Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Economics Page 30 of 100

The Inflation Spike: What it Will Do & How to Take Advantage

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On May 11, 2021

53 Comments

So, many people have noticed there’s been a lot of inflation. Timber is up about three times. There is an international chip shortage (thank you Crypto). The price of everyday goods has risen significantly.

First: No, this isn’t a precursor to hyperinflation in core countries.

Second: Yes, higher inflation is here to stay, beyond what can be concealed by statistical tricks like hedonics. (Assuming the Fed doesn’t hammer the economy into the ground, which I don’t think they will.)

The temporary effect is pandemic driven. A lot of capacity was shuttered during the pandemic, and it will take time for it to ramp up. Once it’s back up, prices will stabilize.

The permanent effect is driven by increased consolidation. A lot of small and medium businesses went out of business during the pandemic, and they aren’t all coming back. They were replaced by larger businesses. Those larger businesses (who, for example, bought up a lot of rental housing) will use their market power to raise prices and they will keep raising prices as long as they have little effective competition (a.k.a., as long as they are oligopolies). In industries like rental properties, they will keep properties off the market to increase prices, because capital is cheap and they can afford to do so.

Right now, this is being mitigated by pandemic government spending, like the additional $300/week for UI benefits. It is also being mitigated, on the low end, by the fact that a decent chunk of the bottom-end died. (Line cooks had the highest pandemic fatality rate of any job class.)

Remember that what matters is not what inflation is, but whether your wages are rising faster than your expenses. If companies are forced to raise wages more than they raise prices, you are better off.

This is why Republican governors removing UI benefits are hurting people. They’ll still get price inflation, without wage inflation, leading to people who are, overall, worse off.

The test here is if Biden, through his fiscal package, can pour money to the poor fast enough to keep the labor market tight. If he does, people’s wages will rise because businesses will have to raise wages to get workers.

If Biden pulls this off, he gets re-elected. He might even win the 2022 midterms. If he doesn’t, he becomes a lame duck President in 2022.

So, if anyone from the administration or Democrats in Congress are reading this, remember: Re-election and keeping power requires flooding poor people with money and good paying jobs like the jobs refitting buildings in the stimulus. Do that, and wage inflation will out-pace price inflation; people will feel great, and you and Biden will soar to re-election and do so with a larger majority which will allow you to do even more — win more seats and create a semi-permanent majority.

It really is that simple and that hard.

For readers, there is still a boom coming, there will be a period where the market is tight (there is already, as I predicted). Get your vaccines, and if you need a job, get one while the getting is good. Consider trading up: See if  you can get a better paying job than the one you have right now.

There is no guarantee Biden and Congress won’t fuck this up and let this turn into price inflation higher than wage inflation, so make while the making is good.

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Who Deserves the Good Things in Life?

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On May 5, 2021

22 Comments

On Wall Street, they have sayings. One of them is that they “eat what they kill.”

They mean this in a good way — that they earn their money by making the right bets or by landing the big clients. That money is theirs: They went and got it.

Of course, one could see it in another way: All the businesses, Private Equity, for example, has destroyed, buy buying them, paying themselves, loading the businesses up with the debt, and then letting them go under.

They earned that money by killing. ToysRUs for example, which was making a profit until they loaded it up with debt to pay for their takeover and the bonuses they gave themselves.

Or, say, causing the 2008 financial crisis, which had a bill that has to be at least 100 trillion and involved millions of people losing their jobs, homes, livelihoods, and in many cases, lives.

Finance, that is to say, demonstrably does more damage to everyone else than it does good, but it pays very very well, especially now that they own every government, so central banks are willing to print trillions of dollars to socialize their losses, while letting them keep the money they stole.

They don’t even actually win bets: If, in 2008, they had taken their losses, they would have all gone out of business.

It’s just a scam; a matter of brute force. They can print money and borrow money at rates ordinary people will never see and government makes sure they never take real losses and that markets go up no matter what is happening to the economy.

Then, there are the studies that show that the more money someone has, the worse their behaviour — the more sociopathic and less generous. Poorer people give more to charity as a percentage of income or wealth than rich people, which makes sense, as most rich people are rich because they care about money more than anything else.

