Dan Kervick — Dismantling the Decadence of the Rentier Recovery

What’s happening in America? We’re creating a society that decreasingly values work and the sahring of the nation’s labor burden, and in which the most successful among us increasingly live off rents and ownership claims on the output generated by others. The success of the capital class in suppressing wage income and extracting capital income from cost-side profits during the recession constitutes their own private countercyclical self-recovery plan. The success of that approach explains why there has not been a notable call from the capital class for a more vigorous, job-producing recovery. And that alternative, capitalist-only formula for rentier recovery is conducive to an economic equilibrium based on risk-averse stagnation, safe asset hoarding, extraction schemes and plutocratic phobia of the public sector. 

There are various things we can and should do about this distortion of our economy and our decline toward a decadent system of rent, exploitation, stagnation, and caste solidification.…

Dan is much more sanguine than I am about repairing the capitalistic system. My view is that it is beyond repair and the only real solution is a system that reverses current priorities and puts people and the environment ahead of money and machines. But that would take actual democracy instead of oligarchy masquerading as democracy.

Rugged Egalitarianism
Dismantling the Decadence of the Rentier Recovery
Dan Kervick