Sunshine Week Letter sent to Sunshine Week - G20 Summit in Washington by Rajeev Mahindra

GET OUT OF THE WAY: An open letter to the G20 Summit

Ladies and Gentlemen

I write to you on behalf of the nameless and countless producers in your respective countries.

If you want a recovery, there is nothing you need to do. JUST GET OUT OF THE WAY. 

Stop flooding the markets with your worthless paper and empty promises because that has not and will not achieve anything. It has only succeeded in prolonging the misery.

I hope that all your posturing and the prejudiced opinions you have been voicing these last few months, will be tempered by reality, before long but I am not betting on that.

What you see unfolding before your eyes is nothing more than the logical culmination of decades of economic abuse and administrative profligacy. No matter how much you rant and rave against the capitalist system, you are all beneficiaries of the largesse that only capitalism could have generated.

I an sure that I am not the only one watching with complete bewilderment that instead of recognizing the real roots of the problem, you have the impudence to meet on US soil and demand that they put their future into the same hell that you have consigned your own countries to, for most of the last century?

It is not capitalism that is responsible for the financial and economic downturn. 

It is the unreasonable wish to get something for nothing that is at the root of the most crises. Humans have been guilty of this in the past and I doubt if this is the last time. And what?s more, when things have gone wrong they have blamed everyone else but themselves. 

It is no wonder then that in as products and fervent advocates of the economic aberration dubbed mixed economy, you have put your heads resolutely in the sand and refuse to believe that this is the end of the road for the system that you advocate, and not the demise of capitalism.

For a group that comprises educated and respected individuals holding (I am sure) university degrees, you are all remarkably uninformed of one simple fact: THERE IS NO CAPITALIST COUNTRY EXISTING IN THE WORLD TODAY.

May I remind you that the economic system, that USA offers in the name of capitalism is nothing more than a mixed economy. In a capitalist economy, the government is not expected to brass up when ever there is an economic downturn. Because the capitalist system does not give it the authority to determine economic policy to benefit pressure groups living off the largess of taxes collected under duress.

The problems that you now confront are a direct result of the corrupt system of favors and whims, pressure groups and vested interests, which are a hallmark of every mixed economy,  that you now expect and wish the USA to adopt in full.

USA, as it exists today is the quintessential mixed economy, with one difference. It is still more honest than the systems that pass for economies in the countries that you purportedly represent.

The fact that you try so hard to evade is this: the mixed economy is morally and ethically bankrupt concept that has no other function than to serve as a machine that rubberstamps the authority of the ones who dispense it?s favors, in short YOU. It may have served to get you votes in the past but this time, unless the USA saves your skin, you are all on the way out in the next elections.

In something reminiscent of the stove calling the kettle black you are today gathered here to damn and ridicule the very system that makes all the wealth that you see. You are damning the very same country that has kept your markets humming by providing a market for goods you are now finding difficult to palm off?

Before you embark upon your avowed course of action to damn the USA, and everything it stands for, spare a moment to look around yourself and you will find it hard not to see the capitalist achievements all around you.  

The airplane that brought you here, the gleaming hotels and the limousines that you take for granted are the products of the very American economic system that you have are here to condemn. 

Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome burnt. The similarities are hard to miss. Millions are being spent on your junkets this time as were spent last week on the G20 Finance 
Ministers meet, without it making the slightest difference to the sliding economy. While the world struggles to make sense of the unfolding events and countless jobs are being lost in thousands each day the best you can come up with is to meet for powwow where you discuss how to pass the blame to everyone else but the real culprits: YOURSELF and your governments.

You have been blaming the USA for exporting the disasters called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to your countries and thereby landing you in this financial mess. What were your MBAs and your financial pundits and economists doing with the information (dating back to 2004) when these same two companies were the target of a Federal investigation charged with wasting billions of dollars in federal resources? 

They just ignored that and your countries went on putting more and more money on the table in the fervent hope that somehow, someone would magically pay you unbelievable returns, that you knew were too good to be true. 

You did that it because there were no comparable opportunities in your own countries and left to yourselves you had no way of convincing any one to invest your you?re your own moribund economies.

