Jeffrey Snider, here:
Employment grows not on the pace of redistribution-derived consumer spending in the lower classes, but as new firms innovate and grow to replace older firms that have seen their last days. Failure and rebirth are the capitalist "secrets", and demand always follows supply in that line. Interrupt it at your peril.
Unfortunately, we see in the 21st century a different strain of imperialism that is rooted in Hobson's preferred solutions to it. By giving government more power over industry and business, Hobson suggested that government would be able to end business agitation toward external colonialism. But in doing so, governments have introduced the seeds of cronyism that take the form of internal imperialism. Big businesses have achieved regulatory leverage in a manner that may preclude the innovation and business cycles from creating that positive economic trajectory. And monetary policy, all in the name of aggregate demand, appears to be playing a large role.
... OWS [Occupy Wall Street] and its sympathizers ... are really protesting their own philosophies put into practice via a bastardized capitalism - so corrupted by devotion to aggregate demand in this era that it can hardly be referred to as such.
There will never be, and has never been, any such thing as fully free markets, nor should there be. What we are arguing is not absolutes but proportions. ... In perhaps the greatest and most tragic of ironies here, the Fed appeals directly to inflation as a means to destroy savings, an impulse to which I have to think Hobson would readily approve, but that inflation is itself a means of redistribution that further concentrates savings among the wealthy. More than an irony, it seems as if this inconsistency is a feature of this philosophy, as taken to its logical ends it produces something akin to circular reasoning. It is a place where the socialists of OWS criticize directly the tools of socialist monetary policy as if they are anything apart from each other.
