Prudent Stewardship Infuses Morality into Money

The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University , in conjunction with The William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance, is hosting a Book Talk by Luke Messac , author of the book, Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine to explore

shifts in health insurance, hospital finance, and the moral economy of care

Because healthcare in the United States is in crisis.

The healthcare delivery network in the US has been infected with the disease of Neoliberal Financialization, replacing the careful caring for planetary health and human wellbeing with the endless pursuit of GROWTH from which profits can be extracted in the stock markets.

Healthcare insurance in the US has stopped being a social innovation for averaging the actual cost of delivering private and shared public health to Americans, and America, and has instead become an engine of Growth for profit extraction through securities trading.

Debt collection practices as a symptom.

The cause is Neoliberalism.

And the financialization of Fiduciary Money that has pushed our common sense of prudent stewardship out, and put the expert knowledge of securities trading professionals in, as the accepted standard of what is permissible in fiduciary practice for Pensions & Endowments.

There is a lie at the core of Neoliberalism that fuels this spread of financialization into everything, including healthcare.

That lie is that money does not matter. That all choices made in society, through the economy, reflect the merit and morality of each of us, as individual choosers. Money is just an instrument through which we use to express our individual merits, and our personal morality. Money itself doesn't matter. What matters is how we choose to use it.

But we cannot use what we do not have.

So, Neoliberalism advances, sotto voce, the corollary proposition that if you don't have the money you need to make the choices you want, or need, to make in the market, by spending money to pay the price - which is the mechanism the markets use to allocate scarcity - that is your own fault. It means you do not have the merit, or the morality, required to succeed.

This, of course, is patent nonsense.

An even more nonsensical corollary to this nonsensical corollary to the falsity that is Neoliberalism, is that those who have control over a lot of money have that control because of their superior merit and morality, and that those who have the most control over the most money, the very richest among us, have the most merit and the most morality. (So, we should let them make all the choices for all of humanity, and dispense with this nonsense about self-government, and accountability to us. Right?)

Yes, money is just a legal instrument that communities use to effect transactions between people separated by distances of time, place and social connection.

But money is also how we pay the price to make a choice in the markets for making choices.

If you have money, you can make the choice you want. If you don't have the money, you have to make a different choice.

So the dynamics by which money is made to flow are very important to sufficiency for longevity of social cohesion within a population.

And those dynamics are not purely driven by individual merit, and personal morality.

There are institutions that control the flow of money as the social energy that directs our individual insights and initiative towards some activities, and away from others. And those institutions direct the flows that they control according to a code, or language and logic, that we hard-wire into those institutions when we create them.

It is essential to equity in the economy, which is essential to cohesion in society, that these institutions be held accountable for authenticity and integrity in their institutional exercises of the institutional authority/power they are invested with, true to the agency/purpose/power for which they are invested with that authority/power.

Neoliberalism is a corruption of that authenticity and integrity in the institutions of Finance for aggregating money set aside by others as savings for investment in financing for enterprise, and allocating those aggregations as money made to flow into enterprises, for their use in doing their work, for a time, at a cost and on terms that inform the businesses that inform the technologies that inform the choices that inform the economy that informs society that informs our future.

It does that specifically by deleting the code of common sense from the protocols of accountability for the fiduciary stewards of society's shared savings aggregated into social trusts for the social safety nets of Workforce Pensions and Civil Society Endowments, and replacing it with the expert knowledge of securities trading professionals, transforming prudent caring for the consequences into recklessly unreckoning profit extraction.

Neoliberalism has succeeded in transforming The Hypothetical Prudent Steward of a Social Trust, as the legal avatar for the common sense of prudent people familiar with such matters of capacity derived from character in undivided loyalty to aims, under the circumstances then prevailing, into Asset Owners Allocating Assets Across Asset Classes, and within classes selecting Asset Managers peer-benchmarked by Consultants for outperformance in maximizing the highest possible purely pecuniary profit extraction from the purchase and sale of securities at market clearing prices in the markets (Exchanges & Funds) for maintaining market-clearing prices on those securities, solely in the financial best interests of securities trading professionals, in reliance on the axiomatic assertion that more fees and profits for them will always also mean a better quality of life for us all.

This axiom is, of course, false.

More for them is not always better for us.

Witness healthcare in the US, and insurance operated to increase profits by denying claims, rather than averaging the actual costs of healthcare for us all, which is the logic by which healthcare insurance in constituted in the first place.

If more is not always better, then the whole intellectual edifice of Neoliberalism collapses around that truth, like the house of cards that it actually is.

In it's place, we can erect a new intellectual edifice, of Prudent Stewardship that infuses a morality of authenticity and integrity into our institutions of fiduciary finance, reversing the corruption of inauthenticity that has spread from fiduciary finance into the securities trading markets, and through securities trading into banking and government and enterprise and politics, in a perfect storm of wealth and power concentration that is driving a cascading cavalcade of social discord through:

• short-termism
• market elitism
• corporate gigantism
• financial system instability
• social security insecurity
• cultural and ecological hostility
• Dark Money capture of politics and public discourse
• political divisiveness degenerating towards violence
• persistent and pervasive inability of our common sense to hold our institutions of agency and authority accountable for authenticity and integrity in their institutional exercises of their institution authority/power true to their institutional agency/purpose/power.

What if we began re-asserting prudence and loyalty by mobilizing Pensions & Endowments to buy healthcare companies - insurers and also pharmaceutical companies - out of stock market ownership, setting them free from their social contract to support growth in share price, and placing them into prudent stewardship of planetary health, through Equity Paybacks of INCOME with IMPACT.

Can you imagine that?