Financialization and Joe the Plumber

Everybody's talking about financialization, the idea that the productive capacity of society is being shifted away from wages and to profits. Bill Mitchell and Steve Keen have great posts on it but are slightly over my head. Michael Perelman did a video (I forget where it is) about how by some process whereby the financial sector slowly eats up the industrial sector. They all sound good but I can't tell if they're wrong or not. More homework for me.

Anyway financialization talk reminds me of what Obama told Joe the Plumber:

It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance at success, too… My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off [...] if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody

It probably would have happened anyway but I think this is the moment when the "Obama equals Socialist" deal took off. As if that would be a bad thing.