"The fabric of credit and capitalization is essentially a fabric of concerted make-believe resting on the routine credulity of the business community at large."
"To the community at large the work of pecuniary management, it appears, is less serviceable the more there is of it."
"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."
The foregoing is from the article Dementia Praecox, in a period when big business grew to giant size; when financial manipulation and feverish speculation-perhaps the epitome of "getting something for nothing" -became an integral and even admirable activity for a large number of Americans.
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.)
Where are America's today's favorite son critics of what is presently obvious as desperately thieving uncontrolled predatory capitalism even as
- Socialist participatory democracy is sweeping most of Latin America.
- In capitalist India, most educated Kerala state always elects Communist governments.
- Nepal has a Maoist prime minister.
- Parliaments in Italy and France often have socialist led coalitions in power.
- East Europeans often vote their formerly communist parties back in to power.
- The leading Asian political economies are run in part as national family protectorates.
- Most Islamic populations favor Islamic Banking practices of fairly shared risk.
- Violent revolt is rampant in an Africa exploited by EU's merciless power banks,
- China's ruling Communist Party successfully limits the rampage of unfettered investment capital,
In 'Big Brother' media dumbed down American majority opinion, capitalism must not be questioned! Conglomerate owned media has sold America on capitalism being as American as apple pie and that to be critical of capitalism is therefore unpatriotic.
In reality, it is the conglomerate owned and cartelized media that is unpatriotic. It supports lies and criminality in high places, features violence from every conceivable angle and through its pervasive editing of all major sources of information right down into the school system, is the great facilitator of the undemocratic private capitalist financial system and corporate governance covertly led by the military-industrial complex.
And since, in our days, word of mouth in America is nearly unheard of, we can be grateful we still have the internet to read dissident thoughts of honest and fearless humanity, and know that ultimately America can be a nation of whatever it wants to be, rather than a captive of misappropriated technology.
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