Econ Up-Date

Stupid centrist jerk Matthew Yglesias (who is leaving Think Progress for Slate or someplace, we think we just read) defines "capitalism" for us.It is not quite the same as OKC Mayor Mick Cornett's "winners & losers" definition, but it's pretty damn simplistic.

Capitalism, a system under which individuals are allowed to save money (“capital”) and invest it in business enterprises that are privately owned, is a huge success.*

Then he goes on to debunk bullshit from the schmuck whose idiotic new book inspired the item in the first place, but Yglesias doesn't expand on his theory that you can just save your money & put it in some business. We won't be arsed, but the statistics on how much Americans, at least, save, let alone invest, are pretty sad. As are the stats on American credit card debt.

And the return on the investment that Americans make w/ their bodies & work-shriveled souls by showing up at a specific time (or you'll get docked/fired!) five days a wk., like it or not, is rather poor, isn't it? Again, plenty of statistics available about the increases in productivity business enterprises have extracted from workers over the past 30 yrs. w/o appreciable increases in money paid to the wage-slaves.
Investment in business enterprises? You mean a chance to have Wall Street take all the fucking money from your retirement acc't. while laughing all the way to the bank? See the last five or six yrs. The stat we saw quite recently was something like $7 trillion in "value" that doesn't exist anymore. Oh, that was just the value of your house. Who knows how much mutual funds & the markets have stolen from you suckers. (Actually, $7 trillion is a very popular amount to disappear.)

So shove it, Matt. Doesn't work that way at all.

But while it’s true that once upon a time a large number of people disputed this and there were serious efforts to organize large countries around the principle of prohibiting private ownership of the means of production, this economic model is now essentially limited to North Korea.

How about expanding this marvelous private ownership/profit-taking to the people who are the means of production, rather than to the looting parasitical moochers who are already so well off from inheritances or what have you that they can invest w/o any of this "saving" he claims happens? At this point we have to wonder if Yglesias got a thorough check-up from the neck up after the beat-down he received on the way home from McArdle's pad a few months back. (Well-deserved beat-down? You decide.)

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*Individuals are "allowed" to do so in the same sense that the poor, as well as the rich, are "forbidden" to sleep under those proverbial bridges. And for whom has this capitalism been most (if not exclusively) successful, again?