Simple solutions for a rational system

Since we don’t have a rational system– merely one designed to serve its most powerful members at the expense of everyone else, though “everyone else” will merrily go along with what the elites want (just so long as a few buttons get pushed along the way, and, of course, the WonderBread and NASCAR/Jersey Shore Circuses keep flowing)– none of these devilishly simple and comprehensive solutions will likely be implemented any time soon on these shores.
But the great Charles Hugh Smith is such a visionary, I feel compelled to shout out his stuff… particularly his current trilogy: Income Tax Solution: Apply Social Security Taxes to the Super-Wealthy ; Income Disparity Solution: Return the Minimum Wage to 1969 Levels; and Big Idea Solution: Radically Lower the Cost Basis for the Entire Economy. Essentially, Smith recognizes that, at least in the realm of economic sustainability anyway, we often did things better decades ago– a few simple “retro” tweaks [adjusting minimum wage for inflation; restoring progressive income taxes; eliminating taxpayer-paid economic “friction”, etc.] that the elites will go apoplectic about (it will undermine their privileges) can go a great way toward restoring “fairness.” And who doesn’t like fairness? Oh yes… the people who have achieved wealth and power unfairly, of course.
Which is why I said “Simple solutions for a rational system…” Still. .. if things get so crappy here that even the low quality obesity-generating-rations we dispense now to the peasants get reduced to the point where we end up having our own Tahrir Squares (not how you bet, btw, and the Occupy! movement just isn’t there yet)… then maybe our own elites will (shades of the 1930’s) be sufficiently scared for their own hides to start thinking about things beyond feathering their own nests. It has happened before…