Micropanacea

I was handed a thick tract the other day on my way to work. Wasn't the typical Falun Gong enlightenment I was used to receiving on the streets of New York. No, Boston's pamphleteers are apparently much more ambitious than that. This was more akin to a miniature magazine with the title:

"President Obama's Options: The Issue is Bankruptcy", Lyndon Larouche's January 16th & 22nd Webcasts.

For those of you who are hearing of Lyndon for the first time (meaning me, only, obviously), you can read the democratic version of him here. If you are not satisfied, you can try this or just Google him like I did.

The first webcast transcribed in the pamphlet lays out our options for survival during these dark economic times. What struck me most as I read through his words while on the elliptical machine at the gym was how many times he asked whether I Wanted to Survive. Whether I wished the United State to continue to survive. Whether I wished to save China from chaos and so forth. Gosh, I thought I did...

So in a nutshell, here is his answer to our salvation:

"We are going to have to wipe out most of the financial claims from the books! We are going to put the world, which we have to save -- a physical world -- we're going to put the world into protection. And we're going to put the world into protection, by eliminating the greatest part of the nominal financial claims, held by financial institutions of the world today."

"You can get out of this mess, very simply: Go back to our Constitution, and go back to the thinking of Franklin Roosevelt, as of 1944. We go to that kind of thinking, and put the world through bankruptcy reorganization, and change away from this monetary system we have, which you can not save!

"...Which means that some things that are essential will continue to be paid, or ordered. Our investment in these things will expand. Other things, which people have been using as substitutes for production, in this kind of crazy market, are going to be frozen, just as you do, in any attempt to salvage a business, which is financially bankrupt."

Not sure what to make of this, and there is lots more. Sounds extreme and improbable, but perhaps not much more than the thought of the government paying our mortgages.

Any thoughts?

Like many people, I am giddily anticipating the upcoming regime change, not specifically because it means a certain someone will be outgoing or that a certain someone will be incoming, but because it is the first time since we've had a new president that I've actually been hopeful about what he might accomplish (though also a little worried about how blank my visions of it seem to be).

What I'm really interested in at the moment is economics.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should let you know that I'm reading The Shock Doctrine. In light of the same interest, I should perhaps also mention that after reading Atlas Shrugged, I temporarily changed my major from Humanities to Manufacturing Engineering. Suffice it to say that reading anything seems to immediately reorganize for me the world as I know it, perhaps more easily than it should.

With that being said, let me over-conclusively state the obvious: a purely free market does not work in practice as it seems to in theory, and certainly not for the benefit of the general public, any more than communism does. Never mind at the moment that neither has been allowed to develop naturally or democratically -- the material point is that both are proposed in too pure an ideal state to be able to function in a real society.

Since the Great Depression, the U.S. has been more or less operating in a fancy and sometimes messy hybrid of the two. The balance has shifted here and there with one administration or another, the Bush administration recently trying hard to pull it back to the right and now Obama foreshadowing plans to swing right back to the left. Ultimately, I think it is possible to strike a balance between a private and public country, giving enough economic freedom to inspire innovation and ambition with just enough regulation to keep people healthy and dignified enough to engage in it.

So here's my question: What do we keep private and what do we operate as a state? Here are a few of my conclusions-for-the-moment:
EDUCATION: purely state. no private schools, no charter schools, no unequal distribution of funds contingent on property taxes of adjacent areas. we have NO chance of being a truly democratic society unless we can offer truly democratic education, which currently we can NOT.
HEALTH CARE: Hybrid. Someone please elaborate for me.
SOCIAL SECURITY: State, W., State.
HOW ABOUT RESOURCES? Unsure. There have been mixed results when developing countries have nationalized their resources. Often it simply brings brutal brutal people into power who can stay as long as they want because they control the country's sole source of wealth. Ideally, however, with some checks and balances, it could mean a guaranteed source of income that could replace some taxes, offer potential for healthy price controls, and curb further disparity between the super rich and the super poor. (Don't worry, I don't REALLY think state control of resources would ever become a glimmer of a reality in the U.S. Now resources control of the state...that's a bit closer to home.)

Your thoughts?