete internationally.

Maybe there’s room for American labor plus creativity to create new products to export.

Who knows, there might even be room for a resurgence of high-quality American goods to be designed, manufactured and exported for high profits.

If you run a business into the ground, you’re not an expert on anything

Except running businesses in the ground.

helllooo

How much can we do about that?

this is not spontaneous Shia combustion – we ordered this

we made a deal with an Iranian agent and pretty much demanded al-Maliki do it – now