The Popular Capitalist View

A key part of the Popular Capitalist program is to reduce the cost of living. A lower cost of providing the necessities puts the rudimentary task of paying the cost of sovereignty more easily within the reach of the political economies of regions with modest resources. This allows those political economies and thus most political economies to offer its citizens opportunities to reach beyond mere survival and build capital that will benefit their communities for years to come. Also, a lower cost of the living beyond survival makes those efforts at building capital more attainable.

The Popular Capitalist View

The election of the next New Jersey Governor is fast upon us with only one real issue being addressed, that of property taxes and the public education system which it currently funds.  Each of the three major candidates – and by “major” I mean that they are on the ballot and on television – has taken up a predictable strategic position on this issue.

The Popular Capitalist View

There is a lot of confusion in our business world about what is or is not personal which seems, to this observer, designed to misplace our sympathies.  A deliberate legal fiction that a corporation be treated like a person, so that it gain some benefit thereby, has been accepted as fact.

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.

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 …