Debate.

Editor,

All you have to do to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of human civilization is dream up a self-serving, crazy "theory" -- whether it be denying global warming, rejecting evolution, redefining conception, or politicizing economics -- and then you have a "debate."

So we continue to "debate" whether government hiring stimulates economic activity -- because the people hired will spend their pay on goods and services -- or if the enormous increase in net worth cheap money has bestowed on the top of the wealth distribution somehow "trickles down" to unemployed people that Congress refuses to put to work.

Meanwhile, the disparity in pay between those at the top and the bottom of the "compensation" distribution is a subject for another day.

If you look at the history of American labor, it begins with slavery, traverses Dickensian exploitation from mines to sweatshops to lettuce fields, is ameliorated briefly by New Deal legislation and agricultural organizers like Cesar Chavez, then veers back into the dark ages of ideally-zero wages with the ascent of Ronald Reagan, global free market fundamentalism and ruthless Republicanism.

What is actually in play at this moment in history -- and the Internet plays no small role in resolving this, which is why net neutrality is so crucial to economic democracy not only in the USA but across the globe -- is the American capitalist model, which rejects the cooperative working relationship between labor and capital seen during the New Deal era and in the Northern European social democracies.

Re: "What Janet Yellen Said, and Didn’t Say, About Inequality" (10/18/2014)