I have been excommunicated from a long list of tea shops and bars on the bogus charge of being the or Ferdinand Lassalle embodiment. The general public wrongly ties together an economic status quo examination with anti-Capitalism bravura based on an acute paranoia of the Karl Marx book "Das Kapital." It is difficult to talk about socialism in any constructive way. If you don't believe me, try to turn the light on the ugliest Capitalism facets, and bam, you get ostracized from the society as a Communist. Prompting a conversation on a new robust alternative to the free-market will only get you frightened looks from self-proclaimed Marx reincarnations. The terms, thoughts, precepts, concepts, practices and personalities have all been vilified on the one hand, or lionized on the other, that most people have an instant disdain for anything you might say once one of the lexicons of its vocabulary comes out of your mouth.
What can you say about the boring cock-fights between Capitalism deities of our time? You should be as disgusted as I am of these clown shows that chip away the substance of economic disparity dialogues. My rants can turn into a tsunami, but there are events in our lives, which, though small, prove to be very significant.
In transit at the Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, waiting for my flight back to the United States, I was once asked what I wanted to be when I grow up. The man was sitting right across my table. He could have been in his late sixties. I could tell by his features and accent that he was from Rwanda, a nation that watchdog organizations reports have pointed at being the mastermind of my home country's political and social horrors. You can understand my rage after I was briefed on how Rwanda provided financial and military support to sadistic bandit groups, and, in return, Rwanda directly plundered Congolese natural resources and indirectly became a hub for mineral trade1.
On that day, I was haunted by one question; how many blows and lives lost would the Democratic Republic of Congo have to endure before the world says enough? With an angry tone, my reply to his question was audacious and straightforward: "I want to become a leader in the Democratic Republic of Congo." While struggling to suppress his mirth, he asked what my solutions would be for the DRC.
After all, my home country has been through more than half a century of economic and social chaos. At first, I lightheartedly laid down my ideas. He pulled his glasses back and asked me to elaborate more on my plan. Needleless to say, the more I talked, the more naïve and dumb I sounded. In the end, I was not able to articulate my vision for the reason that I never seriously thought about it in detail. My entire scheme could not stand any scrutiny. The casual conversation turned into a humiliating and humbling experience.
This book emanates from the economic disciplines hijacked by escape artists and mathematicians, for more than two centuries. For all the wrong reasons, economists have blasted into a million small pieces the Holy Grails of the classical Labor Theory of Value and stripped away the humanism and the real world from theoretical foundations. Then they took the pain of stitching some of the pieces back, using pathetic assumptions as Band-Aids.
There is some truth in the quarantined Marxist Fred Moseley's charge that the economic academia system has been built to reward folks who stick with the mainstream. This good man is the Shoichi Yokoi of economics, deprived of fame and fortune, hiding in the jungles of South Hadley in Massachusetts. He firmly believed his former comrades would one day return for him, and together they would launch a final assault on Capitalism. Alas, merely castigating orthodoxy for the ineptness of their theory can neither restore the classical vision of an efficient market nor get us to the Promised Land.
I kick-started this book on a personal note with a letter to a young teenage single mother who is called Mama Vincent. She is a panhandler that my wife and I met in downtown Nairobi, Kenya. At one point, I had to hold young Vincent in my arms to keep law enforcement agents away. My tourist eminence in Kenya shielded Vincent and his mother from police harassment. The city of Nairobi has passed an ordinance criminalizing pandhandling, or shall I say, poverty. I asked then and do so again, "What then is the poor to do?"
Excess in government is spent on the elite in government, and their favored patrons, not on waging a war against the root causes that perpetuate endemic poverty. This modern era apartheid doesn't call any attention because the oppressed and oppressors have the same skin color. Many more cities are taking the same insane approach and have been getting away with it as long as the line drawn doesn't desecrate the burial of race or ethnic disputes.
In my childhood, I was ingrained with the notion that social, commerce and trade, and political disparity was dictated by law of nature; somebody had to be poor to be a servant of the rich! In the mid-90s, wealthy Congolese sought refuge to the west from the civil war. I stand as a witness to how, in a blink of an eye, most of these families lost their accustomed lifestyle of luxury. After living for close to two decades in exile, even the most powerful generals and the former President's inner circle gradually succumbed to the crippling misery. Not surprisingly, a number of the barons and crusaders of the former regime have crawled back home and are vigorously active in the new parasite system. My wise South African friend referenced a law of nature to explain this cycle: "Once a snake, always a snake!"
The personal testimony is to show the damning universal truth that people, as well as nations, are more concerned about themselves until their luck changes. In the dot com collapse of 1995-2000, and the Great Recession beginning in 2008 we saw many Americans were shaken out of their dream of a house with a picket fence. Ordinary hard-working Americans saw their pensions completely wiped out by a few greedy capitalist insiders. In the latter event housing prices fell by over 31%, greater than in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Non-farm employment was higher than in the Great Depression, and lingered longer. The capitalistsâ stimulative move, The Gramm-Rudman Act, actually precipitated the catastrophe by allowing trading in speculative derivatives that were mortgage backed securities entirely unsupported and by default, worthless2.
Another caustic example is the small group of the Russian oligarchs who have since fallen out of Vladimir Putin's favor, who cannot help but preach justice and equality from their golden exile in London. What is there to say about European countries juggling with mind-blowing debt higher than their worth (Gross Domestic Product)? Add to this picture Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the BRIC countries who are steam-rolling their economic growth at Mother Nature's peril3. Added to this gumbo the Arab Facebook generation, who are no longer content with the tiny slice of their national wealth while a minority splurges with the rest, are attempting to shift cards.
These recent bubbling volcanoes should awaken our sense that preemptive measures should be sought to break the status quo. In the twenty-first century, the sluggish economists' speech "We will be fine as long as we stay on the current course and tweak the old Capitalism wheel a little bit more," has long lost its potency and relevance. It is more than ever imperative to initiate a cultural revolution and to develop a real alternative to the prevailing brutal and primitive social, commerce and trade, and political system, which is Capitalism.
The loud medley in my mind bubbled out of the ordinary challenge facing every nation on this dying planet: social, commerce and trade, and political injustice (disparity for any punks). It is a result of a painful crusade to uncover a pragmatic way of making the gap negligible. Don't pull your wig out just yet; I am not totally out of my mind, advocating to jump back on the saddle of any of the two dead horses. Socialism and Communism have failed, but now Capitalism is failing us.
There are many elaborate dark labyrinths this book will be taking you through. I firmly believe that economists should leave to religion and medicine the principal goal of uncovering mysteries of the unnatural and natural while consoling or abusing us on the way. Economics' responsibility is to find remedies for or to level out, glut and hoarding before any cerebral vagabondage. Instead, it has been reduced to glorifying socio-economic skewness.
I have noted the skepticism about whether any social, commerce and trade, and political form other than Capitalism would ever work. Nowadays, people fail to realize that Capitalism was part of paradigms based on barbaric