America: Modern Greece or Ancient Greece?

It turns out, when times are tough, capital gets concentrated and constipated. Moreover, competition is reduced. There are fewer players in any given game. There are more on the sidelines. Banks become conservative rather than cavalier. They lend less and only to sure bets, which means the tried and true, not the innovative and adventuresome. Banks get lean and mean. One needs to look no further than the 30,000 mere mortal employees to be released by Bank of America in the near future to understand the magnitude of the problem.
The elite in Washington, which includes both parties, have offered two scenarios for recovery. The Obama recovery plan includes a carrot-stick approach with tax incentives to stimulate small business and the loss of tax loopholes for the rich. The Republicans have nothing but carrots for the rich and sticks for the downtrodden. Their message to the poor is grab hold of your bootstraps, pull them up, and that gesture will pull you up as well. It’s a neat trick, like smoke and mirrors, and costs nothing. It also does nothing but leave the poor further behind and out of the running for the American Dream.
Government’s role in good times is to act as referee in the game of capitalism. In bad times it needs to act as re-distributor of wealth and initiator of play. Bad times are like end-games in Monopoly. There are no more properties to buy; there are no more hotels to place; the game is in the hands of the winner; the game is over, and it is time to start a new game, a new beginning. The meaning is in the journey to Park Place, not in sitting there at end-game.
Imagine an NFL season where all the top players are concentrated in one team. There would be no season. The sport would die. The results would be so predictable no one would subscribe. It is the uncertainty that makes the NFL vibrant. On any given day, any team might beat anyone else. There are mechanisms in place to assure competition. If we are so committed to competition in that arena, why are we so hesitant to foster it in our economy? Why do we not have strong mechanisms in place to ensure good competition in the marketplace?
The answer is capitalists try to eliminate competition. They do not thrive on it. A famous capitalist named John D. Rockefeller once proclaimed that competition is a sin. It therefore is up to government to make sure that capitalist entities do not destroy competition through monopolization of markets. Anti-trust laws are written to prevent monopolies.
Market winners continually try to fix the game in their favor. They grow so powerful and so large they are deemed economically immortal (too big to fail). They are made into “gods” who have their own games they play way above mere mortals who must struggle below and sift the fallen scraps for paltry rewards, which is what real trickle-down looks like. The “gods” (masters of the universe) have the resources to purchase politicians who work for their benefit both in and out of office. The professional politicians are either agents of preserving one form or another of the status quo while in office or they are lobbyists directly representing the “gods” and their business entities. The whole game takes place in the economic equivalent of very exclusive fraternity houses. No mere mortals need apply, unless you are a genius who can make one of the “gods” some real money.
America, alas, has become like Ancient Greece except the “gods” are real rather than imagined. The “gods” actually do control the lives of the masses and limit their growth by failing to keep the economic game open. Instead, the masses are given unsustainable entitlements and then blamed for not playing the game from which they have been excluded by the very blamers. The “gods” invest less and less in their less fortunate compatriots, export their jobs, and then blame the losers for not taking responsibility for the outcome.
Of course there are many companies that have chosen names from the time of Ancient Greece. There is Elysium Wealth Management, Centaur Pharmaceuticals, Hercules Incorporated, Hermes Financial Group, Amazon, Atlas Van Lines, and Delphi Energy, to name a few. However, the real titans of the business world today have more mundane names such as General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, and Goldman-Saks.
Yes, the masses were told by the minions of the “gods” that they, too, could have a piece of the American Dream if they bought a house with a sub-prime mortgage they could ill afford, but that failure is blamed on the duped buyers under the rubric of caveat emptor. They should have known better. Meanwhile the “gods” made out like bandits.
Now the Tea Party may look like a rebellion orchestrated by a segment of the masses, but it is actually a false rebellion orchestrated by the “gods” to convince the masses that they, the masses, are to blame for their problems. It’s another neat trick the “gods” have played on mere mortals.
The American “gods” warn that America could go the way of modern Greece if drastic austerity measures are not taken when, in fact, America has been acting out a modern day version of ancient Greek mythology: the “gods” always win. Now maybe we mere mortals will awaken to confront the duplicity and hypocrisy of the “gods” and send them all to Hades, otherwise known as Federal Court. But that possibility is remote as long as the “gods” and their political minions keep our attention on that unsustainable national debt which, according to the “gods” is the result of too much indulgence in entitlements for the masses.
As Francis Bacon once said, “Of great riches there is no real use, except in the distribution; the rest is but conceit.”