[If anybody knows how to bring my recent essay and this post to the attention of the President-Elect, I (and possibly the world) would be tremendously grateful. I don’t “tweet” and hope I never have to, and besides these matters aren’t such as can be expressed in that limited medium.]
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When I posted that rant the other day about public enterprise, I wanted to stop thinking about the political situation here in the US, but all the same I kept on thinking that this is the only way we’re ever going to fix our terminally infected system.
Otherwise, we’ll remain colonies of corporations until they’ve drained our personal lifeblood and absconded with all our national treasures, our common wealth. Next, and this abomination is already in progress, they’ll try to do the same to the whole world.
Playing the cards they were dealt by the obsolete tradition of private enterprise and the short-sightedness of our Founding Fathers about economic psychodynamics, corporations have been running the Roman gambit to control and exploit their captive public: bread and circus.
Corporate agri-business has been keeping the American populace too well fed (to judge by our obesity epidemic), and corporate media entertain us within an inch of our lives. We are inundated and consumed by movies, politics, news, sports, sensationalism, nonsense, and most obnoxiously, the celebrity syndrome, video games, and social networking.
As a result, our people are stunned, hypnotized, and incapable of thinking for themselves or questioning our nation’s critically ill condition. This sickness requires intensive treatment, even radical surgery, to set new rules of play. In this life-and-death game of providing public benefit, the public good must always trump private interest, or it’s all over.
I haven’t been a supporter of President-Elect Trump for more reasons than I can count, but I have to acknowledge his election, however it was accomplished, and rightfully expect real results on his promises to “fix the system.” He hasn’t explained what he hopes to do about it, but I maintain that this public enterprise ideology is his and our country’s best and perhaps only bet. Besides, it’s also a sure way to renew our country’s greatness.
My uncommon sense says, counter-intuitively, that evolving this private enterprise economy into a dependable, productive system of public life-support will probably take an autocratically inclined oligarch who intimately understands it, is not beholden to any of its special interests, and has the courage and chutzpah to do what’s absolutely necessary for the public good. Run-of-the-mill politicians wouldn’t even try.
Call me Machiavelli, but any presidential prince who would rein in the corporate nobility and their colluding politicians will have to use all and any strategies and tools available, within humanitarian and ethical limits, of course. The American Evolution of our economy to public benevolence will be, without exaggeration, the biggest social advance in human history.
This new ideology of public enterprise will also serve well for any government with the best interests of its people at heart, be it a democracy, autocracy, theocracy, or whatever. Modestly, I foresee our American Evolution inspiring the “benevolution” of economies around the world and bringing unprecedented global prosperity. And seriously, I’d call the uncommon person who creates such a brave new world order a super-hero.
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Richard Balthazar 