All wealth comes from the government. There are no self-made billionaires. Fortunes are made by coercing the government to help private businesses. It’s the power of the government that creates wealth. Many times that simply involves suspending the law or interpreting it in a way that favors one business over another.

All of the original US wealth came from the government bending the law to help a private business enterprise. The government looked the other way when the Astor family committed genocide and took furs from Indian land. The fur trade produced half of the original US wealth. The other half came from cotton profits by slavery. The source of wealth for the cotton plantations came from government inaction. It came from political corruption, not the thrift and innovation of plantation owners.

All wealth is still redistributed and maintained by political corruption, not by honest work or innovation. Wealthy individuals and corporations bribe legislators to bend the law. Government is the source of all political power, especially in a fiat economy. Wealth is simply a measure of political power, not some sort of physical asset. Contrary to Republican spin, wealthy oligarchs do not favor small government. They want the government to enforce laws that favor their economic interests and suspend laws that restrict their exploitation of the markets. The oligarchs know that small government is incompatible with Capitalism. Capitalism can not exist without a strong legal infrastructure. Contracts must be enforced or fiat wealth evaporates. Government is the source of all law. The Oligarchs preach anarchy over laws that restrict them while preaching law and order over laws that favor them.

The Private Sector is not more efficient than the Public Sector. The cost of a Public Sector project is simply the cost of providing the good or service. The cost of a Private Sector project is the cost of providing the good or service PLUS the cost of providing a profit to a Private corporate entity. What the Private Sector is implying is that government projects are less efficient because they contain an added cost for corruption. All corruption originates from the Private Sector. When the Private Sector leaves the Public Sector alone, the Public Sector is more efficient.

Social Security has a tiny overhead margin. 98% of all Social Security tax revenue is paid out in benefits. Private health care corporations have an administrative overhead and profit slice of about 25%. They make this “Profit” by bribing Congress to restrain the regulatory power of the law. All wealth comes from the government. The only thing to be decided is who the government helps, the Private Sector or the working class consumer. There IS an Adversarial relationship between Owners and Workers.

What can we do? The great compromise is Firewall Economics. We should offer FE to the Oligarchs. If they agree, the collapse of Capitalism gets a soft landing. If they don’t agree, they get the hard landing that is certainly predictable from a brutal and unsustainable economic system.