Financial shocks, the bulleted version:

Let's see if I can summarize Yonatan Zunger's article on financial shocks from last week:

• The United States is a highly advanced, mature economy which is capable of meeting all the needs and most of the wants of its citizens.
  


• This maturity makes it difficult to establish growth industries. We have enough food, water, warmth, and shelter. Contrary to the press, most of us actually do live in a world of safety and security. Most new business are catering to wants and luxuries.
  


• In a capitalist system, lack of growth leads to difficulty in finding sources of profit.
  


• Despite the evidence of plenitude, these minimal resources are not remotely distributed in a way that resembles equality, or even fairness.
  


• For those at the bottom of the scale, a financial shock of as little as $400, such as an illness, a house fire, a broken leg or an automobile accident will result in a genuine downward spiral into poverty. In the absence of a social safety net, that person and their dependents will lose everything.
  


• That "everything" is still valuable, but the victim can no longer afford it. If that "everything" is land, it ends up in the hands of the creditors.
  


• The net result is that the creditors now own more wealth, and the poor less.
  


• Those who can afford financial shocks will be fine; they can pay the bills and recover. Those who cannot will disappear, possibly forever, from the ledger.
  


• Those who can afford financial shocks can, as mentioned above, profit from the losses of others.
  


• Therefore, those wealthy enough to afford financial shocks can engineer those shocks.
  


• There are two kinds of government: an Imperial government, which is an army that invests in health care and education only insofar as those support the main enterprise of waging conequest; and an Insurance government, which supports its citizens fully, backs them with relief in times of crisis, and maintains an army only insofar as the state has external threats.
  


• The United States is now neither. It is a hollowed-out core in which the oligarchy is routinely "shaking the tree," manufacturing financial shocks that allow it to gather more capital.
  


• The Republican Tax Bill currently before Congress is a blatant attempt to "shake the tree" even harder, creating shocks that couldn't be survived even by those who could survive even a $1,000 shock.
  


• The next step will be to reach futher up, attacking those with two, then five, the ten thousand dollars in savings.