Creating "Demand"

Watched Charlie Rose last night. He had Larry Summers on for the second night running. Summers is a weird guy, no kidding. It would take a month to try to tell how powerful and wicked he has been over the years, but he manages to look "simple and innocent" on TV.

Last night he kept harping on one thing needed to "get the country moving again": create demand. He outlined four ideas for doing that. I forget what they were. They all stopped short of what I would go for. Summers would as soon mention knocking the bankers out of control of money issue in this land as he would undress in public. Nonetheless that is the way to go. Have the government create all money, interest free, spend it on infrastructure and, if necessary, give it away in great gobs to the people (not the rich).

That is, implement Major Douglas's plan for govt. handouts to create demand, to bring the "power to buy" somewhere near the "power to make." I'll give Summers credit for spotting the main problem: there isn't enough purchasing power to buy even the limited amount of stuff available now from the factories.

I do recall one of Summers's ideas: step up promotion of American manufactures to foreign nations. Why is that better than getting our own people to buy our own stuff? These giant economic brains seem never to see the obvious.

All this may seem a little obscure to the uninitiated. Have no fear. We live in a world of (relative) abundance even in spite of peak oil. It's just that our damned élites are terrified of letting ordinary people have some access to it.

But that's the needed trick: let the people be able to buy their own product. What a revolutionary idea!