As if issues of maintaining proper civil control over individual corporations weren’t enough, consider again the stock market’s perverse contemporary tendency to become depressed when unemployment is whittled down, and to soar happily again when more people are out of work. 

What if, instead of representing the retirement hopes of just the subset of the population who have managed contribute to 401Ks and the like, the Dow Jones Index were the embodiment of everybody’s old age security?  How would we reconcile our interests in keeping the Dow high enough to finance a decent retirement with the need to put able and willing people to work?  On this as well as other fundamental economic issues, we could well find ourselves unable to develop a workable consensus on much of anything.

In such an environment, not only would government’s ability to play its proper and legally mandated role be seriously undermined;  it could become so lacking in viable direction as to eventually not function as a government at all

Is this really what we want?

The unfortunate truth is that it may very well be what we get, if we don’t get our heads up soon.