You did that because the US government stood behind it all. And who stands behind the US government?

The very same (shackled and damned) capitalist system that you and your ilk have been denouncing. Wow, what a bunch of losers.

It is fashionable and trendy to bash capitalism as you all having been doing for the last few months , years...whatever. But the one fact that you cannot escape any more is that it IS fruits of CAPITALISM (in whatever distorted and maimed form), that have resulted in the longest period of prosperity that the world has ever seen. Left to yourselves, you would just go back to warring tribal nations, pillaging and looting from whoever was unlucky enough to let his hard labors and produce fall into your grubby hands.

You have been crying out loud that the economy is bleeding jobs and that something must be done to set that right. Of all the destructive assumptions made by mixed economy advocates this is the most destructive.

For your kind information, the purpose of an economy is not to create jobs but to create products and services. It is the demand for these products and services that creates the associated jobs.

You have been talking about a new world order, which has checks that prevents banks from overreaching themselves. Such checks do not need not be invented, they already exist. 

Remember the Gold Standard? You have been trumpeting a new global order. The choice is simple. INSTITUTE THE GOLD STANDARD. Alan Greenspan wrote in 1962 about the dangers of consuming while not producing anything economically beneficial, but I doubt if many of you even know of this.

You do not need advanced economics and management degrees to understand one simple fact: If all you do is consume, there comes a day when your account is empty. That day 
has arrived, for you and millions of your countrymen.

You have grown indolent and lazy on the fruits of the efforts of those who work and produce, but now comes the time for reckoning when you find that the economies that your expensive MBAs have MANAGED to your own ends no longer do your bidding. Is it too difficult to understand why? Because before you can manage, you must have some one do the production for you. 

The producers have decided that your management just makes them poorer and poorer even as you promise them a better deal next week, next month, next year.

All your public sector officials, and bureaucrats who vote for you year after year, are not producing anything. They are merely an ever increasing burden upon the productive members of the society, slowly and inexorably suffocating all initiative and innovation.

You who have given to the world a tomorrow that never becomes a reality now face a today this is worse than your worst nightmare.

Your managers and expensive economists have run out of ideas. None of them is clever enough to make the one illusion that has been the underpinning of your prosperity, last any longer : It is NOT possible to create some thing out of nothing. 

The truth that you prefer not to recognize is that for you and your subjects to consume, some one some where has to produce. That production cannot go on when you use the force of organized government to tax productive endeavor and then proceed to sluice the money to a select clique of shadowy figures who do no more than channel the money into unproductive ends.

You have used the largess collected from taxes to buy votes, in return promising goodies which you knew deep in your hearts that you could not deliver because you thought "before they find out...I will be out of the government anyway, and then it is not my problem". Too bad. Now it is! There is nowhere to run to. Nowhere to hide. 

Your proverbial chickens are coming home to roost. What are you complaining about?

In times good or bad, each of your respective countries has fostered the notion that the government is there to ensure a just distribution of resources. And where do these resources come from? The producers. It is the producers that are giving up now.

Make no mistake, each of you presides over economies that are no more than planned tribal conglomerations, and left to yourself you would not have any possibility to come up with anything more than empty promises which are worth exactly as much as a CDO today.

In conclusion, if you have even a shred of conscience left in you and even a vague sense of the enormous responsibility and trust that has been placed upon you by your respective countrymen, GO BACK HOME, and put your OWN houses in order before you come banging on the door of the USA, demanding that they scrap capitalism and adopt the mixed economy model.

Go back home and start dismantling the huge bureaucracies that you have let flourish by default, disband the welfare state and tell your voters that they need to work. 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, for many many years if they wish to get out of the present crisis alive.

You will need guts to do much of this, of which there is always a shortage, but look at New Zealand. If such a small country can, so can you, as most of you are far bigger.

I also have a message to many among the capitalists, captains of industry, and the productive elements in the American society: DO NOT BE APOLOGETIC. Do not let the capitalist system be sacrificed on the altar of self immolation. Dare to speak out. Dare to have your voice heard.

Or it is curtains, for all of us.