The trickle that dried up

One man's 'entitlement' is another man's burden and listening to Alan Greenspan, it's the rise in "entitlements" which curtails the ability of companies to spend on modernisation of plant and machinery, which drastically diminishes the productivity of labour, to his mind, and is what is holding back growth across the civilised world
"Entitlements" such as Medicare, minimum wages, legally binding labour contracts, minimum standard on working conditions the list goes on. In the mind of a this neo-liberal who studied under Hayak and Friedman, entitlements are an inhibitor to growth.  No matter how growth is obtained one is committing economic sin, not to seek to establish growth. 

Societies participation is limited to benefiting, when it can, through "trickle down economics".
And so you have the dilemma. Privatisation, fiscal austerity, deregulation, the whole gambit of laissez-faire economics which, in the short term, punish the worker and dismantle any social cohesion he might have built up, in the long run, is good for everyone because it produces growth and profits which sustain some sense of well being. 

It's fundamentally a question of jobs versus unemployment but all at a price. Wages are barely sufficient, the work is often short term, without any sort of continuity and society is made to understand that for the system to work and prosper, any of the old sureties are gone and the Global corporate Minotaur must be fed and kept happy.   

The new kid on the block is "flexibility"
After the Second World War there was a period of sustained old fashioned liberalism/socialism which attempted to take into the economic mechanism, human welfare. A concept that real gains are made when society at large is rewarded with the benefits of growth and the fiscal health of a country is based on recycling wages, profits and dividends to provide the stimulus for the market in goods and services to grow organically.
Today's growth is rigged.  Profits come from ever smaller strategic segments of economic activity whilst the rest are left to fend for themselves, inevitably to rot and die, along with the people who are engaged in these activities.
The burger flipper, the shelf packer, the carers, both for children and the old are the collateral damage of a heartless world wide economic experiment driven by Wall Street. The misuse of what were called, euphemistically, the units of labour, (people), and the lowering of relative wages has accelerated the stagnation of most of our cities across the globe as people eke out their lives as best they can with little left over to spend and stimulate their respective economies. With increasingly less "trickling" down, stagnation is the only game in town.