Reply #12: You, we, should be terrified

[davekriss]

I work for a Fortune 100 manufacturer. It's been around for nearly a century. Orders have literally evaporated. The economic metrics we watch have been driven into the floor but their downward trajectory appears to be accelerating. We're talking internally of ejecting almost 20% of our workforce with hints that in our worst Post World War II climate we ejected a third of our workforce and current conditions by far dwarf the worst we've seen since then. This is indeed a DEPRESSION. It will take at least, we believe, 5 to 6 years to dig ourselves out if not a decade.

This really is the Day of Reckoning. This is indeed what every one of us (with academic interest in economics) has feared, a (believe it or not) typical result of unfettered freedom for capital, for the concentration of wealth that results, the result of putting people who believe in "freedom" above all else in charge of the wheels of power.

The "freedom" I speak of is the freedom of capital to exploit the slave. The freedom of capital to demand unfree (authoritarian) rents from the market, the freedom of the already advantaged to augment their advantage by buying political power (fascism). It's not like we haven't seen this before; on the contrary, it has repeated after every "Roaring Twenties" or "Guilded Age" in our history. There will be a swing to the Left to pick up the pieces, but it seems we (as a species) never learn. Self-inflicted pain. Intense hangover. But unfortanately the latter translates to acute human misery for the masses.

May we rise up and claim what we deserve and desire, peace and prosperity for every man, not just the few.