Annie Lowrey, Atlantic" is how Real Clear Markets links to:
The Truth About the Gig Economy
Uber and similar companies aren’t driving huge changes in the way that Americans make a living.
Real Clear Markets' libertarian headline writer completely missed the point of the article, which is that the gig economy is as much as 80% smaller than we first thought. A capitalism disintegrating into a chaos of millions of small holders in risky circumstances, careening into the ditch, is a complete myth. The leftists who still long for this resemble no one so much as the Christian millenarians.
Clearly Marxism-light thoroughly infects economic thinking at the popular level in more places than just The Atlantic, blinding us to where we really are, which is in the golden age of fascism. Here tax reform for the individual is an afterthought, a necessary piece of propaganda in the big scheme of things having to do with state capitalism and its myriad forms of corporate welfare. What really matters is the relationship between government and business, protecting their mutual interests.
The West's version is little different from China's. China exercises top down control through the corrupt Communist Party, but we increasingly have the same thing from the bottom up through the unjust hand of Political Correctness, populated through the right schools and the revolving door of Washington where the regulators become the richly rewarded regulated.
The extension and consolidation of control by this globalist fascist system since the Reagan Revolution is responsible for all the failure lately attributed to capitalism by the coddled generations of children of the post-war Baby Boom. It couldn't be otherwise in a world where everything has been organized to feed the corporation through the glorification of the job. You must go to school, you must get good grades, you must get a college degree in order to get hired, you'll need loans to make this happen, and for the car to get to work, and good credit, and . . .. And then they've got you. It's called preying on human nature.
The declarations of independence of our former youth often used to take the form of getting out of Dodge as soon as they turned eighteen. Now those declarations are a mere shadow of their former selves, taking the form of tattoos on that creature that still lives in your basement in his twenties . . . or thirties.
The risk-taking of capitalism has been expunged, and the consequences of rebelling against the new rigidity have been amplified. Stenosis has set in, and if the barbarians finally do overtake us they will find that the bones break easily.