So.much.to.say.brain.exploding....
Long story short, from what I have read about the US economy and people in the 20th century, we started as a nation who understood that socialist policies were not only good but needed for economic recovery after the inequality of the Guilded Age. But there was a huge attack on socialist policies in the 1970's during another recession. That's when our astounding elite minds decided that letting corporations take over to end government wasteful spending (there was also the restructuring of welfare benefits to try to get "welfare moms" of the welfare rosters--I have so much to say about these racist, sexist laws and the family court structure that led to all of it, but that is for another day). Slowly as investors and financiers were seeing amazing profit potential by cutting government programs and letting them be run by contractors from for profit companies, we started getting fed the line that the government was wasteful; worker protections just got in the way of doing business; and everything could be done easier and cheaper if it's done in a for profit contractor system where people don't have to be provided with insurance or retirement--just don't look too hard at the work produced. It took a lot of popular media brainwashing for us, the American people, to embrace these tenets as truth, but with the red scare in the 50's and 60's, it wasn't too hard to equate socialism with communism--and communism was, of course, the devil.
Now we are here, where neoliberal policies of unrestricted corporate monopolies are actually eroding our democracy--because the only people that get heard are campaign donors. Most of our top economist still believe in some aspects of trickle down economics even though it's been thoroughly debunked. Business as usual is now unsustainable because the only way to increase profits for shareholders is to pay workers less and replace parts and pieces with cheaper materials or try to make a process quicker by automation or just plain cutting corners. We've painted ourselves into a corner that we can't get out of. Many public retirement pensions rely on the stock market making consistent returns and our economy is inevitably tied to the stock market regardless of how decoupled it looks right now. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both warned that financiers/rentiers (people who make money off of rents and interest instead of production) were great servants but horrible masters. They both warn against this class having power as it creates a stew of corruption. This is who is in charge and because of creative accounting and insane financial "products", they have created this environment where the stock market does not reflect the actual economy, and inequality is running rampant. This isn't the first time in this country that inequality has been bad, and it's certainly not the first time in history. There is always a realignment. There is always a rebalancing. It can be peaceful or it can be violent. I'm hoping for the peaceful solution where we pass a lot of laws that protects workers and rebalances the stock market to something that again looks like it's mimicking the economy--but this will require us to tax billionaires a whole bunch which we in the US don't like. We enjoy the myth of the self made man that gained wealth from his own two hands--this is a myth that keeps most of the US against socialist policies. We don't understand that behind every self made man is usually a bunch of inherited cash, and that we, as regular people have no real path to wealth anymore thanks to the belief that we shouldn't hassle billionaires because they "earned" their money, instead of the truth that they exploited people like you and me to make those billions.
ETA: If you want to read about how billionaires are eroding democracy, here's a good article:
The Political Immortality of Billionaires
www.vice.com
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22230300/1229135526.jpg)
www.theverge.com
