Why we are SCREWED

The following is an article by a man held in high esteem, and respect. THE MANS AN IDIOT! Let me tell you why.

Capitalism is killing our morals, our future

Commentary: In a Market Society, everything is for sale

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, capitalism is working ... for the Forbes 1,000 Global Billionaires whose ranks swelled from 322 in 2000 to 1,426 recently. Billionaires control the vast majority of the world’s wealth, while the income of American workers stagnated. And what that is the Billionaires fault? The fact that some people have MADE vast sums of money is a good thing. They didn't steal it. One person making wealth in no way harms another's ability to do so.

For the rest of the world, capitalism is not working: A billion live on less than two dollars a day. With global population exploding to 10 billion by 2050, that inequality gap will grow, fueling revolutions, wars, adding more billionaires and more folks surviving on two bucks a day.That is not the fault of Capitalism. Capitalism isn't even practised in any part of the world, let alone the majority. Socialism, and Dictatorship is the majority rule of the world.

Over the years we’ve explored the reasons capitalism blindly continues on its self-destructive path. Wrong Recently we found someone who brilliantly explains why free-market capitalism is destined to destroy the world, absent a historic paradigm shift: That is Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, Another Idiot author of the new best-seller, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” and his earlier classic, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?”

For more than three decades Sandel’s been explaining how capitalism is undermining America’s moral values and why most people are in denial of the impact. Capitalism isn't undermining anything. Socialism and it's anti-god factions have been whats eroding the morals of society incrementally for 100 years His classes are larger than a thousand although you can take his Harvard “Justice” course online. Yes you can get the reach of Radical Communism right in your own home from any University Sandel recently summarized his ideas about capitalism in the Atlantic. In “What Isn’t for Sale?” he writes:

“Without being fully aware of the shift, Americans have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society ... where almost everything is up for sale ... a way of life where market values seep into almost every sphere of life and sometimes crowd out or corrode important values, non-market values.”

Sandel should be required reading for all Wall Street insiders as well as America’s 95 million Main Street investors. Here’s a condensed version: Everything has always been for sale, name a time when it wasn't.

In one generation, market ideology consumed America’s collective spirit

“The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of market faith and deregulation — an era of market triumphalism,” says Sandel. “The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom.”And their policies led to a 20 year boom of prosperity

Justin Ide/Harvard University News Office

Michael Sandel

And in the 1990s with the “market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good.”Wrong the ushered in the current collapse

Today “almost everything can be bought and sold.” Today “markets, and market values, have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us,” says Sandel.That's because he is an idiot

Over the years, “market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.”It always has, but it was tempered with faith and the morality that comes with faith in God

Examples: New free-market capitalism trapped in American brains

Yes, it’s everywhere: “Markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods unheard-of 30 years ago. Today, we take them largely for granted.”All those areas are controlled by the socialist politicians and their minions. Not one is market driven, they are dictated to on their functioning by bureaucrats that believe they know better than the common man. It is why everyone of those areas is failing.

Examples ... for-profit schools, hospitals, prisons ... outsourcing war to private contractors ... police forces by private guards “almost twice the number of public police officers” and are financially viable ... drug “companies aggressive marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice ... prohibited in most other countries.”

More: Ads in “public schools ... buses ... corridors ... cafeterias ... because the have milked the homeowner out of every penny of property tax that they can, and to support an average salary twice that of the common man golden pensions and healthcare packages they have reached the limit they can steal from the taxpayer. So the now get sponsors  naming rights to parks and civic spaces ... Also mostly paid for by TAX revenue blurred boundaries, within journalism, between news and advertising ... marketing of ‘designer’ eggs and sperm for assisted reproduction ... buying and selling ... the right to pollute carbon TAXES created by the socialist environmentalists  ... campaign finance in the U.S. that comes close to permitting the buying and selling of elections.” 

Why should you worry? Capitalism breeds corruption and inequality

But the 2008 crash challenged our faith in free-market capitalism: “The financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a widespread sense that markets have become detached from morals.”No it showed that when Government "Mandates" that banks give money that can't pay it back and then buys that bad paper and sells it on the world market, Government creates catastrophe

Then comes the big question: So what? “Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?” Two big reasons concern Sandel:

First, inequality: “Where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means.” If wealth just bought things, yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities wouldn’t matter much. “But as money comes to buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger.”The voice of the true communist

Second, corruption: “Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them ... markets don’t only allocate goods, they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged.” Also “corrupt the meaning of citizenship. Economists often assume that markets ... do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark.”Pure babel that ignores the effects of the removal of faith from the public arena

Warning: Morals are new commodities auctioned to highest bidder

Sandel warns that our new dominating capitalist mind-set is crowding out “nonmarket values worth caring about. When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold,” they become “commodities, as instruments of profit and use.”

