Is The USA Facing a Weimar Moment?

A lengthy article from Common Dreams that starts off by making comparisons between the Weimar Republic in Germany and the current situation in the USA. Difficult to get rid of the left-wing/right-wing agendas but the methods of a discredited out-going administration doing everything to undermine and even to blame the new administration are easy to see.

However, the article then drifts off into blaming the whole basis of capitalism as being in any way "efficient". I think this is on more solid ground.

"According to the World Economic Forum, forty percent of the entire world's wealth has been destroyed in the recent financial collapse. In the U.S. alone, between housing and the stock market, more than $18 trillion in wealth has already been destroyed.

The government's unfunded liabilities, promises it has made to the American people but for which no payment source can be identified, now exceed $60 trillion, a literally inconceivable sum that can never, will never, be paid. Federal Reserve economist Lawrence Kotlikoff has suggested that the U.S. government is "actuarially bankrupt."

Free markets clearly do not align risk and reward, allocating capital to its most productive uses, as its promoters advertise. They clearly do not automatically return to equilibrium, but must be bailed out with trillions of dollars of injections from the shrinking coffers of the public to the ever-bulging coffers of a private priesthood of pillage and plunder.

And in perhaps the greatest indictment of all, one going back to its primeval roots in Adam Smith's eighteenth century opus, The Wealth of Nations, the unrestrained behavior of self-interested individuals clearly, manifestly, does not "coalesce as if by an Invisible Hand to the greatest good for the greatest number.""

Even though John Nash showed how false this doctrine is, it looks like Nash economics have not yet entered the public psyche. Also, capitalism is by its very nature expansionist, whereas governments are not inherently so. It is therefore basic mathematics that there would come a point when companies would be larger and more powerful than many governments. Lobbying is just a euphemism for bribery and the result is that governments, supposedly there for the people, are actually controlled by big business.

As for solutions, I'm not yet sure how people and governments can reclaim their sovereignty. Perhaps no political system works all of the time and that any change is for the better insofar as it breaks down established control mechanisms. What we are witnessing is, however, depressing in that the guilty are becoming the jailers of the innocent.