The simple fact is that people like nurses, teachers, janitors, garbage pick up, farm workers, and factory floor workers are who create most value. On the intellectual and creative side, the designers, engineers, scientists, and other creators are the ones who create value, not the suits. In fact, suits often reduce value: It isn’t engineers and designers who wanted planned obsolesence (19th century engineers fought it bitterly) or to remove the right to repair.

Most financiers don’t even finance creation any more; they finance destruction. Most managers are, at best, a wash, any random person would do about as well and maybe better (management literature shows this clearly, it isn’t in dispute). As for CEOs, higher compensation correlates to worse performance, and during the 40s through the 70s, before the massive rise in CEO compensation, had far more growth than our era. CEOs eat what they kill, is all. They control who gets paid what, so they pay themselves the most. It has nothing to do with merit, except if merit means “you deserve whatever you get.”

“You deserve whatever you get.”

That’s really what we mean by merit, today, isn’t it?

Not, “you contributed to society,” or even, often enough, “you contributed to your organization,” but “whatever you have the power to seize, at whatever cost to anyone else, is what you deserve.”

It’s not even about “whatever you can get legally.” Wall Street’s entire 2000s run was based on extensive fraud, they then, with the help of Obama, stole millions of houses using fradulently signed statements. Wall Street currently makes huge amounts of money by front-running investors, simply paying to get faster access and information.

So much for deserve, as we use it.

My personal take is that there are awards that should definitely be merit based. Medals, titles, and so on. A lot of positions should only go to those who have shown they “deserve” them, though our ideas of what that means are really warped when the entire media weeps about how Hillary Clinton was “the most qualified candidate in history,” when she had displayed both terrible judgment (Iraq, Libya, pushing Trump) and incompetence (losing two campaigns as front runner, bungling Hilary-care.)

But I am heterodox. I don’t like incentives. I don’t think people should get more for doing more, because I think incentives usually warp behaviour in horrible ways.

Instead, in a surplus society, we should just ensure everyone has good quality of what they need: housing, healthcare, food. Take the fear and greed away, and send them to work without the whip of hunger. In such a world, oddly, by not doing what we do now, you’d see some of what orthodox economics says should happen, happen. For example, picking up garbage would be highly paid, because it’s not fun (though it is useful).

Let money buy anything that doesn’t matter: A fancy vacation, a TV so high-definition it looks like reality, a set of five-million thread count sheets so smooth you barely feel them, or an animatronic bear that loves you, really.

Deserve, in a surplus society, is really about FEAR. People who spend their entire lives operating from fear do not create good societies.

No one needs or deserves to be a billionaire (and if anyone ever did, it’s someone like Jonas Salk, not Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.) Having such people costs far more than money, as Bill Gates has proven by restricting vaccines.

Forget deserve. Give everyone a good life, and see what world people who aren’t scared create.

We’ve tried everything else. Maybe it’s time to try and run a society not based on fear.

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The Most Radical Statement I’ve Ever Read

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On May 4, 2021

38 Comments

From Dr. Robert Tabash, in Bethlehem:

The poorest deserve the best.

I stared, stunned at this for a while, because it’s absolutely 180 degrees from how we do things. To do this would be a complete repudiation of our entire society, and every society of which I am aware.

I stumbled across it in the replies to this tweet, on the same general theme.

It’s hard to say much about this, because it’s almost impossible to imagine a world in which we do this.

Of course, this comes from Christians, and it’s why I have contempt for most modern Christians, especially evangelicals.

Christ was a radical. Unbelievably radical. “As you have done to these, the least of mine…” and telling the rich to sell all their possessions and give them to the poor. Real Christianity, the path of Jesus, not all the crap accreted about Christianity, is perhaps the most radical, and hardest, in the world.

This is why most “Christians” don’t follow Jesus’s clear instructions: Doing so is hard. That’s fine, I don’t either. But I also don’t call myself a Christian.

But put the Christianity aside, if you can, and marvel just in the idea of a world completely topsy turvy to the one in which we live, where those who are poorest; those who are weakest, get the best, because they are the ones who need it most, and we care for each other.

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Why Progress Always Required Space Travel

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On April 28, 2021

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When  I was a teenager I read The Club of Rome’s “Limits To Growth.” The Club ran consumption, pollution and population numbers thru some simple models to see what would happen. The model misses climate change, so we’re worse off than they expect (much worse off) and some other factors, but the stuff it models has been coming in approximately as expected.

