Ponderings 3 - The Emergence Of The Cult Of Capitalism

People see themselves as Capitalists the way they see themselves as "Christian" or "White". It's become like a cult with beliefs & GOP is thier leader. Earlier understandings of Capitalism (from the, mostly forgotten,WW2 era) where increases in the wage where considered to be part of the boons of American Capitalism has been lost because the meaning of capitalism no longer includes fairness (somehow 'all capitalists are good' has become the underlying assumption of all Republican arguments - Interesting side note: Carl Jung warns us that this is where society in heading back in the 1950's based on his observations of living through the World Wars in his book The Undiscovered Self). It's like people have read so much Ayn Rand that they sympathize with the mean streak of unregulated capitalism. A sort of sad-masochistic idealism towards what it means to be a "Capitalist".


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Extract:

"It used to be that conservatism was a hard-headed set of ideas rooted in reality.
Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society, but from the world as it actually exists.

"This is the way things work," conservatives would patiently explain to wooly headed liberal professors. "Whatever you may want it to look like, this is what it really looks like."
But consider the debates over the economy these days. The Republican prescription is cut taxes - slash government spending, then things will always bounce back.

Now, I would like to see lower tax rates in the context of simplification and reform, but what is the actual evidence that massive tax cuts are the single best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest levels since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies.

So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts, either past or present. It is simply a theoretical assertion.

The rich countries after all are in the best shape right now with strong growth and low unemployment are ones like Germany, Denmark and Canada - none characterized by low taxes."


The key to understanding why Republicans have become so dependent on personal budgeting allegories has to do with a dis proven study (following junk science seems to be a Republican "Capitalist" Cult thing!)

Austerity's Spreadsheet Error - Graduate student Thomas Herndon identifies little staggering omissions in a prominent academic paper, "Growth in a Time of Debt." (04:19):

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