Why is it that the people who complain the loudest about big government are the first ones to turn to it when they have a problem?
UPDATE: Even the Wall Street Journal notes that there have been many problems with foreclosures, despite banks’ claims to the contrary. The problems prompted a strong warning from the Obama administration.
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What this comic doesn’t show, though, is that the Invisible Hand goes both ways. The Invisible Hand is also trying to bitchslap the upper and business classes into pay workers more. The mortgage crisis is a symptom, not the actual problem. The problem is that real wages have been going down since the ’70s, and shit is just now starting to hit the fan. The only reason why everything hasn’t already collapsed is because the Boomers and older generations still have money from the post-WWII economic boom. That money is supporting the younger generations who aren’t getting paid fairly. However, it appears that nothing is going to change until the money runs out because they believe the young ‘uns are crying “wolf”.
Whenever a young person tries to talk about what’s going on, they’re met with things like, “Man up and pull up your bootstraps, you entitled brat!” (They love to call young people “entitled”, as if it’s wrong for them to expect to work a full-time job and enjoy the same lifestyle that their family had when they were young.) “It’s supposed to be hard when you’re first starting out!” Fine, we understand that we’re not going to get the fancy office and the six-figure salary right away. Not everyone is going to be able to get that, either. What we want is for everyone who can’t attain that to at least be able to have a comfortable middle class lifestyle.
So, yes, the problem is that either wages are too low or prices are too high (or maybe both). But the government can’t directly fix that problem. Not without turning America into a socialist state, which is unlikely to happen soon. After all, we’re seeing firsthand how much of a kneejerk panic attack people have when they think the government is doing anything remotely socialist. Minimum wage laws won’t fix it. Not unless the government enacts some sort of freeze on prices. (ZOMG! OH NOES! SOCIALISM!)
So, what the upper/business class doesn’t realize (or pretends not to realize) is that it’s up to them to straighten things out. The Invisible Hand is slapping them (and us) silly trying to spur them into action. It’s up to them to start paying fair wages (i.e. decrease the CEO/worker income disparity) and/or lower the prices on goods. You would think that with poor sales on everything, business would attempt to charge less so that more people would buy their products. And if that happened, much more people would buy the products than they would if prices stayed unreasonably high, which would actually make the business more money than they would earn otherwise. That’s the only thing that will fix our economic problems for the long term. It’s not the elites on Wall Street that matter, it’s the average joes that matter. After all, there’s much more of them than upper class people, and they’re more likely to want to buy things. So, make it so they can and let’s keep the economy running the way it should, with the standard of living that America is supposed to represent!
Speaking as someone who lived in England and watched it happen, I have to point out that there is no guarantee that the “upper and business classes” will figure out what it going on, even when they are being repeatedly “bitch slapped”. In their case, it took a pretty severe turn towards socialism to shake things up, which then resulted in the Thatcherite reactionaries gaining power, and the pendulum kept swinging. To this day, I don’t think they have found their happy medium.
At least the pendulum is swinging over there. It’s not really swinging here. All of the American governments since at least the Kennedy administration have not been anywhere left of center-right.