Lazy Unemployed Vs Productive Rich?

Dec 8th, 2010

by F. Grey Parker 
UPDATE: You can find the follow up HERE.

There have been many foolish comments made to me about the ongoing economic crisis, particularly with regard to the unemployed and the investor class. I have read hyperbole of a sort that is plainly hard to stomach. But this one earns the prize:

"Taking money from person A so person B can stay home and watch Oprah is as dumb and evil as paying farmers not to grow. Get the government and Federal Reserve's fingers out of the economy and there will no longer be recessions."

This Randian devotion to mid-20th century concepts of the "free market" is no less naive than a first year college student pontificating about the glories of pure socialism. It is gamesmanship of a sort we should expect in children but ought refuse to tolerate in adults.


I have heard the contemporary American Right blame our problems on what they call "the entitlement bubble." It's Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance and a culture of laziness, they say.

Of course, the real crisis of entitlement is a system of corporate welfare that allows billion-dollar-plus publicly traded companies to claim write-downs intended for small businesses, receive tremendous tax incentives for off-shoring and outsourcing and a political environment which has helped them game trillions of dollars in rewards over the last three decades from taxpayers while simultaneously refusing to invest in America.

What we are experiencing now is the death rattle of Reaganomics. Even David Stockman, Ronnie's financial guru who once bowed down to "The Laffer Curve" and "Trickle Down Theory," has utterly repudiated the philosophy.

Small American businesses in the new global structure require consistent domestic expansion on the part of large corporations to sustain local growth. Period. It is the only way to keep pace with our population increases and also maintain a system which allows anything that resembles private fortune. That is the reality of the 21st century.

And yet, our largest corporations are refusing to hire American labor in times of stunning profit. Why? It is not due to the oft repeated canard that there is "too much uncertainty."  Rather, it is because there is more short term profit to be made in not hiring. 

Investing on the scale our crisis and our infrastructure demands is seemingly impossible in this climate; There must be several fiscal-quarters (if not years) of diminished dividends. The roughly 1% of the class which possesses the majority of the shares in these companies would have the heads of the first CEOs who dared to propose "investors" take less capital out of the economy.

So, ask yourself. What's more un-patriotic? A slim minority of unemployed citizens conning the system or the vast majority of our shareholders and corporate boards who no longer believe it is worth investing in The United States of America?