On Nov 7, 2012, at 5:45 PM, [email protected] wrote: > I am afraid of the extreme democrats also. They want to take us towards > socialism.
I think that this is untrue. Most of the leading Democratic thinkers, such as Joseph Stiglitz, wants more Keynesian economy and Keynesian economic policy is mostly polar opposite to that of Socialism, i.e. planned economy. I would guess that the US economic policy from 1980's onwards has mostly increased the influence of Goldman Sachs and other big players over the people and economy. Therefore it is quite justified to say there has been a shift towards privately controlled planned economy. E.g. oil price has fluctuated chaotically during the last decade, because it is not controlled by the law of supply and demand, but mostly speculative and algorithmic high frequency trading. This kind of HF-trading is destructive to the economy, because it does allow value extraction from the economy. And usually the more unbalance there is in the economy, the more there are opportunities for value extraction ― and the middle class is always the one who is paying the bill! However the idea of Keynesian economy is to increase relative purchasing power of the people. This way there is created more demand to the economy that will guide economy towards more productivity, more jobs and higher wages. If common people has more wealth than he needs for basic needs, there will be immense potential e.g. for crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is more effective in weeding out the most successful start-up companies. Traditional venture capitalistic approach is immensely inefficient and there are huge amounts of resources wasted for unfruitful start-up companies. There is far more wisdom in the crowd, especially in the era of social media, than what venture capitalists has to offer, therefore the mis-investment rate is inherently lower in crowdfunding than with venture capitalistic approach. This crowdfunding is just one example why it is good for the economy that most of the wealth is in hands of the Keynesian middle class rather than in the hands of Goldman Sachs and mittromnies. As Mitt Romney created his wealth by extracting value from the middle class misery, and he sees nothing wrong in that, I would say that this is the most powerful and fact based argument to support Obama over Romney. ―Jouni
