romansh wrote:I can't help thinking if what you are seeing is a result of US's culture of individualism; this stems back at least two centuries. It will take a while to reverse this trend.
There is no "silver bullet" to fix the serious, severe problems, but one economic journalist has a number of suggestions in this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Makers-Takers-Fi ... B014BR46P2
Policy recommendations include the general principle that the rules of capitalism are entirely man-made and must be altered by human intervention. They are not divinely inspired. The author suggests that this means Congress can:
--work to make finance more transparent, in part, by simplifying the institutions so that we can have more effective access to banking activities;
--stop rewarding debt over equity under a regime that currently punishes individuals and companies for trying to engage in business instead of stock trading and encourages everyone to borrow instead of earning and investing the old fashioned way;
--re-thinking who companies are run for--not just profit-seeking stockholders and CEO's, but customers, trading partners, workers and society at large;
--build a national growth strategy that makes sensible real policy for growth across the board, [which IMHO means giving up the idea that privatization of legitimate, exclusive government functions can continue to hide a bloated military budget that is doing to the U.S. what the military spending of the U.S.S.R. did to that nation---suicidal robbing of the treasury for covert, incompetent and unethical programs and projects];
--and re-defining the central mission of the economic system so that finance is no longer at the top of the food chain, but a servant to other interests. [The book's author suggests that capitalism is about business, and I would tend to believe it is about the consumer, but we agree that finance cannot continue to rule the roost.]
[**This synopsis of recommendations is the result of my paraphrasing, with apologies to experts for my amateur understanding of a complex area of study.]
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Once in a while a door opens, and let's in the future. --- Graham Greene