But “not all goods are properly valued in this way ... Slavery was appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold at auction,” failing to “value human beings as persons, worthy of dignity and respect; it sees them as instruments of gain and objects of use.”

Nor do we permit “children to be bought and sold, no matter how difficult the process of adoption can be.” The same with citizenship ... jury duty ... voting rights ... “we believe that civic duties are not private property but public responsibilities. To outsource them is to demean them, to value them in the wrong way.”

Many things should never be commodities.You decry the environment that has resulted by the insertion of socialism and the removal of god and morality from the public arena. A feat that has been achieved over the past 100 years by "Progressives" not Capitalists

America transforms from mere market economy to new market society

Sandel’s core message is simple: “The good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question — health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones.”These are questions for the individual, led by his/her own moral code which used to be grounded in faith, not the domain of the political class or the group-think majority

Unfortunately, we never had that debate during the 30-year rise of “market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it — without ever deciding to do so — we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.”No we have had 100 years of "Progressives" driving us to this point, piece by piece

And “the difference is this: A market economy is a tool ... for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.” The difference is profound.

Not only did the debate never happen. It may never. Why? Because politicians aren’t up to debating values, may be pushing us past the point of no return.It is because the progressive agenda has always been the agenda of communism and no god. Since 1910 the progressives have incrementally insinuated socialism into our system till it has reached this point of collapse. They have done so deliberately and have never been willing to express their agenda openly

Today’s “political argument consists mainly of shouting matches on cable television, partisan vitriol on talk radio and ideological food fights on the floor of Congress,” says Sandel, so “it’s hard to imagine a reasoned public debate about such controversial moral questions as the right way to value procreation, children, education, health, the environment, citizenship and other goods.”You are the type of person that has brought it to this point.

Dysfunctional politicians pushing Americans past point of no return

Can we change? “The appeal of using markets to put a price on public values, is that there’s no judgment on the preferences they satisfy.” Debate is unnecessary. Markets don’t “ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex, or a kidney ... the only question the economist asks is ‘How much?’ Markets ... don’t discriminate between worthy preferences and unworthy ones.” Markets may never draw the line, but do politicians, in secret?Who decides who is worthy? the bureaucrat ?

What is certain: Capitalism is eliminating moral values, as Nobel economist Milton Friedman and capitalism’s philosopher Ayn Rand had been preaching to the generation. Twisting the words of the greats doesn't bolster your deluded observations As Sandel puts it: “Each party to a deal decides for him- or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged. This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal.”

But unfortunately, market capitalism “has exacted a heavy price ... drained public discourse of moral and civic energy.”No socialist engineering of the market has done that

The good professor is a great teacher, with only one glaring flaw in his logic: he’s too idealistic, too quixotic. You don’t have to be a fatalist to know that without a total economic collapse, market capitalists — including 1,426 billionaires, Wall Street bankers, hedgers, lobbyists and every other special interest getting rich off the new market society — will never voluntarily surrender their control over the American political system.

Rather, they will blindly continue down their self-destructive path with an absolute conviction they are divinely guided by the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith, and perhaps even God. The true words of a man who doesn't even realize he is preaching Marx

Meanwhile, we have no choice but wait patiently till the collapse, anxiously aware that our bizarre political system will just keep degrading America’s moral values, pricing, buying, selling, trading morals like commodities, because in the final analysis everything has a price and everyone has a price in our hot new exciting Market Society. If and when a full collapse takes place you are not going to be happy. The minority of socialist bureaucrats like yourself and Sandel will be amongst those that are hunted down for the cause of the collapse. America is supposed to be about Free Markets and Capitalism. Your ilk have polluted it to the point of dismay and disrepair that it is currently in. When it rights itself, which it will, you will find yourself on the short end of the stick

Paul B. Farrell is a MarketWatch columnist based in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Follow him on Twitter @MKTWFarrell.

Argument concluded.