In a world where the privileged make money with money it is obvious
that these same privileged people would support the neoclassical
'accurate measurement' of economic performance: the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP).
So we have governments, bankers, think tanks and priestly
academicians all conjuring among themselves about the recurring
prediction of the size the GDP would take this next month. They use
the law of the average to hide their greed, and they use the
supposed scientific law of statistics to back up their predictions
and the related supporting governmental economic policies.
I remember when Canadian bankers, the federal government along
with the Business Council on National Issues were all busy laying
out a promotional economic agenda to improve average productivity
and therefore overcome the progressive decline in Canada's standard
of living relative to the United States.
What a non sense! You have all these rich guys wrapping
themselves in the Canadian flag and vowing to work hard to overcome
the United States' standard of living by supporting higher average
productivity and the byproduct of low wages and higher unemployment.
Then we have these same rich people telling us that the health care
system needs both more federal money and privatization.
I am going to explain my truth in what is wrong with our social
and economic system. We must all know that in a supposed democratic
society social and economic changes don't occur overnight, rather
they evolve and they evolve either for the better or for the worse
for people at large. In the last twenty years our social and
economic systems evolved for the worse as the rich got richer and
the poor got poorer*.
We have already written about the disparity of wealth in the
United States as the financial wealth of the top one percent of
households now exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent.
And we have the development of a similar trend in Canada where the
poorest ten percent of family units have negative average wealth or
more debts than assets. On the other hand, the richest 20 percent of
family units own 72 percent of the $420 billion in registered
savings plans, 94 percent of the $92 billion in stocks outside the
registered savings plans, and 81 percent of the $80 billion in
mutual and investment funds outside the registered savings plans.
We must reverse this trend where the rich get richer, and we must
stop the deceptive talks of our rich bankers, politicians and gurus
who continue to preach the ever continuing growth of both the GDP
and average productivity. Why not talking about living wages and
full employment instead?
*Note dated July 26, 2006: China didnt follow the
neoclassical economic directions and it experienced the
highest ever economic growth of any other country.
References
Ownership Statistics: Why a Shared Capitalism is Needed Shared
Capitalism Institute http://www.sharedcapitalism.org/scfacts.html
Kerstetter,Steve, Wealth Inequality in Canada, , December 2002,
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, http://www.policyalternatives.ca |