From Ken Cross's seminar.
- Five myths about capitalism - Maybe greed isn’t so good.
Myth No. 1 - Greed, natural human instinct, makes markets work.
Myth No. 2 – Corporations must be run to maximize value for shareholders.
Myth No. 3 – Workers’ pay is an objective measure of economic contribution.
Myth No. 4 – Equality of opportunity is all people need to climb the economic ladder.
Myth No. 5 – Making the economy fairer will make it smaller and less prosperous.
By Steven Pearlstein - Steven Pearlstein, a Washington Post economics columnist and the Robinson professor of public affairs at George Mason University, is the author of “Can American Capitalism Survive?” September 28, 2018
SOLUTIONS for Wall Street and Capitalism Abuses:
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_Bureau
- What Should Be Done? Charles Ferguson - author of the Inside Job: The Financiers Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century
Bring the financial sector under control:
- Reform, and tightly regulate, compensation structures at the individual, corporate, and industry levels.
- Break up the largest banks.
- Greatly strengthen the power and political independence of regulation and white-collar criminal law enforcement.
- Tax financial transactions.
- Tax financial sector income fairly.
- Close loopholes for activities such as “innovations” designed for tax avoidance or for betting against one’s own securities.
Natural result of proper re-regulation of the financial sector:
- Reduce its size, concentration & political power.
Many benefits:
- Increasing the supply of talented people for more productive activities.
- Reducing the pressures for political corruption.
Control the impact of money on politics:
- Lobbying and political contributions should be heavily taxed .
- Government and regulator salaries should be raised sharply, in return for strict prohibitions on revolving-door behavior.
- Some form of public campaign financing for political campaigns should be mandatory.
Reform the tax system:
- Both the individual and corporate, so as to raise revenues, increase fairness, and mitigate against the forms of hereditary and financial oligarchies.
- Extremely high estate taxes are one important element of this, as is the fair taxation of very high financial sector incomes.
Greatly strengthen antitrust policy and the regulation of corporate governance
- Antitrust policy and analysis have fallen victim to corruption in two ways:
- The corruption of U.S. government policy through campaign finance, lobbying, and revolving-door hiring.
- The corruption of the economics discipline that supplies the economic analysis, and the personnel, behind antitrust decisions.
Ø In the areas of industrial organization, regulation, corporate governance, and antitrust theory, the economics discipline doesn’t just need reform; it needs a five-organ transplant and a yearlong stay at a reeducation camp.
- More generally, America needs to figure out how to keep large, mature industries from going the way of General Motors, U.S. Steel, AT&T, Microsoft, or for that matter Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, either by deep reforms in corporate governance, by breaking up large and stagnant companies, or by creating other mechanisms for new entry in mature industries.
Improve educational opportunity and quality is fundamental.
- A country cannot compete economically, elect wise leaders, or call itself a fair society if it has a 25 percent school drop rate, or if only the wealthy can attend good schools. Here, there is a fairness issue that not even a bank CEO can openly deny. If there is one thing that nearly everyone can agree on, it is that all children deserve a fair chance. If a child is born in a poor area, or to drug-addicted parents, it isn’t the baby’s fault. And yet the way we handle school funding, child nutrition, foster care, and child poverty remain shameful, especially in the U.S., and if anything, threaten to become more so. Beyond this, a well-educated population yields a far happier, more prosperous society. As it stands, we are wasting a startlingly high fraction of our people, in ways that are painful and very expensive.
Create a truly universally accessible, high-speed broadband Internet infrastructure, both wireline and wireless.
- Broadband deployment should be viewed in much the same terms that a government deploys a national road system. If anything, broadband deployment is more important than transport, as a way to decrease foreign strategy dependence, insure security, and reduce global warning.
Week #5 Income Inequality Follow-up:
- Ready To Make A Difference?: Take Action – Follow the Inequality for All film website link to find how you can take action >http://inequalityforall.com/
+ Raise The Minimum Wage > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/raise-the-minimum-wage/
+ Strengthen Workers’ Voices > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/strengthen-workers-voices/
+ Invest In Education > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/invest-in-education/
+ Reform Wall Street > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/reform-wall-street/
+ Fix The Tax System > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/fix-the-tax-system/
+ Get Big Money Out Of Politics > http://inequalityforall.com/take-action/get-money-out-of-politics/
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