If we only had a financial system

Steve Randy Waldman opines that If we only had a financial system, then Capitalism would really work.

The elephant that is not in the room is a financial system. By a financial system, I don't mean the tottering cartel of banks and insurers loudly sucking newly printed cash into "collateral postings" and "deleveragings" and other meaningless nonactivities. That is no financial system at all. It is an ecology of intestines and tapeworms, tubes through which dollars flow and are skimmed en route to destinations about which the tripe-creatures have little interest or concern.

No, a financial system would be forward-looking. A financial system would be interested in the world, rather than fascinated by the patterns that formed behind its own mathematical eyelids. A financial system would hunger for information. It would leave no human preference overlooked and no technological possibility unconsidered. A financial system would embrace us all, would want to learn from us all. It would not be something external, something outsourced to specialists in London or Manhattan. It would want "savers" to express what they plan to do, how they hope to live, rather than offering generic claims on money along a disembodied spectrum of "risk". It would thirst for proposals, ideas, business plans designed to meet the preferences thus expressed, or to achieve possibilities not widely considered. A financial system would be creative. No stock exchange could contain the vast and multifarious tapestry of investable ideas a financial system would educe. A financial system would offer us opportunities to invest not in distant opportunities where we are disadvantaged, but in projects that are informationally, if not physically, near to us. A financial system would be ruthless. It would allow us to have a voice in the most important decision we collectively make, but would force us each to bear the costs of our errors.

Emphasis Mine

In other words, Mr. Waldman wants the democratic control of the financial system so that investment decisions are made on the basis of human need not corporate greed.

An interesting concept - something that Marx and Engels raised in The Communist Manifesto over a 160 years ago.

If the financial decisions are too important to be left to bankers, why are the actual production decisions still left in the hands of owners?

As Mr. Waldman says, democratic control of the financial system means that people will have to take responsibility for those decisions. This is a welcome development in the people's consciousness. For too long, the mystique of representative democracy has allowed us to become lazy. Someone else makes the hard decisions. Someone else takes the consequences.

We cannot advance to a Communist society until the Proletariat develops responsibility for its existence and advancement.

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