[detbuch]

QUOTE=Pete F.;1157475]And how would eliminating large parts of the current federal government change any part of this example of how our retail markets have changed:

To begin with, you claim that "The dying middle class is the problem and the concentration of wealth is one of the causes."
I assume by "wealth" you mean "money." The federal government has, by far, the greatest concentration of money in this country. And it has the largest monopoly of power and the total monopoly on doing the various things it does "for" us or against us.

Amazon is a good example of what has happened and how wealth distribution has changed our society

Amazon is an irrelevant midget compared to the power and influence the fed gov has over us, and the federal government extracts way more money from us and our communities than Amazon does.

30 years ago if I wanted a pair of pants or shoes, I would go to the store in town and buy them. Assume I spent a hundred dollars . . . Of the $100 I spent probably 60% would remain in my area to be spent again and again.
Well some say, Amazon is cheaper, you save money
Assume it only costs me $80 for the same thing from Amazon
Of that $80 none stays in my area to be spent again and again
There are no local employees
The money doesn't get spent at my or my employers establishment.
The store no longer pays taxes

There is an infrastructure in your community that is paid by Amazon to receive, store and deliver your purchase.

The $20 dollars I "saved" is the most costly money you can find.

It's $20 that you would not have had to spend in other parts of your community if you had paid $100. It could help to support some new businesses to replace those that were lost. Entrepreneurs in your community can produce things that Amazon would sell. When there are opportunities, entrepreneurs who are free to do so, create new wealth. Where there are productive people, wealth can be created. If they are free to do so.

Small businesses have always been ephemeral, and have come and gone for many reasons.

That money is what funds our society, pays our neighbors, provides little league, makes local tackle shops work and is what our society was based on.[/QUOTE]

Our society was not based on a leviathan central government extracting the greatest amount of money from our local communities. Those "large parts of the current federal government" you speak of were not part of our founding.

Wealth and money are not the same thing. The "wealth" of our founding nation was not money, but a free exchange between labor and production as Adam Smith would have envisioned it. Money was just a means of representing and distributing that wealth. Our "wealth" was a product of a free, capitalist, market. Which was an escape from a previous government regulated mercantile market which actually extracted wealth from the labor and production of local communities or colonies.

Our present economic market is evolving from free market capitalism back into a sort of neo mercantilist system in which government regulation of the market is greatly for the benefit of government treasury and power along with its crony oligarchs such as Amazon--national govt. extraction of, as opposed to individually distributed, wealth. The current neo-mercantile type of national wealth extracts a major portion of the money earned from labor and production and redistributes it to government bureaucratic power, and, by regulation which favors big business, to its oligarchic partners, as well as to its government dependents.

A healthy "middle class" resulted from free market capitalism, and it shrinks as we switch to mercantilism, and then to socialism and ultimately to communism.

The massive regulatory system of our current administrative state has diminished the power of communities to run their own businesses and lives. The devolution of that regulatory and administrative power back to the states and local communities where it used to reside would increase the wealth of their citizens.

And the "middle class" could be restored. In the meantime we are left wondering what to do. And think, maybe, unattainable term limits would do the job.