♣ Today the US economy runs on a profligate system of fiscal libertinism, a system of profiteering without reserve, responsibility, regulation or consideration for the sad lot of the average American citizen, a system favoring wealth and endorsing a winner-take-all mentality. Wall Streeters and big money in general have us all back on the same cyclical pre-Roosevelt juggernaut, the runaway roller coaster that’s made regular stops at economic disaster throughout history and which in fact induced the infamous crash of 1929.

Oddly enough, knowing this, our government has been lifting prudent regulation of Wall Street and business at large increasingly since the Reagan years, regulation duly imposed both during and after the Great Depression. Today it’s all but totally non-existent. More, the US government does precious little nowadays to curb the nasty trend toward business excess, power mongering and hindrance, even exclusion of lesser players, although each infraction has served in some measure to undermine American freedom while undoing our democratic process. Likewise, our government does precious little in curbing today what’s tantamount to greed, unbridled greed that courts destruction, rampant greed that history tells us guarantees destruction. “All aboard!” seems to shout a frenzied clique of business and government people met at the head of the wild carnival ride, a snide grin curling up their sickly blue and frothy lips “Next stop: Major depression.”

It’s like the Supreme Court ruled the most crucial human right in the US Constitution the right of man to make money, then decreed it take full precedence over all other rights and human effort, forget that the very right emerged ambiguously under the heading of free trade and the even more ambiguous themes of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Certainly such vague ambiguity renders the seemingly favorite human right, the right to make money or more aptly, big business’s right to make money, liable to clash in both interpretation and practice with the right of the less endowed to make money or otherwise gain themselves some feint semblance of life, liberty, yes or some ghostly form of that most profoundly ambiguous of ambiguities, the pursuit of happiness.

Meanwhile, given official license in recent years,  carte blanche to do whatever it pleases, big business continues to play fast and loose with the economic system and the devil take the hindmost, the hindmost being, as usual, a disinherited mass including several indiscreet rich and a huge preponderance of average as well as sub-average wage-earners doomed to plunge headlong into poverty and hopelessness. Meanwhile, given official license, carte blanche to do whatever it pleases, big business continues to play fast and loose with that which ought to be everyone’s economy but will only become everyone’s economy when final disaster strikes, when the rich take cover behind their wealth and the common man is forced to pick up the pieces.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com