Rent Seeking bx crowding out trad production

Rent-seeking behavior is crowding out classical economic productivity. Ask yourself this: do you know anyone who produces goods or services that are not subsidized or derived from government spending/entitlements? Is your highest ambition to escape global labor arbitrage by sheltering in a government mandated make-work program that pays in excess of actual market demands? If government underwrites universal survival absent requirements to produce tangible economic value then the value of merely surviving drops to zero. The insidious growth of this strategy of rent-seeking and flight from real economic productivity is resulting in a decline in population fitness both intellectual and physical. It may be that rent seeking strategies are pursued for lack of better alternatives despite being sub-optimal in their own right. In such cases (and Arkansas is probably one of them) macro economic policy (Keynesian), misallocation of resources, and crony capitalism bear the responsibility for biopolitical failure.

Jobs are dead

NYBamBam 2 days ago

Our government has absolutely murdered our labor markets. The labor force participation rate contracted steadily throughout the Obama administration. At this point, there are not enough jobs to go around. Wages are stagnant. Labor conditions have deteriorated. Upward economic mobility is dead, dead, dead. Forget about full-time, benefited jobs. There's a war on all fronts against living wage work.

Nepotism, cronyism, corruption and insider networks control opportunity. We've lost 40 years of labor force participation when the needs of society - and the lousy wages - demand our labor force participation rate grow dramatically, not shrink historically.

Democrats ignored these conditions and won the fewest elected officials in 90 years. 96 million eligible voters didn't vote in 2016, 41% of the electorate. 95 million working age Americans didn't work that year either. Hmmmmm.....

Any politician who ignores these conditions or makes them worse will meet the same fate. The public has no patience left with its politicians on this topic. They should have dealt with 8 years ago. America needs millions of living wage jobs, student debt relief, affordable housing and massive reinvestment in local economies. Preferably from the ground up.