John Creighto said:
Well, first we have to decide what fundamental change is. In my opinion fundamental change happens all the time in law, politics, economics, technology and through social movements. Another name we might give to such events is "black swan's".
Then perhaps it's just a terminology issue. A "fundamental" principle is a basic, founding principle. By definition, these are rare and big.
Well, what do you consider dynamiting the system? Did the New-Deal dynamite the system of Laissez-faire capitalism in favor of a system of state/corporate capitalism? If we went back to small government and system that gave large corporations less of an advantage would this be dynamiting the system, gradual change or something in-between?
The new deal was pretty big, yeah -- and it was 80 years ago. That's not "all the time".
But I'm not sure what you mean by "state/corporate capitalism" or the idea that it gave large corporations an advantage. The New Deal was almost exclusively about expansion of government power/responsibility.
All efforts to try to stabilize a system of market imbalances in the end lead to greater instabilities in the long run. The longer we try to keep the market from self correcting the greater the crash and the greater the likely hood of a knee jerk reaction that will take us in the wrong direction.
That's not true. We've done a pretty good job preventing another 1929 for the past 80 years.
If it is okay to inject a little bit of history in this discussion let me state this again:
"
What economists call over-production is but a production that is above the purchasing power of the worker, who is reduced to poverty by capital and State. Now, this sort of over-production remains fatally characteristic of the present capitalist production, because workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.
http://www.panarchy.org/kropotkin/1896.eng.html
This was written in 1898 by Piotr Kropotkin
Just because it was said 110 years ago, doesn't make it right or precient. Most of the poor in the US own air conditioners, cars, TVs, dish washers, etc. They most certainly
can buy the products being produced.
If you read the book, "The Dollar Crisis" it essentially said that the only progress Clinton made on the debt was due to capital gains taxes".
Yes, that's what I said. It means that rather than cutting an advancing upper class off at the knee, if we let them advance, they'll bail out everyone else.
In other word the mild progress that Clinton made on the debt was simply a result of a bubble fueled by cheap money which essentially leads to a growth in debt.
I'll grant that there was cheap money, but underlying the expansion at the time was a very real new industrial revolution. It was real advancement. Yes, it became overvalued in the end, but it did have significant real value.
I'll address this last paragraph in another thread but I don't believe that the buying power of the bottom have of the income distribution has remained constant.
It hasn't: It has
increased over a long term (that is: inflation adjusted incomes), measuring peak-to-peak across cycles. I suppose you'll argue that our measure of inflation is flawed and inflation is happening faster, but I think that's wrong too: the fact that the standard of living of the poor is continuing to advance is evience that our measure of inflation and definition of poverty are moving uphill.
I don't envy the task of the CPS: they are tasked with calculating inflation by combining some products that are inflationary with others that are deflationary. And it's the needs (food, fuel) that are inflationary and the luxuries (TV, computers) that are deflationary. What this means is that there is a level - somewhere below what we now call the "poverty line" - below which purchasing power is decreasing. For just about everyone else, buying power is increasing.