Presidential Candidates

Listening to the Democratic Presidential candidates engaged in friendly debate on Public Radio, they blamed everything from global warming to loss of jobs overseas to Wall Street and Corporate America.

Now I’m just a country boy, grown old and moved north, but that assertion seems as destructively naïve as the Republicans support of cartels and monopolies with the attitude that what’s good for big business is good for the economy.

Corporations are uniquely Western and are the sole driving force for financing good ideas, good products, productivity and our quality of life. Even if we were an agrarian economy and we all lived on farms, the idea that individual investors can finance the seed-money, the grub-stake, as it were, would be a decided advantage over bank financing and the risk of foreclosure. Wall Street is merely the exchange giving everybody access to the opportunities and companies access to financing through that shared ownership.

The problem, it seems to me, rests with antiquated old and over bloated corporations and their bean counters who have found ways to engineer scarcity, to maintain a quasi monopoly, schmooze with legislators and other clearly illegal strategies, while avoiding prosecution in a million well learned evasions. Anti-trust laws are not enforced or sometimes directed for political ends. Big old post mature companies thus illegally squelch innovation, competition and productivity.

If anti-trust laws were enforced, these stiffeling old companies would be replaced by younger, smaller, smarter, growth and innovation driven enterprise. New technology would replace old irrelevant and sanctioned monopolies. Small business generates by far the greater productivity.

We have given big business what it wants and that has resulted in Multi Nationals, a Trade Deficit, dependence on foreign oil, and lost technology jobs, but the problem is not corporations or the equities market that funds innovation; it is the government’s own politics of greed in both political parties. Be careful guys where you point the finger.

The oil industry, pharmacy, health insurance, media, old telephone companies and now corporate medicine are out of control monopolies and cartels that illegally dictate their own terms. A justice department that is politically independent, and sensitive to the economic damage accrued, might do its job and advance the human good.

Government might do more good yet in promoting the infrastructures that speed innovation, production and humanity --- like science, education, health, and the greatest driving force for productivity ever, the Internet – with free or very cheap band width and free information. Rethink the intellectual property and airways as property laws.

Free information in ever expanding and limitless channels will drive robotics and artificial intelligence to unimaginable lengths. Progressive, yes, conservative, yes, political, no: wake up to the real world or we will be left in the dust. Information and technology is our competitive edge, not super power.

Critical research includes: metallurgy, high temperature super conducting motors, genetics, batteries, lithium, hydrogen and helium fusion research, solar cells and quantum or particle physics. We were once petroleum independent. We need to be energy independent now! -- with a quantum leap in efficiency and no carbon footprint. Subsidized at first, our source must be distributed, diverse, competitive and lead to very cheap or even free energy for everyone.

“Where there is confusion, there is money to be made.” The journey, if there is vision enough in our candidates, will provide enormous job opportunities along the way and an endless growth of new innovative enterprise. We must not feel too sorry for the loss and demise of the old Industrial Age institution practicing a form of valorized monopoly that would make Daddy Warbucks blush.