As Aristotle said, democracy is the political stage immediately preceding oligarchy. That's what the economy is now evolving into.
The reason U.S. labor has lost its competitiveness is not simply a race to the bottom. To see why U.S. exports are being priced out of world markets, you need to look not only at the take-home pay of workers, but also at what employers are not investing to raise capital productivity, and what they don't get from government in the form of basic infrastructure support.
One reason why employers have not invested as much in raising the productivity of their plant and equipment is that they are saddled with having to pay out more of their cash flow as interest to bondholders and banks, and dividends to assuage shareholder activists, the new euphemism for financial raiders.
U.S. corporate philosophy has been more driven by knee-jerk ideology than by enlightened self-interest. General Motors has pointed out that it has to pay enormous health care costs that its foreign competitors don't. Some sixty years belatedly it's finally discovered that socialized medicine is more efficient that health care privatized by predatory financial and insurance operators. Government services don't build in interest rate costs, dividends, exorbitant management remuneration, stock options and legal fees. All this absorbs a big part of the corporate expense for its work force without raising labor's living standards in the process.
Meanwhile, educating doctors, dentists and nurses is much less costly abroad. Here, they emerge from medical school with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and then have to take on more debt to set up their offices, then they need to buy expensive liability insurance. Once they get on an HMO schedule, they usually have to wait for a year or so to actually get paid. Meanwhile, they have to hire their own full-time bookkeepers just to deal with the HMOs. Doctors, dentists and nurses are being put on rations.
Most of all, the price of labor reflects the high cost of housing here mainly the cost of carrying a home mortgage plus non-mortgage debt. Labor doesn't benefit from these costs. And as matters have turned out, industry hasn't benefited either. It's the price the U.S. economy as a whole is paying for having become financialized and privatized in a dysfunctional way.
The idea that a worse economy will be self-curing is IMF anti-labor ideology and Chicago School propaganda. This is indeed what Nobel Economic Prizes are given for, I grant you. But it's Junk Economics. A falling dollar threatens to become self-reinforcing. For starters, dollar-denominated stocks, bonds and real estate are worth less and less in terms of euros, sterling or other harder and foreign currencies. This doesn't provide much incentive for foreigners to invest here. And if we go into a recession (not to speak of depression), there will be even fewer profitable opportunities to invest.
U.S. import dependency will continue to rise as the economy de-industrializes that is, as it is further financialized. U.S. overseas military spending will throw yet more dollars onto the world's foreign exchange markets. So a weak economy here does NOT mean that the dollar will strengthen; it means we have a bad investment climate! Austerity will make us more dependent on foreign countries. Just look at what has happened when the IMF has imposed austerity plans on Third World debtors. And remember, last time when Robert Rubin was given a free hand, in reforming Russia under Clinton, the result was industrial collapse and bankruptcy.
Excerpted from a Mike Whitney Interview @ Counterpunch
