Last week’s bailout of small banks (and it was a bank bailout) needs to be seen in the larger context of America’s soaring inequality.
The standard conservative explanation for why inequality has widened is that individuals are paid what they’re “worth” — and that a few Americans at the top are now worth extraordinary sums while most Americans are not.
Their argument is easily confused with a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid in the market. Yet the amounts people are paid are morally justifiable only if the legal and political institutions defining the market are morally justifiable, which they are not.
Markets depend on who has the power to design and enforce them — deciding what can be owned and sold and under what terms, who can join together to gain additional market power, what happens if someone cannot pay up, how to pay for what is held in
So we need to ask: Is it morally acceptable that the typical worker’s wage has stagnated for the last 40 years while most of the economy’s gains have gone to the […]
I hate to sound rude, but I’m ready for an ALL-OUT WAR with the God-Damned Republicans! I am an Ordained Minister and do not believe a REAL Christian could be a Republican or vote for one!
Note that Treasury Secretary Yellen and Jerome Powell of the Federal reserve have made it very clear that all bank deposits are safe in being backed by the United States Government. Think about that for a second. What does that mean? It means we have effectively socialized the banking system to where bankers can do whatever they want with the depositor’s money, no matter how risky, because those deposits are insured by us, the taxpayers. The old Reagan playbook: “Privatize the profits, and socialize the costs”, on steroids