Optimizing economic growth is like making a body function in an economic bloodstream. If the head hoards all the blood, then the body collapses when the rest of the body parts such as the heart, hands and feet do not receive any blood. Therefore, greed, which is the engine of the right-wing capitalist system, does not work.
Excessive saving does not work either, because then some blood (= money) is taken out of the circulation and the different parts of the body do not have as much blood to propel the body forward either. We have large financial operations such as banks and international giants that are hoarding money and slowing down development to protect themselves.
We have a government that tightens in a paradoxical view of the economy and allows large assets to lie still without creating benefit. In 2012, Sweden had net assets of SEK 637 billion. The price is that many in society are cut off from the cycle. An economy that plunders its own households and its own society. An economy that consumes its resources intended for a new return. Finance is not money, but it exists to be a fuel for creating new things.
Here there are further connections to the environment. If we use up all the metal in the earth, we will eventually run out of metal. But if we recycle, the metal doesn't run out.
So create jobs for everyone, make sure they have a wage they can consume for and keep the economic wheels rolling along. Make sure that those who are still sick and unemployed get proper social insurance, because then they can in any case benefit as consumers. Then make sure to recycle what we take from the earth, because then the earth's resources don't have to run out.
Some additional reward for desirable achievements such as an academic degree, responsibility or creativity etc. is okay. But the base level must be high enough to keep the cycles rolling along. When some are rewarded too much, they start saving instead of consuming. Then money is taken out of the economic cycle and the economy languishes.
The Vikings are believed by historians to have helped boost the economy after the recession of the Middle Ages. When they looted the churches for their economically unproductive gold and silver, the Vikings then used the stolen goods to trade and the precious metals were brought back into the economic cycle. The result was that trade increased and the economy grew.
Now I am not in favor of individual looting and violence against the church. But no social institution should be allowed to accumulate too much wealth. Tax is a legal form of plunder that keeps the economic cycle going. And I believe that it was not morally right for the Vikings to plunder them, but if it had been possible for English society to tax the church and distribute its abundance among the poor, then this would have been morally right and just as effective. No one should be tax exempt.
The economy works best if everyone is allowed to be a winner.
Conclusion:
- The origin of the economy belongs to nature. All natural processes depict cycles such as the water cycle.
- The market economy depicts an artificial model. It broke the ties to nature, society and people when the industrial revolution came in the 1700th century with its own, new laws that did not really exist but were hypotheses.
- This explains the problem with the market economy. It does not contain a natural cycle, but stops the flow of the economy. The market economists also want to limit the tax, which is a cycle. Everything is collected in the gigantic pockets of a few. Money exists to create new benefits.
PS
Theft must of course be proven. But if one is rich and another is starving, isn't asserting the inviolability of property rights a theft from and violence against the one who is close to dying of starvation? Was Robin Hood evil and the Sheriff of Nottingham good?
Well, the idea of the money in a cycle is perfectly reasonable and should be guiding. It is also a basic idea in the Solidar system ( http://solidar.lir.be/HemSida) described by Åsa Brandberg. Also available in the book Money on the Planet's Conditions.