Eva Durant wrote,
>So, you are saying that pensionfunds
>and some sort of mass-shareholder scheems
>would take us sort of smoothly out of capitalism?
>But they, too rely on profits and growing profits,
>and to stock market gambling, thus
>tendecy to crash...
>Sorry to have lead you away from shorter
>hours.
Eva,
You seem to think I was presenting the examples of hedge funds and pension
funds as positive features. They are not. They are essentially parasitic and
dysfunctional.
What I am saying is that financial schemes perform only one economic
function -- the redistribution of income from producers of wealth to
non-producers -- and they don't perform that function particularly well. In
fact, they now perform it dysfunctionally -- they intensify, rather than
moderate, income and wealth inequalities. At some point in the past, the
redistributive role of pension funds may well have been positive, but that
positive role has been overwhelmed by the sheer speculative inertia of so
much brain-dead institutional money.
Profits for these activities are not economically vital for the maintenance
of capitalism. They do perform an ideological function for capitalism in
convincing a large number of people that they are getting "something for
nothing" every time they win a buck-fifty on a two dollar lottery ticket.
But at this point, even that ideological function is beginning to cost the
system more than the benefits it offers. It is the habit of systems to
continue to dysfunction long after their dysfunctionality becomes obvious to
any honest observer.
So, what I am saying is the opposite of what you think I am saying. Far from
"taking us smoothly out of capitalism" mass shareholder schemes are the
engines of idle speculative activity. Choking-off the profitibility of such
schemes would be a blessing, not only to ordinary working people but to
capitalism itself.
regards,
Tom Walker
