The only people who sincerely believe the American Economy is not really broken (but just requires superior tinkering or a better way of modifying the Social Protocols that govern human behavior, especially in the economic world) are delusional because they are not rationally learning from history. More than half a century of real history proves they are delusional.

[Socrates, like any other practical and rational man, would try to find “Why” and “How” things did not work out well for the average common citizen. Plato would look for a “new idea” to overcome the defects without first understanding what the defects really are; and why and how they are defective. There are always these two competing “visions” of human nature – the rationally practical vs. the theoretical. You know, Socrates vs. Plato.]

Half a century ago an invaluable four-year college education at the most elite schools costs about $10,000 for the whole 4-year room and board experience. Almost anywhere you looked back then education was “real education.” (Bullshit colleges existed but were rare.)

When I entered the City College of New York (a couple of years after presidential candidate Bernard Sanders entered a different school within the NYC Public University system) the freshman orientation class instructor had a standard line that had been used for the 20-year period in which CCNY and California Berkeley had monopolized the top two positions in producing Bachelor Degree graduates who subsequently, elsewhere, acquired a PhD degree. (Those PhD degrees were pretty consistently “real” too.) The speaker told us to look at the 4 freshmen around us (front, back, left and right) and recognize that in 4 years 3 out of 4 will have left school. Standards were still real in education when I entered college in 1962.

Five years later the Social Protocols at CCNY completely changed. First they lowered the entrance standards (which had previously rejected the preponderance of applicants) to include anyone with a high school diploma. The Education Experts and Authorities had already begun to institutionalize “Social Promotion” in the lower grades (from 1 to 12) creating a world in which it was possible to acquire a high school diploma without learning how to read at a third grade level.

[There was a famous NFL football player who held himself up as an example of a functional illiterate who passed right on through college 20 or 30 years ago.]

Economics to be real involves real things and real costs.

I bought my first car, a 1966 Chevrolet Corvair 500, for $2,125 cash at the end of the model year. It was the cheapest compact on the market with an automatic transmission and a push-button radio. (The powerglide transmission had a 2-speed little gear selector on the dashboard between the steering column and the radio.)

For $10,000 one could, if admitted, attend MIT or Harvard University and get a 4-year degree. Or you could purchase 5 brand new compact cars.

Savings banks paid 5% interest on deposits and contracted 30-year fixed-rate mortgages at about 6%, with a 20% down payment, in case something went wrong. (In any large group, over time. lots of things could go wrong – because individual people have Free Will.) That system did not change until the Carter Administration. (Just like Socrates in his world, I have a really good memory.)

The Experts and Authorities running our education systems for over half a century only come in four categories. The majority are just getting along by going along. (Everybody who is not born independently wealthy as part of the Social Oligarchy needs an income to live.)

The other three categories are the problem.

• The driving force of negative change comes from a half century of “Idealists” imposing their “Ideals” through the culture at its most influential area – perpetually educating the “next generation.”
• They are assisted by the category of those who are simply incompetent. (Stupid might be a more accurate word in “Education.”) The frequency of incompetence, especially in institutional structures, is universally underestimated.
• The last category is the ever-present category in human nature – those who are personally, knowingly corrupt and therefore operate under the principle that you make higher profits selling shoddier merchandise to a customer base that grows more generously funded from year to year. (They never cut prices or budgets in the “Education” industry.)

This analysis will necessarily run on for several sessions. But, before I bring this introduction to an end, I wish to categorically state that half a century ago in the profession (and in its credential-granting institutions of higher-education) that we call Economics (or Macro-Economics) something went seriously wrong.

And just as importantly over the course of the last quarter-century in the profession (and in the credential-granting institutions of higher-education) that we call Accounting something also went seriously wrong.

I don’t know whether to call Bernard Sanders “terminally naïve” or (fatuously) stupid for he clearly is a proponent of the Socialist delusion in spite of half a century of adult experience and observation to disabuse a minimally rational mind from such insanity.

But he is at least half right about the corruption of the completely politicized world of business and finance. (If you wish to be super rich in business contribute generously to both parties!)

Besides the two corrupt professions (and the corrupt prestigious universities that credential those professions – Economists and Accountants), there are two cliches that are the source of the irrationality that has corrupted our economic world. They too will need their own separate sessions for a rational explanation of “Why” and “How” the Social Oligarchy has corrupted our world.

Over the centuries “Peer Review” has meant that the modernizing world of science could give the world a constantly improving way of life from generation to generation for any common American citizen without inherited advantages or other social “connections.” But what “Peer Review” means today is a corrupted, politicized delusion whenever and wherever what is called “Political Correctness” mandates it. It has become selective and therefore optional, rather than rationally skeptical and therefore universal. (Any true scientist humbly knows how easy it is for one or more geniuses to make a mistake in judgment no matter how brilliant they may be.)

The fourth and last explanation revolves about the ultimate cliché in the thoroughly corrupted bullshit field we call “Investment Banking.” (Even a dogmatic simpleton like Bernard Sanders is on to something with the leftist rhetoric about the “Wall Street Casino.”)

It is not that fraudulent Social Oligarchy investment bankers sign a document claiming to have performed their “Due Diligence” that is the problem. The problem is that our corrupted and politicized Social Oligarchy in the lawyer industry (cartel of lawyers and judges) accepts their lie and no longer recognizes the “Social Protocols” that made responsible parties responsible for the consequences of that “Due Diligence.” I do not know how long it was before the 1998 Long Term Capital Management blow up revealed it, but it revealed that investment banker personal legal liability had clearly been removed from the Social Protocols we call the Rule of Law.

If you are arrogantly stupid enough to leave an email audit trail gloating over the fraud you were selling to the dopey client, you might get individually prosecuted. The fact that the fraud was run through the firm and their well-paid legal staff – in-house and consultants – never seems to broaden the criminal prosecutions of individual people. [The shareholders, of course, take the losses that their fiduciaries running the operation are mysteriously immune from fiduciary responsibility for. And then the Central Bankers distort interest rates so that frugal people with cash savings continue forever to subsidize the profligate and the greedy and the dishonest – all performed under the best advice of the most prestigious Experts and Authorities in the fields of (Macro)Economics and Accounting.]

I think Socrates last word for this introduction would be very similar to what he says on page 339 of my book, The Memoirs of Socrates: The Last Rational Man, wherein he says in the year 407 BCE:

“…If this keeps up they will find a way to have us destroyed – even behind our impregnable Long Walls and powerful Navy!
“In the privacy of my family this is easily recognized as a moral problem. In just about every more public and social place you look in our Athenian world this is the socially competitive celebrity-gossip entertaining and exciting (bullshit) world in which we live. Ask any citizen and he will tell you: we live in exciting times; we live in times of social and political ‘change’ and ‘progress.’
“[We live in an age of follower morons, led by Sophist ‘educated’ leader morons. And, in what is left of my old-age years, I truly tremble for my country.]”