[Purrybonker]

All these posts I see here re: homelessness in San Fran et al, shoplifters, "lazy people" outrage from the comfortably situated.

All the bitterness, anger here and everywhere by everyone.

I can't help but recall some of Steinbeck's stuff "Grapes of Wrath", "In Dubious Battle".

Also, can't help but thinking where my sympathies inevitably lie when I read those novels.

John Dos Passos did an even more comprehensive job of capturing that era indelibly, for me in his un-novels, the USA trilogy.

John Maynard Keynes - basically the father of capitalist economic thinking.

Less understood (check out the excellent discussion of Keynes by Robert Skidelsky), Keynes could see that capitalism was akin to a Faustian deal to advance human society.

He recognized that capitalism rewarded the worst of human motivations but he wrongly assumed that when people became sufficiently wealthy they would become sated with assets and thereafter wealth would become equally shared.

He foresaw a world where everyone would work 8 hour work weeks due to the technological advances capitalism would produce by way of rewarding human ingenuity and greed.

Keynes was mostly right about the advancement and greed part - he was just magnificently wrong about the "sated" part.

So, today we live in a world of immense inequality. And we are surprised about anger and scofflaw behavior?

Toss away your virtue laden Ayn Rand, pick up some Dos Passos or some Steinbeck to gain a better understanding of our world.