I have a number of… not friends but rather people I often encounter on line now promoting this book The Great Taking by David Rogers Webb. I don’t really feel like reading yet another manifesto/screed/whatever this is that may or may not raise my blood pressure or bore me to tears.
Has anyone read this? Any opinions? My very superficial reaction based on the scanty information I’ve found so far makes me think it’s taking some few actual facts and spinning them into a global conspiracy theory (as if we haven’t see that before) but maybe I’m wrong. So I’m asking for a quick summary if someone has one, or just some more feedback.
You can read for yourself (The Great Taking at archive.org) if you can even make it past the twenty-five page “prologue that, as far as I cared to read it, appears to be a personal screen about how the system betrayed him. I skimmed through the rest of the book quickly which mostly seems to be taking the tenets of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and weaving them into a well-organized global conspiracy of elite fiscalcrats, which…yes, the very wealthy do influence and in some measure control markets and influence monetary policy, as well as have access to financial instruments beyond the merely rich and lower classes to shield their wealth from taxation and leverage their interests to many times the face value, but I’d scarcely call it well organized or evidence of conspiracy, and in fact the 2007/8 global financial catastrophe would seem to indicate that all of this leveraging has produced dangerous unstable and difficult-to-predict fiscal behavior.
His essential premise seems to be summed up in this ‘fact’: “Ownership of securities as a property has been replaced with a new legal concept of a ‘security entitlement’, which is a contractual claim assuring a very weak position if the account provider becomes insolvent.” While the latter part of this statement is true, I don’t think that ‘securities’ such as stocks, mutual funds, bonds, et cetera have ever been legally regarded as real property (because they aren’t), and instead represent some kind of transferable financial stake in a business, fund, or commitment, and if the ‘account provider becomes insolvent’ that is just the risk that you take as an investor. Particularly influential investors, and especially those with ‘insider’ information, can shield themselves from loss or take priority on recovery better than the average investor, but I don’t think there is evidence that they are doing so in some kind of deliberately coordinated fashion.
Some of the individual critiques of dematerialization, harmonization, collateraliszation, ‘Central Clearing Parties’, et cetera are legitimate arguments against the utility of post-Keynesian economics and the globalized financial system the application of MMT has produced, I think the notion that this was a preplanned and globally orchestrated conspiracy to deny everyone actual ownership in anything is lacking to say the least. That is not to say that the very wealthy have not lobbied for financial laws that both protect their interests and force the general public to invest their money into ‘the market’, hence why nearly all retirement plans offered by corporate America today are in the form of 401(k) plans for which the liability is on the employee rather than employer-guaranteed pension plans or annuities, but that is just corporate capitalism in action, not evidence of a cabal.
To the extent that I could stand to read this and parse the factual from the fantastical, he seems to be mostly just complaining about the consequences of ending the Bretton Woods system, although curiously failing to address an actual confirmed conspiracy underlying our global financial system, which is Kissinger making an agreement to peg of the price of oil to the US dollar by forcing Saudi Arabia (and by extension, the Arab world) to trade oil only in American currency, creating a system where all global trade is in essence shipped, distributed, and sold at rates dependent upon USD valuation.
Well, yes, I have had several of the people mentioned in the OP send me links to it, what I’m wondering is if it is worth spending my time on it. Obtaining it does not seem to be difficult.
