The Hippie Blog
Writings From The Author Of The Hippie Dictionary
March 12, 2024
I am a Free-Enterprise Socialist--- that is democratic economics
A Free-Enterprise Socialist believes in the freedom of everyone to be enterprising, and that's not Capitalism. We believe in social systems to help people get a free-thinking and adequate education and to be free from staggering poverty and the lack of medical care.
Did you know that at one time, actor John Wayne and some of his friends were the biggest recipients of welfare checks for not planting cotton or raising cattle? And at the same time, he verbally ridiculed welfare mothers for getting small checks to feed their children.
The Great Depression and President Franklin D. Roosevelt created many social programs in America, and Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson created more. These programs were designed to help the poor and disenfranchised citizens get out from under debilitating poverty, achieve an education, be able to contribute to society, and eventually experience some part of the American dream.
Welfare and free enterprise need not be incompatible in American society. A proper mixture of both would help to balance our economy more equally among the majority population. But there is an element of our wealthy population that considers welfare or anything that resembles socialism to be a threat to their agenda.
These people don’t oppose welfare on the grounds that it is bad for people or for society. They oppose it because it may cut into their own economic profits.
Since the 1970s, all of these programs have been slowly dismantled or made ineffective because of conservative disapproval. The stigma of an assumed connection to left-wing ideology has worked against these important social and educational programs. Because of this, the economy of this country is fast becoming polarized into the two vastly separate groups of the very rich and the very poor.
The reason the social systems in this country are inefficient and fraught with abuse and corruption is that every four to eight years the Republicans take over the administration of these departments. With each change in Washington, DC, or state capitols swinging to the conservative side of the aisle, businessmen who do not want social systems are put in charge of them.
They know it wouldn’t look good on their record if they outright dismantled programs to feed poor children, so they cut funding or make them so inefficient they are slowly becoming unworkable.
This country cannot afford to have conservative minds make policies about government agencies that affect the poor, health care or education. They continually gut them or privatize them to make lots of money, and then abandon them to chaos.
Twenty years ago I started suggesting that we abandon or greatly curtail the stock market, this is what I wrote:
"The stock market needs an overhaul and a downsizing. The original intent in creating the stock market was to provide money for companies to research and develop new products and services. It was not intended to provide profits for the company's owners, officers and executives. The market was meant to be a means, not the end in itself.
The stock exchange became corrupted when it became more important as a source of income for the stockbrokers and investors than as a stimulus creating new and better products for the economy. That is when this country started on its way toward becoming a paper, or shadow, economy rather than an economy based on the industry of its people.
We must change the concept of the stock market back to its original intent. Originally “going public” was a way for new companies or companies with a new product to “borrow” money to use in research and development to get new products out in the marketplace.
This process was intended to stimulate our country’s economy in several ways at the same time. First, to give companies fresh funding to spend in the marketplace to develop new, useful products to sell and then to give dividends (profits) to the investors for them to spend in the marketplace.
The first glitch in this process arose when some people discovered they could make a profit by buying and selling stocks rather than waiting for the dividends. At this point, the whole concept of the stock market changed into a large government-sanctioned and legalized pyramid scheme.
At this point, “the market” itself became a business. In other words, there were people devoted solely to buying and selling stocks ... and making a lot of money from the process. Of course, this siphons off some of the money in commissions, which should have been, or was intended to be, invested into the product or services.
I know there are investors, the professionals, who don’t care where their investment is spent as long as it brings them back a profit. The amateur investors might as well bet on jumping frogs. Even the mutual funds are losing money right now. How does that all fit with our president’s (Bush and Trump) claims that he has helped our economy?
Another major problem with this present stock market system is that the “loan” from investors is not guaranteed or secured by anything except the prospect that a new product is profitable. This gave some people the license to steal, because if they cook the books, which they do, they can show a loss and never have to pay any dividends. For everybody who makes money in the stock market, someone else has to lose
This brings up the last big scheme that the market has spawned--corporate CEO salaries. Stock market invested money is supposed to be spent on valid research and development only. It should not be used for CEO salaries or such things as advertising, new office furniture or trips to the Bahamas.
If a company is public or on the Stock Exchange, the CEO salaries should be regulated to match the profits of the business. Another step in the right direction would be to put a cap on corporate profits. We have a minimum wage. It makes sense to balance that by having a maximum wage, based on someone’s value to the society.