Yes, and it also makes so called capitalism and the so called free market impossible.
A free market is impossible, save perhaps a short period of time in a brand new place, until someone gets a capital advantage and uses it enhance the advantage.
Capitalism is of course possible since it is simply an economic system based on using capital to create wealth.
Capitalism allows for the most freedom and productivity, but it is also rife with potential for abuses. That is where democratic society comes into play, to try and mitigate the abuses that capital applies for the benefit of capital. Unfettered capitalism would quickly devolve into an oligarchy, and that is really the road we are heading down now. Wealth concentration is the benefit capital seeks, and wealth concentration is the situation that democracy usually tries to avoid. We had about 20% of all private wealth in the hands of the top 1% for most of the last century, fairly consisently around 20%. Since the supply side policies of the 80's that has increased to almost 45%.
People like to say that our economy is not a zero sum game, that the rich can get massively richer and everyone else can do well too. Perhaps that is possibly, but the actual facts indicate that is not what has happened here. While wealth has concentrated, everyone else has seen buying power stagnate or go down.
I wish I could convince people to look at what is actually happening. It is not that taxes are too high now, or that government spending is too, or that the government is giving away too much money to poor people. We had done much more of that historically and still saw incredible economic growth. What happened was that despite the protests of capital, democratic policies empowered workers to demand greater compensation relative to productivity and profits. That is no longer the case. I firmly believe that the basic business principal, that a business that is not growing is dying, applies to the American middle class. Capital is being used to suck more and more out of the economy into the hands of the few and the result is basically a cannibal economy. The middle class is the milk cow, and it had created the highest standard of living ever seen in the history of man, but the supply-side policies that have been in place for the last 30 years have created a situation where the cow is not only being milked, but steaks are being cut out of it. How long before the cow falls over? Five years, twenty years, I don't know, but the current policy is unsustainable.
But capital and business has gone global, so America is not nearly as important as the next quarterly report, and when our economy falls, they will just pick and move on to the next market. Unfettered capitalism with the ability to capture and define government policy works like the aliens in Independence Day, set up shop, pick the market clean, leave it dead and move on to the next market. Only citizens can change the policies that allow this to happen, and only if they understand the problem. Unfortunately, there are 50,000 PR professionals in this country and only 10,000 journalists, so the information we get is more designed to make us think our problems are democrat versus republican instead of the real problem, policy bought with profits from our spending versus the American people.