The standard model of progress, often assailed by thinkers like John Michael Greer, assumes that there aren’t significant limits to growth that we can’t substitute out of. Run out of oil? Switch to solar? Run out lithium, figure out another way to make batteries? Run out of water, mass-desalinization? Run out of soil, make soil or grow plankton in water. Run out of fish? Fish farms.

Etc…

But the people who created the model, who championed it, aren’t as optimistic and stupid as their opponents often indicate: the standard future model of people who believe in progress requires space exploitation precisely because we can’t assume we can always find a substitute on Earth for what we lack.

If you want, in other words, to keep GROWTH you must exploit space. Send out the space miners! Harvest solar above the atmosphere. Explore, exploit, grow!

You don’t necessarily have to colonize space in any meaningful way to do this, though the earlier imagineers thought we would: this can be done by robots and telepresence mostly, with a very few actual humans in space.

Note that this side-cuts most of the standard complaints about space colonization: other planets nearby all suck, and are worse for life than Earth (even shitty places on Earth like Antarctica) and space itself is full of deadly radiation and other problems we don’t know  how to fully mitigate.

Doesn’t matter if you’re just sending out robots to get stuff (lithium, say) and bring it back.

BUT none of this matters in a larger sense because the real problem isn’t running out of lithium or copper or helium or any other simple substance like that.

It’s destroying the biosphere, climate and ecosphere

Earth’s true wealth is an intricate web of life, from creatures simpler than bacteria all the way up to blue whales, including plants and fungi and insects and a wild variety of creatures we don’t understand or haven’t even discovered.

That, along with Earth’s climate, is what you can only get on Earth, at least within the solar system. That’s what we’re destroying.

So… space exploitation? Why not. It may help deal with some bottlenecks. But it still won’t let us continue GROWTH and the standard progress model, because the real limit to growth is simply that if we go past the Earth’s carrying capacity — which I will say, despite some disagreeing with me — we unequivocally have, we then start destroying that carrying capacity and all the things we must have that only Earth supplies.

Earth is the Jewel, the most important place in the universe for humans, right now. We cannot do without it and what is important about it is not copper or lithium, it is precisely climate and LIFE (ecosystems). Our destruction of those two things is what makes the standard model of progress impossible.

We’ve got a limited resource, created by processes of evolution which take millions of years to work. We are so ignorant we cannot even create a self-sustaining biosphere; we cannot fix what we are breaking.

Anyone and any system destroying the Earth’s climate and ecosphere is thus, then, doing the greatest wrong possible for the future of humanity, and of much life on Earth. Our mass genocide of other species is a slow form of strangling ourselves.

Space can help, but it won’t get us around the real issues. Only true respect for the genuine non-renewable resources we MUST have and which exist only on Earth can create a positive future for humanity and for all the species we have held hostage and not yet murdered, who are unfortunate enough to be trapped on Earth with us.

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The Ugly Reality of America’s Powerful

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On April 22, 2021

23 Comments

It’s been a while since January 6th, and on economic domestic affairs, Biden’s turned out somewhat better than I expected, but nothing’s really changed in terms of his legitimacy:

78 percent of Republicans think Biden stole the US election.

That is a broken country, folks. Fourty-five percent think the January 6th occupation was justified, which seems oddly low; I’d certainly think it was justified — if I also believed the election was stolen. In fact, I’d think it was mild, and that far more than that was justified. In a democracy, stolen elections can’t be tolerated, which is why Gore was wrong to stand down in the face of Bush’s theft in 2000.

What the US has, is a broken media system: There are two sets of facts circulating, and often more, on many issues, and people live in completely different worlds. Most Democrats don’t have any Republican friends, and vice-versa.

The weird bit is that false narratives are driven by facts with ur-truth. “Q” is wrong about the specifics, but not wrong that many American elites are pedophiles. Part of the Q myth is that rich people use a drug made from the pituitary gland of tortured children: That’s not true, but some elites do use the blood of young people (in their twenties) to help rejuvenate themselves.

Ironically, there was a great deal of election fixing, mostly by Republicans. It’s like the old joke from the Iraq war era: “We know they have WMD, we have the receipts!” Biden won despite vast Republican efforts to suppress the vote, but Democrats also suppressed the third-party vote, keeping Green candidates off the ballot wherever they could in a sickening anti-democratic display, and did a great deal during the primary that was anti-democratic against Sanders. It’s not that Democrats don’t believe in suppressing votes; they don’t believe in suppressing their votes, and in general elections, the more people vote, the more Democrats win, unless they’re pesky third-party voters.

