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The Zen Art of Firewall Economics the Deprivatization of Desperate Human Necessities a Centrist Compromise Between Capitalism and Socialism a Simple but Powerful Idea

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The Zen Art of Firewall Economics the Deprivatization of Desperate Human Necessities a Centrist Compromise Between Capitalism and Socialism a Simple but Powerful Idea The Zen Art of Firewall Economics The Deprivatization of Desperate Human Necessities A Centrist Compromise between Capitalism and Socialism A simple but powerful idea. Joseph D. Phillips MSW, LCSW copyright 2019 Introduction No academic field is censored more than economics. New economic ideas are blocked from publication. No economist can keep a job at a university while praising anything other than full bore Capitalism. No economist can stay employed at a Private Sector financial firm without repeating the lie that unregulated private markets can regulate themselves. No economist or educated financial professional actually believes that myth. The myth is a cover up that they repeat in public. It's an excuse for deregulation. Every CEO knows that there is an adversarial relationship between labor and capital. They say the reverse in public, but you can tell that they don't believe their own spin because they make management decisions like someone who takes the adversarial relationship for granted. They sound like Milton Friedman but they act like Marx. If management really believed that owners and workers were in the same boat, management would raise wages and wait for profits to rise. Students of economics see the lies and complain. They know they are being censored. The entire field of economics has been held back for decades. Any innovation gets crushed before it sees light. You can't publish an idea like FE in an economics journal and keep an entry level teaching position at a university. Writing a paper about anything that debunks the old Chicago School spin will prevent you from finding employment as an economist. Rich people hire economists to tell them what they want to hear. How can an idea like FE see light? Under the old system it was not possible. You had to be an economist and get published in an academic journal that is only read by other economists. Very few people would ever see it. In order to launch a book outside of the university you had to convince a publisher to take it and risk money on it. The publisher had to promote it in the old fashioned marketing way. You had to convince a for-profit publisher that a book on economics would make money. The publisher would have to risk becoming the enemy of everyone who profits from keeping the truth about economics secret. FE would never see light with a traditional strategy. Enter the internet. As long as the author doesn't care about making money from an idea, the idea can see light. It can go around all the traditional roadblocks and screens. The author can market the idea on social media. The author can even be anonymous. It's a perfect meritocracy for ideas. The internet will do more for democracy than the printing press. Even illiterate people can watch a video. You had to be able to read to benefit from early printing. FE happened before the internet, but when social media happened, I knew that it had a chance to be seen. I saw a technology that would make it possible for one person with a revolutionary idea to break through institutional restrictions. This book is not just about FE. This is an experiment in democracy. The big prize is a new world where ideas, even unpopular ideas, even ideas that have no institutional support, even ideas that power wants to suppress, can break out and be judged fairly in an uncensored democracy where information is free. ONE An important clarification. In the pages that follow I will calling for the Public Sector administration of markets for Desperate Necessities. I will be arguing that the Private Sector is not appropriate for important markets like health care, education, and retirement pensions. Some of my real life experiences that I will be writing about may not sound like someone who favors the Public Sector at all. What I am describing actually happened to me, but what I saw does not represent a typical Public Sector environment. My entire career in the Public Sector was during the so-called Reagan Revolution. The Public Sector was beaten down and cut to the bone by conservative Republican administrations throughout my entire career. The Public sector that I describe here is a broken one. This is what public services look like after being gutted by decades of suffering under Reagan's "government is the enemy" scam. We have decades of evidence now that a strategy of cutting the Public Sector to the bone, privatization, and Trickle Down Economics is terribly destructive to the health and welfare of the American People. I am not describing a healthy Public Sector here. This is the bombed-out commons that Reagan left us. Please remember that when I describe some of the ugly things I found in my Public Sector jobs. This book is not a textbook. I write for the general public. I make my case for Firewall Economics as if I'm talking to three generations at the dinner table over the holidays. Firewall Economics was my baby in graduate school. I came very close to publishing FE as a paper in a social work journal, but I never did. Academic journals are where good ideas go to die. FE cannot advance until it is exposed to the general public. I give my books away online. I have no boss. I am free to spread the word. My ebook on political literacy has 100,000 hits. Thank you to all the people that shared the link. FE is a straightforward idea. I can describe it in a few short pages that anyone can understand. I will do that, and then explain how FE came about. I will show you how it fits into the history and the future of economics. I will show you how many of our seemingly intractable political problems of today can be solved by a straightforward application of FE. FE is a compromise that the political left and right can both live with. If Capitalism and Socialism went to arbitration, FE is the compromise that would come out. You will see how logical and easy to understand FE is and say "Surely anyone could have thought of that." I get the credit. I thought of it first. It came from the Jane Addams School of Social Work at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Social Work. No economists were involved in the development of this original economic model. Social Workers 1. Economists 0. One more thing before we go. I like to capitalize important terms and concepts. Capitalism, Socialism, Private Sector, Public Sector, Left, Right. I do that as a sort of outlining/memory tool to help readers assign bits of information to logically consistent categories. Capitalized terms are fundamental categories. I actually have a Chicago Manual of Style or whatever its called somewhere in my library but this book is not going to be that formal. I can't decide when to write 1000 vs. One Thousand etc, but that's not important here. There are times when I have to sound a little technical but I try to write I'm explaining FE to my brother at Thanksgiving. I kept all of my college papers. They make me laugh now. College students and professors never miss an opportunity to use a bigger word. I don't need big words to describe FE. I think I found all of the typos. If I missed one, send me an email and I'll fix it. You can do that with ebooks. THE DEFINITION OF FIREWALL ECONOMICS Firewall Economics restricts all commerce for the sale of goods and services that are considered to be Desperate Human Necessities from Private Sector For-Profit Markets. Only Desperate Human Necessities are restricted. The definition of a Desperate Human Necessity is any good or service that a consumer cannot refuse to buy at an exorbitant price without borrowing money and going into debt. Firewall Economics is an economic model that recognizes that all economic systems are mixtures of Capitalism and Socialism. The US economy is a mixed economy. FE is not much different than what we have now in the ratio of Public to Private. What would change is the way we choose what markets get administered by the Public Sector. Necessities go to the Public Sector. In our present stage of the evolution of democracy, the mix between Capitalism and Socialism is settled by blunt political force. When the right is in power, the mix is low on Socialism and high on Capitalism. When the center-left is in power, the mix is higher on Socialism and lower on Capitalism. (The left is never in power in the US.) There are advantages and disadvantages to both. The disadvantages of conservative administrations fall disproportionately on working class people. Left-wing administrations clip the wings of upper-income taxpayers and the owners of significant wealth. (There IS an adversarial relationship between workers and owners. More on that later.) Using blunt political force to determine the mix in an economy is not efficient or rational. Political polarization prevents compromise. Both sides fail to trade off things that they do not need in exchange for things that they value. If a compromise happens, it gets negotiated by blunt political force and not by a rational analysis of the needs of both sides. Capitalism and Socialism have different advantages and disadvantages. Capitalism is competitive and suitable for accumulating wealth, but Capitalism is terrible at providing a safety net for the general population. Socialism is cooperative and better for building a safety net, but too much Socialism can discourage ambition and innovation.
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