Stiglitz: The Invisible Hand is Invisible Because It Isn't There … Americans have had it drilled into them that government is bad, but a new narrative is surfacing. Last Thursday, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick kicked off the Roosevelt Institute's new flagship initiative, Rediscovering Government, at an event in New York City, declaring, "There is no economy without government. There is no America without government. Government doesn't have a role; it is integral." In a keynote address, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Joseph Stiglitz also argued that healthy societies have strong governments and that his research has shown that "the reason the invisible hand often was invisible was that it wasn't there. – New Deal 2.0 is the blog of the Roosevelt Institute

Dominant Social Theme: FDR strikes back again. Freedom is so … yesterday. Government is integral to our well being. The narrative must change.

Free-Market Analysis: The power elite is starting to get serious. At first the alternative media was nothing but a tiny nuisance, like a buzzing gnat. Later on, it was seen as an easily confused entity and numerous false flags were launched to mix up the message of smaller government and more freedom.

These false-flag mechanisms are still being promoted, of course. We write about them in a separate article in today's edition, focusing on public banking and OWS. But apparently, attempting to sow confusion is not enough. Now a full-on pro-government campaign is being launched from one of the elite's crown-jewel think tanks – the Roosevelt Institute (see excerpt above).

This campaign, bluntly trumpeted by the Roosevelt Institute, is evidence of how far the alternative media freedom movement has come. The elites that evidently and obviously want to run the world now feel a necessity to launch a frontal attack on the 21st century's "freedom meme."

Unlike elite memes (that consolidate power via fear-based globalist promotions), the freedom meme is a spontaneous one and has likely been causing the same kinds of problems in the modern era that the Gutenberg Press caused the elites 600 years ago when it helped ignite the Renaissance and then the Reformation.

The power elite that exercises control over the world's central banks needs government in order to continue to press for world government. The power elite rules via mercantilism, from the shadows in the modern era.

No government, no mercantilism. And thus the need for a formal initiative to boost an unusually frank dominant social theme: Government is good. Here's more from the article:

Stiglitz says that "most Americans don't realize that we are no longer the country of opportunity that we think of ourselves, that America today has less equality of opportunity than any of the other advanced industrial countries." He points out how many like to say that our economy is doing well because GDP is growing, but that "if you're going to be judging how well an economy is doing, clearly I think the key metric that one wants to focus on is what is happening to the living standards of most citizens."

He says that most Americans don't realize how bad we're doing, including the fact that "the median income of a full-time male worker today is the same as it was in 1968," and "if you look at median household income it is the same today as it was a decade and a half ago."

How did our society get to a place where government has taken a back seat and where people are wary of government control? Stiglitz thanks the conservatives who have successfully touted false ideology about markets over the past 40 years. While they like to blame the government for inequality, Stiglitz notes that not even Adam Smith thought markets were anything beyond efficient.

"Nobody ever said that they were fair, that they would lead to a distribution of income that was socially acceptable." Furthermore, he says, "Many of the aspects of our inequality are a result of market failure. People who don't have health insurance when they get sick wind up in extreme poverty and they can't get health insurance because of a whole set of market failures."

He says it's "striking that in spite of the fact that there is no intellectual basis for what you might call a 'Smithian' view that unfettered markets lead to efficiency," conservatives have marched ahead with this idea. So why was there so much economic growth after World War II? Stiglitz says one reason is "the legacy of the Roosevelts, the legacy that government made a difference."

One hardly knows where to start here. US dominance after World War II was a function of decimating every other country on the planet. Only the US industrial plant was intact. US post-war dominance had little or nothing to do with the statist and authoritarian programs that Roosevelt imposed.

Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War began the US slide toward Leviathan. Woodrow Wilson continued it and FDR advanced the big government meme aggressively. Today, the US's joblessness and general economic malaise is a direct result of taxes, regulation and monopoly central banking.

One is tempted to feel sorry for the Roosevelt Institute – on a purely theoretical level. It's hard to argue for an "ism" anymore. Communism, socialism, fascism – these were all compelling in their day but have been discredited by hard experience and ongoing information on the Internet about the Way the World Really Works.

The elites now have a considerable uphill battle. They are trying everything – economic depression, authoritarian laws … and now outright pro-government promotions. But a narrative, once it gets going on a global scale, is hard to change. We venture the elites are about a decade too late when it comes to re-establishing a pro-government narrative.

What we call the Internet Reformation is a powerful force. It took the elites centuries to recover from the advent of the Gutenberg Press. There are likely at least decades to go before they recover from the damage that the Internet has done to elite memes.