The key to fixing our broken economy: it's not what you think

David Atkins says The key to fixing our broken economy: it's not what you think. It's an interesting piece, here's just a bit of it.

"Globalization created a surplus of labor. Even middle-school students understand the supply and demand factors at work: in a global economy with billions of people desperate for work, unskilled and semi-skilled labor costs will be driven to the lowest common denominator. Some of the cost savings on labor will go toward creating cheaper goods with ever advancing technology, but a great deal of it will also go toward capital gains and shareholder returns.

But the simplistic mechanistic effects don't tell the entire story. As the capital of multinational corporations wins the long-term battle over national labor pools, corporations shed any patriotic loyalty they might have had to the nation states that spawned them. A new class of stateless global elites is created. Most of the productive energy of the brightest and most creative individuals increasingly diverts to the financial industry where the bulk of the money is actually to be made. The increased power of capital corrodes the responsiveness of governments to their people."

"Furthermore, in a global economy multinational corporations will simply continue to do what they already do today: play each nation off one another in a bid to make policy more favorable to themselves, in exchange for desperately needed "investment." This will occur with or without tariffs, as the jet setting elite don't particularly care which country they call home, or where they happen to park their stolen billions.

The only way out of this mess is to make governments and workers more powerful than multinational corporations. At this point in history corporations have the edge on nation-states. Nations dance to the tune of corporations as companies manufacture products in a global supply chain, using globalized energy resources. Governments attempt to enrich companies owned by shareholders in each nation-state, even as the workers in each nation-state are themselves left in the lurch. Wars are fought to ensure access to global energy supplies on behalf of international corporations."