The problem is that amassing a huge wad of cash and then doling it out through a centralized foundation is structurally biased toward exacerbating corporatism, not reducing it.

depends on a set of preconditions. The equations work out only if you’ve got full employment in both nations. It’s not more economically efficient to do international trade if it ends up decreasing employment in the more efficiently operating industrial economy. Furthermore, Ricardo himself argued that his theory works only if the trade between the

Congressional Research Service report found that for every two jobs created by a Wal-Mart store, the local community ended up losing three. Furthermore, the jobs created were at lower wages (an average of under $250 a week), fewer hours, and reduced benefits. A majority of Wal-Mart employees with children live below the poverty line, qualifying for

Populists such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs, and others speaking out on behalf of working stiffs, stoke more rage and discontent than thoughtful engagement.

re-create some value ourselves. Instead of fixing the problem, and reclaiming our ability to generate wealth directly with one another, we seek to prop up institutions whose very purpose remains to usurp this ability from us. We try to repair our economy by bolstering the same institutions that sapped it. In the very best years, corporatism worked

Today, thanks to TV, print, billboards, and Internet banners, the average person sees over three thousand advertising messages a day. And deep down, all those ads are saying the same thing.

Going into debt, distancing ourselves from our neighbors, and striving for conformity became equated with freedom.

Its purpose, from the beginning, was to suppress lateral interactions between people or small companies and instead redirect any and all value they created to a select group of investors.

From the perspective of the Communist Manifesto coauthor Friedrich Engels, however, this indebtedness was just the yoke that capitalists needed to keep labor in line. Home ownership, and the mortgage it required, would be “chaining the worker by his property to the factory in which he works.”