The UR-Stories told, then, are true. US elites are evil, anti-democratic, and many are at least pedophile-adjacent (see all the pictures of famous politicians and other rich people with Jeffrey Epstein, including Clinton and Bill Gates.)

Even leaving aside the blood bit, the rich do live off the health of young people: The younger the generation, the poorer they are compared to previous generations. The US economy destroys the health of poor people for the benefit of rich people. Ordinary people, by the time they’re sixty tend to look old; rich people tend to still look young, and keep charging around well into their seventies due to avoiding hard physical labor, eating very expensive food (which is, overall, better for them) and using far superior health care, which they can afford, and the poor and middle class can’t.

The US is an oligarchy where the rich and powerful live longer and are healthier and richer because they oppress everyone else. That’s a fact. The mechanisms of how they do so are boring: Obama immunizing all the bankers and helping them steal people’s homes. Trump’s gigantic tax cut for the rich. The IRS hardly auditing rich people. Laws that make it easy to hide money offshore. Private islands where unspeakable lusts are indulged, and entirely legal use of young people’s blood to feel younger.

Most of this is done out in the open. If you were in the right circles, “everyone knew” about Epstein, but he was protected by the intelligence agencies, presumably because pictures of important people with underage girls are very, very valuable. The laws are passed in the Senate; the Treasury and the Department of Justice bail out and immunize the rich and everyone who belongs to the club is taken care of unless they steal from the club (Madoff) or egregiously embarrass the club by constantly talking up their evil like Martin Shkreli, the so-called “Pharma Bro.” Plenty of other pharma execs have jacked up prices and killed people, including for epi-pens and insulin, but those execs didn’t scream about it to the rooftops.

So conspiracy theories like “Q” are garbage, but they work because the ur-truth is that US and Western elites are, in fact, evil and engaged in hurting and killing ordinary people. It’s just that most of how they do it, Epstein aside, is boring and at scale.

So the US is broken. Republicans think the election was stolen. Back in 2000, an election was actually stolen, and voter suppression and election fixing is routine. Rich people do kill and hurt you for money, and a lot of rich people do seem to like under-aged girls, but certainly don’t need to go to some pizza joint to indulge.

There’s no need for “Q” or most other conspiracy theories (though surely, there are conspiracies). Most of the evil is done in the cold light of day.

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Why Do We Do That?

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On April 19, 2021

62 Comments

So today I stopped by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) and picked up a small bottle of sake.

The teller seemed unhappy, so we chatted for a bit. I told him I’d worked at the LCBO for a couple months about 25 years ago (for the Christmas season), and he opened up a bit.

“Yes, it was a better job then. It was also a better job eight years ago, or three years ago. It just gets a bit worse every year, it seems. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still better than most jobs: we have a pension, and not a lot of jobs offer one any more, but…”

The long and short of it is that every year management tries to take away a little bit of what makes working for the LCBO a pretty good job. It’s still pretty good, but if this doesn’t reverse, one day it won’t be.

This has been going on for decades; a couple generations at least, arguably three to four generations. In the US, working class male wages peaked in real terms in 1968, the year I was born, and I have white hair.

We just keep making life worse for a huge chunk of our population; this is true in Canada, in the US, and in most of Europe.

Our rich are the richest rich in his -— ah, forget it. You’ve heard me say it many times.

And I can tell you the “reasons,” but at the heart of it, I don’t fucking get it. How rich do these assholes need to be? How many private jets and vacation homes and $50k/day hotel room stays do they need? Do they really think their pleasure is worth so much more than billions of people’s suffering? Because much of what they do hits the developing world hard.

Why are they such scum? So evil?

Why do we run a society that is just making things worse for so many people (don’t waste my time with the “extreme poverty numbers,” they’re bullshit)? Why do we have more homes than homeless; waste a third of our food and have hungry people? Why are we on track to kill about half of all known life forms on Earth?

Why are we so stupid, evil, and selfish as a species? Why is our leadership made of so many people who could only, truly, improve the world by taking a long jump of a short pier?

