Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off - yeah, yeah

It is becoming quite clear to the less ignorant elements that some major restructuring of the economic sphere is in order. A host of economists without egg on their faces (Roubini and Taleb, among others) are calling for wholesale nationalisation of the banking industry. While we don't agree with them, we find the scale of that particular solution appropriate, and preferable to attempts to return to 'business as usual.'

Aside from our preferred solution of returning to bona fide money, any solution which at a minimum gets the world's circulating money out of the hands of the people who squandered so much of it is a step in the right direction. Stricter limits on what the banks may invest the circulating money in would also be an improvement.

Moving on from the financial troubles, it is obvious that neither the faux free-market system of the English-speaking world, nor the faux socialism of the EU can reliably deliver a modicum of prosperity to the masses. Major reform is in order.

One example of the sort of appropriately-scaled reform that ought to be on the table would be a negative income tax as the only form of national income support replacing social security, food stamps, and housing assistance (among other things). The idea has been lurking for quite a while, and supported by both liberals and conservatives, but has never been implemented. In our opinion the reason is that too many people make their living as welfare system bureaucrats.

This leads to the question, is major reform even possible? Has the political system become as dysfunctional as the grotesque that is the economic system? As the Depression grinds along, the presence or absence of political leadership will separate the societies that recover from the ones that don't.