"It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste.
But in practice such a society could not remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupified by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."
George Orwell, 1984
This is the ultimate failure of oligarchical, crony capitalism, as it is being trumpeted today from several diverse circles of thought as the new thing with China as its model. Oligarchies can not allow for the rise of a thriving middle class, with decent education, substantial wages, and rising standards of living, because that is a threat to their power. The fascists were much admired for their economic recovery from the Depression, but they maintained their control of the people through the iron grip of fear and terror, even while the East coast establishment lionized Mussolini and Hitler as economic miracle workers.
And this is why the oligarchical classes even in the US and the UK favor austerity over reform. Reform diminishes their illicit access to unproductive wealth and power, and austerity hammers the middle class into submission.
On a lighter note, Wall Street has decided that Egypt is really not all that important, with the likely passage of power to another puppet if Mubarak should fall. So the big tickle will be the Jobs Report on Friday. The key metric for them is the anticipated unemployment rate which is expected to be 9.5% or thereabouts.
"Now it is fairly well known that the unemployment rate is a less important metric, since people stop being counted as unemployed when no longer receiving unemployment benefits, or when they take a menial low paying job. And in a prolonged downturn you can therefore have improvements in the unemployment rate without any real improvement in overall unemployment like the labor participation rate and the median wage, which are the key indicators of a sustainable recovery.
So it makes me wonder what antics the government and the pigmen might have up their sleeve to rattle the swill bucket for mom and pop to get back into stocks, and most likely once again at a top."
