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We have surpassed the "trickle-down" theory and entered a new era of generative economics. To understand the relevance and virtues of Barack Obama economic vision, we have to look at the long history of struggle between American laissez-faire capitalism and American middle-class capitalism. We are on the verge of what is likely to be a comprehensive philosophical shift in economic policy toward generative investment, which means counting as economic imperatives the resilience and productive expansion of the positive bases of economic growth, i.e. human and environmental health and well-being, resource-density and cyclical models of resource use and reproduction.

We must also eschew, to avoid distraction, "filter terms like "socialism" or "big government, which are for many reasons, useless in the current realities of American economic policy. The government is bigger than it has ever been, and ideologically speaking, the issue is totally incoherent: the most supply-side administration in recent decades has produced the largest expansion of both spending and government power, while the social-services minded administration of the 1990s presided over the largest reductions.

The key is to understand that if the majority of consumers find cash scarce, even those businesses funded by the investor class will also find it scarce, as spending falls away. We have seen concrete proof of this fact in the recent mortgage-related credit crisis. The failure, on a massive scale, of home loans designed to help deliver equity and bargaining power to consumers unable to meet the profit-demands of lending institutions, has drained the middle class broadly of easy credit and disposable income.

Current Trends

Prices have gone up, credit has frozen, banks have closed, and ultimately, the economy sunk into "negative growth", because the 70% of GDP representing consumer spending could not draw from those now depleted capital resources. The current climate provides us with a kind of acid-test of basic economic theories, including the assumption that "pro-business" market policy could not have a constricting effect on capital. We now see that abundance can produce economic pathologies that lead to widespread scarcity, and prolonged contraction.

The "free market" is really a market-wide conceptualization of economics that has tended to be applied always as a policy that permits the most powerful actors in a given market the maximum freedom to operate without responsible oversight or constraint. It is the misapplication of the market-wide factor (totalizing market policy and imposing harsh realities on those who can ill afford to face them, instead of recognizing the need to generate health across the entire pool of market resources) that has led to this opportunity-choking strategy.

By enhancing the "competitiveness" of the most powerful, the focus of market competition is removed to the realm of the most powerful operators; smaller economic entities cannot compete. Small family farms give way to large corporate agribusiness compounds; small "mom and pop" shops in small towns and big cities alike, are outmaneuvered by conglomerates with efficiency protocols, massive marketing budgets and economies of scale, to help them undercut sustainable local prices and reinforce their dominance.

The result tends to be a process of consolidation and the effective closing
of the market under the influence of ever-fewer powerful actors. A true open market is one in which not only those who have most successfully concentrated power in their hands are free to compete, but the lone individual can find capital, establish an enterprise of just one or a handful of people, and compete for local market share in a fair and viable way.

This keeps capital moving more freely and generates a broader base of prosperity, upon which a market for goods and services can be optimized to suit the needs and interests of consumers. In such a scenario, a business achieves vast success not by exerting influence over the levers of power (usually artificially made available to them via selective deregulation), but by best meeting the needs and interests of consumers.

That has to include doing so within a policy framework that privileges those needs and interests... for instance, protecting public health and environmental sustainability, while preventing criminal activity: three performative urgencies which when neglected serve as a serious drag on the sustainability of dynamic growth. There is nothing "socialist"

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