I mean, Bill Gates fought hard to keep vaccines under patent. He’s never been a good actor, of course, but, here, he is protecting his interests by hurting people in the middle of a global pandemic, despite having more money than he could possibly need if he lived a million lifespans.

We have a pair of huge problems as humans:

  1. We’re badly led.
  2. Enough of us support terrible leadership for it to just keep happening.

Either we fix those problems, or Earth is going to continue to be Hell for much of the human race and worse than hell for non-human life.

But, emotionally, I still just don’t get these people. The Clintons’, Bushses, Obamas’, Bidens’, Bezos’, Waltons and so on. They just hurt people, hurt people, and hurt people, over and over again. There’s something deeply wrong with them, and with us as a species that these types of people wind up leading us over and over and over again.

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Capitalism and Good Post-capitalism

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On April 19, 2021

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Let us revisit the definition of capitalism.

Capitalism, everywhere, is defined by the removal of capital from most ordinary people and the concentration of capital in the hands of a few.

Capital, in this definition, is not money. It is the tools required to feed, house, and cloth oneself.

Medieval serfs, in most areas, had access to capital. They had the right to land to grow food, to take firewood, and so on. They built their own houses, spun their own clothes.

Depending on the time and place, they were healthy and relatively long-lived.

As I have pointed out before, early industrial workers, as a class, were worse off than the serfs and peasants they replaced. They worked longer, ate worse, died younger.

Capitalism is accompanied by enclosure virtually everywhere. The old rights are taken away and the peasants are forced off the land.

“Forced” is the operative word: In both England and China, the land to which they had rights — for centuries — was taken from them. If they won’t go peacefully, armed force is used to remove them. There are many, many stories of peasants in China resisting the government trying to take their land so they can hand it over to other owners.

Many people get “better” ownership out of the process of moving to capitalism. They get a better bundle of rights in terms of “property.” But most people lose their rights to productive capital.

You see this in virtually every developing country. Peasants are forced off the land, whether by law, crashing crop prices caused by unfettered “free” trade (which isn’t “free,” even slightly; Europe and the US massively subsidize agriculture), or by force. They flee to the cities, forming vast rings of slums. They are worse off than when they were peasants, in most cases, but there are no other options.

In most cases, this is done so that their country can concentrate on a few cash crops, plantation style, with a few owners making all the money.

Enclosure.

A citizen in a capitalist economy is distinguished by having no independent ability to feed, clothe, or house themselves. They must sell their labor on “the market” or live miserably and likely even die. (People who live on the street long-term don’t, as a rule, live long term.)

The term “wage-slave” is old, used in the 19th century to talk about what was happening then.

A person who must sell their labor to another, then do their master’s bidding, is not free. Their entire working day is spent doing what someone else tells them to do. Only a very few people, under any capitalist system, have anything close to freedom. The majority of people are slaves in their daily life, free only to sell their labor.

Because most people are undistinguishable, they take the rates offered by the market, and those rates are determined primarily by how tight the labor market is, a factor that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with any one individual worker.

Most workers in the world have miserable lives. Those reading this may have “good jobs.” In China, they make batteries by hand because it is cheaper than using machines. Other Chinese are now hand-pollinating crops.

That’s freedom for you.

People whose lives are lived doing what other people tell them are not only not free, but because their daily life is about obeying orders, they are not used to freedom and are conditioned to expect orders.

Being a wage-slave, taking orders is ordinary to them. It’s what they expect. They don’t know what freedom is because they have never experienced it (coming from a school system which is designed to turn people into obedient drones).

Real freedom is being your own master. It’s been a long time since that described most of the world’s population.

But capitalism, meaning wage slavery, contrary to the propaganda, has not been an unambiguous move towards freedom.

In the 19th century in North America, for example, if land was unused, you could simply go work it and after a few years it was yours.

You can’t do that now.

Capitalism is about taking the ability of the many to provide for themselves and putting it into the hands of a few. The argument is that this transfer allows for the creation of more goods and services than would be possible otherwise.

But we don’t need more — let alone the vast amount of surplus we are creating. We waste a third of the food we produce. We deliberately build “planned obsolesence” into the manufacture of goods. We are vastly overproducing past our needs, and because we distribute goods through corrupt market mechanisms, many people still don’t have enough to get by, let alone enough for a good life. We could easily provide for them if what we produced were more evenly distributed and not made to break down so we can make more.

