Indeed it is precisely for the rapid pace of scientific discovery and its unavoidably quick implementation in new technology that makes private capitalist profit and the drive for ownership power and control ever more difficult within an old-fashioned, reactionary and retrogressive system of continued accumulation of capital per se.
In lieu of honest economics journalism in media today, we can learn from American's most famous economist, Thorstein Veblen, who wrote a century ago.
Veblen assumed depression to be the normal condition in a business-enterprise economy, to be relieved in periods of excitation caused by stimuli not intrinsic to the system (e.g., war, expansion abroad, etc.)
"For Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes[*] and Karl Marx, profits showed a tendency toward zero in the long run as the supply of capital, i.e., of productive capacity, increased. This would be true were it not for destructive compensating factors making for contrived or natural scarcities of goods - e.g., wars, geographic expansion, monopolistic restriction of production." [Thorstein Veblen, by Douglas Dowd]
We are presently witnessing technological advances arriving at mind-blowing speed, too many of which, rather than improving the lives of majority mankind, are being misused by the aberrant, ignorant and fearful minds of the capitalist masters of our fraudulent economy and ever more hyped and cheapened consumer culture. Apparently, these 2008 clever tricks of the holders and disposers of the common wealth co-opted into private hands that package and re-market debt as if it were real capital, are nothing new,
For way back In 1894, one could read,
"Fictitious values (credit moneys) are thrown into circulation as capital and converted into fictitious forms of capital. As a result, 'the greater portion of banker's capital is purely fictitious and consists of claims (bills of exchange), government securities (which represent spent capital) and stocks (drafts on future revenue)' [Das Capital, vol. 3, p. 469) Friedrich Engels from notes left by Karl Marx]
Obviously, the severity of the capitalism's amoral threat to the quality of money as a means of exchange was obvious to economists one hundred and fifty years ago.
In the chapter The Myths and Realities of the Free Market, in Against the Conventional Wisdom - a Primer for Current Economic Controversies and Proposals, published in 1997, economic historian Douglas Dowd points out that
"It should be acknowledged that the financial sector is dominant not in the servicing of productive investment that has provided its reputability, but now dominates speculation in securities and in the foreign exchange market (the latter exceeding $2.6 trillion per day) It is estimated that more than $40 trillion are involved in derivatives games.
... the role of investment and trade in the daily Foreign Exchange Market fell from the 1986 figure of around 10 to perhaps 1 percent in 1997, leaving the remaining 99 percent for speculation in one ore another of its many forms. Decisions are made by gamblers more than by, in the approved sense of the term, "enterprisers."
But already in 1922, Veblen had admonished that,
"The current situation in America [1922] is by way of being something of a psychiatrical clinic...Perhaps the commonest and plainest evidence of ... unbalanced mentality is to be seen in a certain fearsome and feverish credulity with which a large proportion of Americans are affected.... There is a visible lack of composure and logical coherence, both in what they will believe and in what they are ready to do about it."
Thorstein's observations were made during a period when big business first grew to giant size; when financial manipulation and frantic speculation-perhaps the epitome of "getting something for nothing" -had already become an integral and even admirable activity for a large number of Americans."
Our Noam Chomsky writing in the Irish Times, republished by Common Dreams, Oct. 10, '08, explains how we arrived at this month's debacle in Anti-Democratic Nature of US Capitalism is Being Exposed
"... predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from [during a few decades of] liberalization are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.
Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments "socialize their losses," as in today's taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention "has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries", they conclude.
... after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".
"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded America's leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda".
We close by restating our theme: the absence of ethics and morality in the capitalist system, a system of thievery, with a tellingly severe footnote on the shameful present, which is firmly positive about Man's eventual return to upright, honorable and moral standards.
[*] John Maynard Keynes describing our coming era in "The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren":
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