Where Have All the Profits Gone? by Stephen Fleischman

[Joanne98]

March 16, 2008

The stock market has been bouncing around like a yo-yo on steroids.

The term “subprime” that most of us hadn’t heard before, has become a household word.

Household mortgages have been avalanching and foreclosures piling up. Banks are locked in a credit crunch.

Bear Stearns, one of Wall Street’s biggies, had to be bailed out by the Fed.

Banks, like bookies of yore, are laying off bad bets. The government is dancing as fast as it can, printing $600 checks to send out to everybody, hopefully creating some purchasing power for people to go out and buy stuff.

Yet, despite the stimulus package, and other fables being told by George W. Bush, reputable economists and dour newsmen are predicting a deep and long recession ahead.

According to Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, a recession is a decline in a country’s gross domestic product for two or more successive quarters. Recessions may be associated with falling prices, called deflation, or rising prices, called inflation, in a process known as stagflation.

A severe or long recession is referred to as an economic depression. A devastating breakdown of an economy is called economic collapse.

Is that where we’re headed?

It’s got to be somebody’s fault. Who are the villains of the piece? Capitalists? No. Entrepreneurs? No. The working class? Well, maybe.

It’s the profit motive, Stupid! In the end, you know, every crook gets caught.

Where does profit come from? That is the question.

It took Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) Prussian philosopher, political economist and revolutionary, to find out where profit came from. It was a discovery that ranked with Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Sigmund Freud’s ego, super-ego and the id.

Profit, Marx found out, is the gain capitalists receive by paying workers less than the full value of their labor. It’s called “exploitation” of one class by another–an inherent feature and key element of capitalism and free markets.

What! This whole capitalist system that has taken over the world is based on out-and-out thievery! The capitalist steals the surplus value of the labor the worker puts into the commodity being produced! What a discovery!
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/where-have-all-the-profits-gone-by-stephen-fleischman/

[bemildred]

1. It's not thievery, it's fraud, a Ponzi scheme.

Fiat money helps a lot too, so it's sort of a government sponsored Ponzi scheme.