At This Point, as a Socialist, I'd Settle for a CAPITALIST Revolution

  I'm having trouble with labels these days. I've always thought of myself as anti-capitalist.  But the more I study it, the more I discover that the American economy is not very capitalist at all.  It has gone from free market capitalism to something even worse: a Reverse-socialist Plutocracy.

  It all started in law school. I entered law school in 1986, after Reagan had been in power for 5 years or so. I fell in love with Antitrust law - thought it was the greatest thing ever and the answer to America's problems. The Sherman Act of 1895 had halted a trend of massive monopolization and was effectively expanded to remedy many of the ills of capitalism anticipated by Adam Smith - price fixing, too-big-to-fail mergers, hedging through conglomeration, and predatory pricing. The FTC and the Justice Department had been using antitrust law to keep the American economy fair. 

  As it turned out, Reagan had practically halted all government antitrust prosecution and gutted their department funding. Enforcement has been a joke since 1980. Clinton did a little better, but by then the AG and FTC were outgunned.  With the addition of Scalia, Alito, Roberts, and Breyer, USSC opinions began favoring business and discouraging private antitrust suits. The USA was no longer able to keep the playing field level, and big business had free rein to use its size and monopoly power to avoid competing. The "Chicago School" of fundamentalist neo-liberal economics had fully poisoned business law.

  Without competition, the moral basis of free market capitalism disappears. When the government enables new businesses and requires all to compete fairly, the quality of goods and services goes up and the price comes down, benefitting the consumer.  Without regulation of competition, however, quality goes down and prices go up, benefitting unworthy, but large, businesses. Their preferred way of doing business is to provide goods that wear out, so you have to buy more of them, and to provide shoddy services through low-paid employees. Competition, to them, is inefficient. 

  By the time I was looking for antitrust work in the legal market in 1989 and couldn't find any (except on the corporate hater side of things), I realized that we didn't have functioning, free market capitalism anymore. 

  So I became a criminal defense lawyer and started learning about socialism.  Along the way, I started reading more politics and economics.  As it turned out, by 2000, not only did we not have capitalism, we didn't have democracy either.  We had a plutocracy: a system where a small group of wealthy entities controlled the government. 

  Not satisfied with running the business world, the rich took over government as well.  It makes sense, because even without antitrust enforcement, there are still government regulations that cost money to comply with.  Getting rid of white collar law enforcement helps the bottom line. There were also tariffs and trade barriers designed to help American workers - buying out the government meant getting rid of those by treaty. Finally, there were laws enabling unions that the wealthy could surely do without. We soon had globalized capitalism and marginalized labor.

  But they weren't done. Once they took over the government, they figured, hey, the government collects tax money, why not get in on some of that sweetness?

  Banks, insurance companies, and corporations have coerced the government to pass law after law funneling taxpayer dollars their way to the point where we have reverse socialism: redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich!

  Dean Baker carefully outlines these policies in his great book The Conservative Nanny State. We subsidize people who don't need money: oil companies, factory farmers, coal companies, health care companies, insurance companies, and finance companies.  All of them get either direct subsidies, easy contracts, tax breaks, or free research and development money. 

  Some of them are subtle: Google would not be in business without military investments in ARPANET made with tax money.  Drug companies use patent laws to enjoy monopolies on products that literally save lives - allowing them to extort money out of the dying. Fortunes are made on Wall Street and we give them a huge tax break on capital gains - for not working!  Wall Street is where our national wealth makes money for a small group of arrogant leeches. 

  One of the real reasons people are upset with Obama is that the Health Care law guaranteed new customers for the insurance companies - corporate welfare - without getting anything free for us. 

  It is hard to imagine it getting any better for the rich or any worse for the working man. But it did!  What do obscenely wealthy people do for fun when there's nothing left to buy? They gamble!  Wall Street financial houses, established to connect American business to global wealth for the good of the economy, became casinos.  And the poker chips were our houses.  Picture little green plastic houses, like in Monopoly, being tossed onto a craps table like dice. Just like in 1928, they gambled on risky ventures using margin loans; not against the same shares of stock, but against the same pile of mortgages. 

  The reason we don't notice our Great Society being ripped away from us is twofold:

1) math is hard; and

2) the wealthy left our unimportant rights alone - you know, free speech, due process, association, voting, gun ownership, jury trials, shit like that. That gave the illusion of good ol' America without the creamy delicious center (money!)

  We were also doing OK, especially in the 1990s, when most of this quiet coup was going on.  Our home values were artificially inflating, and our 401k's were going up. "Reagan was right," we all said, "privatizing the pension system worked, and our homes is now ATMs!"

  But soon there was no extra money to put in the 401k.  Then house values crashed because they were bullshit.  Now the jobs are going away. America's chickens are coming home to roost. 

  Now we're like, WTF? Sadly, our instincts are telling us to suck it up, tighten the ol' belt, and work harder. It's not going to work. We are going to be poor for the next 10-20 years while wealthy people have enough to wipe their asses with $100 bills every time they take a shit.  Our wages will continue to go down until they reach the worldwide average, because business is global now and there won't be any artificial value in US dollars. 

 So, I still want a socialist system, but first we're going to have to fight real hard to get back to a democratic system - a country where the votes of actual people make a difference and we're not brainwashed by rich interest groups.  Then we're going to have to keep pushing for a capitalist system - a country where competition makes markets operate in the public interest. THEN maybe the natural course of history will lead us to self-government and equitable wealth distribution. 

  Or maybe, just maybe, there actually will be a revolution. I doubt it.  Americans are famous for adaptation, not revolt. You throw us in the gutter, we write a musical about singing in the rain.