[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

--- "This isn't capitalism: it's a crony oligarchy pretending to be 'capitalist' just as it increasingly pretends to be a 'democracy' with stolen elections and medical 'emergency' dictatorship, as we can see in Canada, covered with legal euphemisms."

Thank you for the clear persepctive. "Pretending to be capitalism...."

An article from 2004: "Perpetual Debt: From the British Empire to the American Hegemon" https://mises.org/library/perpetual-debt-british-empire-american-hegemon

[pierrem15]

There are two types of government debt.

The firts type is when the government borrows lots of money to buy lots of goods or services from the real economy.

This is what Hamilton saw as a bookkeeper for a British trading company as a young man. Britain borrowed a fortune for the Seven Years War, which went for ships, guns, and military service. That expanded the British economy dramatically.

The same thing happened here during WWII as American businesses and banks were recapitalized after the Depression.

But at the end of the Sixties, something changed here.

First off, military procurement spent oodles of money on production that had nothing to do with the civilian economy, although there were important technical developments that helped. For example, IC's from military and space contracts obviously had a huge impact, but was it a rational expenditure or a distortion in terms of the cost?

Second, by going off the gold standard the US was opened to unlimited trade deficits since excess imports no longer required transfer of gold and official devaluation of the currency while dollar reserve status kept the US dollar artificially high. Going off gold also effectively transferred control of the currency un-Constitutionally to the Federal Reserve via interest rates. "Monetary Policy" as an economic theory only makes sense in a fiat currency economy.

Third, deregulation of banking combined with unlimited imports set off a speculative frenzy by encouraging asset bubbles and beggar the country labor arbitrage across national boundaries. Capital that was once needed to invest in equipment and expensive skilled labor was freed to just import products to sell at low cost and then purchase more assets. This made the asset holding top part of the economy richer and richer by depressing wages and wage growth. Every loosening of monetary policy also meant that US taxpayers essentially financed the growth of East Asia through enormous trade deficits.

Only players at the top can play in this economy and win, the game is rigged against everyone else.