The Popular Capitalist View

There seem to be some persistent and wrong assumptions about policy issues that are used to frame positions and prescriptions such as mine, particularly in the currently volatile subject of medical or health care reform. So, in order to better the understanding and serious consideration of what I have presented here, I have decided to take a step back and place medicine and its reform in an economic context.

From the board rooms
From the seats of power
In the towers of ivory and gold
Let us call the doctors home
Let us call the doctors home

It happened one dark night
Two ships passing
Unknown to each other
One calls another

The third unknown and unknowing
To both and wary
In the urban sea
Strange neighbors all

But the second thinks
He knows the third
Believing the myth
Keeping strange

While the third knows
He does not know the second
His job being
Keeper of the strange

Then a fourth who knows the second
Shows he does not know the third
Then tries to teach
With the strange myth

Yet the great preacher knew
The myth of race is false
That we know our neighbor
By character not by color of skin

That knowing our neighbor
As they know themselves
We would …

“The Wizard of Wall Street”
Is what he said he was
And so we donned the rose-colored glasses
And entered a ruby state of mind
Thinking ourselves rich
Or was it:
That was rich!
But he was a shy guy
That was what he said he was
So we paid no attention
To his doings behind the curtain

The Popular Capitalist View

“Like as a father pities his children”, says the Psalmist, “so the Lord has mercy on those that fear him.” In this scripture and other sacred texts from a variety of faiths, we have a favorable image of fatherly governance as represented in a fatherly image of God. Yet with that image comes a distortion of its fatherliness.

The Popular Capitalist View

A frequent derogatory stereotype of the populists, especially of the more prominent ones, is of a demagogue, of someone appealing to the basest forms of popular opinion. In almost all cases, those who make the charge are the ones who are making that appeal.

The Popular Capitalist View

Recent actions and initiatives, particularly on the federal level, have brought up the issue of how far the public interest extends and what the scope and nature of the public function ought to be in serving that interest. Popular Capitalism addresses this question by applying its core populist philosophy of advancing the cause of the individual against privately or publicly owned collectives, as well as against the predations and intimidations of more powerful individuals.

The Popular Capitalist View
With the recent announcement of the retirement of Justice Souter from the Supreme Court and the new and awkward position of Lieutenant Governor for the State of New Jersey, it seems a good time to consider issues of representation and balance of powers. These had taken shape in my own mind over two years ago as a proposed Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, but there are clear implications for New Jersey that will also, hopefully, materialize as a New Jersey Constitutional Amendment.

Being also a poet of some accomplishment, I have on occasion used verse to express my political and economic views. The following is one such poem, with which I decry the maximization of the return on equity.

Gubernatorial Platform

Having discussed in my previous columns the place of popular capitalism in the political world, and that being a world of abstractions and symbols if not ideas, it is probably best to present to the practical reader some more concrete policies that popular capitalism would seek to implement. To give that reader, whom I take to be you, some better sense of what popular capitalism would mean for them, a specific context should be provided, by me of course. Slyly passing from the third to the first two …