Imagine a world with no planned obsolesence, in which everyone has a small garden (indoors gardens are easy to do now, and one pilot study found 10X yields from a basement garden with LED lights), everyone has basic maker tools, and every community has a few facilities capable of creating large appliances.

We can print buildings on 3D printers now (they could have been made well, prefab, long ago).

Freedom is the ability to make your own choices, daily, about what you do with your time and your abilities, without losing everything. It is the ability to support yourself.

Feudalism was no joy. But capitalism removed even more economic freedom than feudalism did. You don’t have to believe me, believe the people who lived at the time, who violently resisted the changes. They weren’t idiots, they weren’t fools; they knew their lives were being changed for the worse. That it worked out for some of their descendents means little: A century of technological improvement accounts for much of that.

Post-capitalism, if it is any good, will restore the ability to grow and make what they need to the people. Not like feudalism, but a craft-based, hunter-gatherer society. Work 20 hours a week to meet the essentials, spend the rest of the time as you wish and choose how and when to work those 20 hours.

More on this later.

Originally from April 17, 2016. Back to the top.

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Making the Rich and Powerful Work for Everyone

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On April 12, 2021

35 Comments

The philosopher John Rawls suggested that the only ethical society is one which we design before we know what position we will hold in it. If you don’t know whether you’ll be born the child of janitor or a billionaire, black or white, you may view social justice differently than when you know that your parents both went to Harvard or Oxford.

Rawls’s point is just in the sense that though none of us choose our parents, very few of us are able to see the world except through our own eyes. What I am going to suggest is something different: A society works best if it treats people the same, no matter what position they hold. This is hardly a new position. The idea that everyone should be treated equally is ancient and many a war has been fought over it. But despite a fair bit of progress, we don’t really understand what equality means, how it works, and why it works.

Let’s have an example. Based on international testing, at the time of this writing, the Finnish education system is arguably the best in the world. Its students do better than those of any other nation.

What is interesting about the Finnish school system, though, is this: When they decided to change how it worked, they did not set out to try and make it the best in the world. Instead their goal was to make it so that everyone was treated the same. Their goal was not excellence, their goal was equality. Somehow, along the way, and very much to their surprise, it also became arguably the best school system in the world.

There are a number of reasons for this, the main one being a well-established fact: People who are treated as lesser don’t perform as well and are less healthy–even after you take into account other factors.

But another reason is that if you are rich or powerful, you can’t buy your child a better education. Testing results between schools are not made public and the very few private schools are not allowed to use selective admissions. In a system where your child will be treated the same as every other child, you must make sure that every child receives an excellent education, otherwise your child may not receive one.

Let’s engage in another thought experiment. In the United States, airport security is extremely intrusive. Recently, new procedures for physical examinations were put in place which include touching the genitals (I’ve personally experienced it and it definitely included genital contact, albeit with my clothing on.) Most security experts consider this to be security theatre, along with such things as taking your shoes off and the new 3D scanners. They believe that the two most important improvements in airline security were locked cockpit doors and passengers knowing that if they remain passive and allow hijacking, they could all wind up dead.

Coincidentally, the 2000s have seen an explosion in the use of private jets. The most powerful, rich, and important people no longer fly on the same airplanes as the hoi polloi and, as a result, they do not go through the same security screenings.

Do you think that if the most important people in the US had to endure the same security as ordinary Americans that it would be as intrusive as it is? How many billionaires would have to be groped before something was done?

While we’re on the subject of private jets, consider the following: A private jet still has to use a runway. If a private jet is using the same public airport you are, it takes up a take-off or landing slot. Next time you’re waiting for a take-off slot, or wondering why your flight is delayed, think on that. Less than ten people on a private jet are holding up over a hundred people on a passenger jet.

No part of society will continue to work properly if the powerful and rich have no interest in its doing so. There are three parts to this:

  1. If there is a public system, there cannot also be a private system which can be used to opt out of the public system.
  2. If there are limited resources, whether those are airplane flight slots at airports or medical care, then no one can be allowed to use either wealth or power to jump the queue, nor must they be allowed to use more resources than those without power or money.
  3. Any part of the economy where there is a monopoly or an oligopoly must either be publicly run or must be heavily regulated for quality, level of profits, and reinvestment.

(Ian-a fundamental article, originally published March 31st, 2015. As it will be unfamiliar to most current readers, re-upped.)

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