Economists have jobs only by serving the economic regime in power as court eunuchs.
Goods and services have at least two values. The first is their use value, the value of a commodity or service in real on-the-ground terms, such as useful value of a tool, or shelter or food, or worth as a service, such as transport.
The second is their transactional value: how much money banking and "investment" can make controlling the money involved in the transactions surrounding those goods or services, or financing the creation of new ones through loans, marketing and institutionalized capital control.
The consequences, even in creating unneeded services and products for the sheer sake of growth, even pointless are enormously profitable.
There is no arguing that there is no greater method of creating economic growth than capitalism. Even Marx had no qualm with that. But growth is like crack cocaine for bankers and economists, both of which see the world purely in terms if wealth accumulation and production. For we who do the producing (or once did the producing back when workers were still considered a necessary evil) the truth is that American capitalism is like a wine press. It squeezes the masses for the money representing their productivity, in a process otherwise known as the virtual economy. A few people in the virtual economy become multi-millionaires. The rest of us pay the freight financially, socially and ecologically.
It will get worse. Consider Obama's ramped up mountaintop removal program for coal energy. Corporate coal and Wall Street bankers are overjoyed at the prospect of adding to the 143 already-leveled mountains and their attending toxic water zones. The frog of capitalism will be poked in a big way for another jump.
Excerpted from Joe Bageant @ Counterpunch
