We already have an annual wealth tax on homes, the major asset of the middle class. It's called the property tax. Why not a small annual tax on the value of stocks and bonds, the major assets of the wealthy?

No economy can continue to function when the vast middle class and everybody else don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing without going deeper and deeper into debt.

Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation.

When corporations get special handouts from the government, subsidies and tax breaks, it costs you. It means you have to pay more in taxes to make up for these hidden expenses, and government has less money for good schools and roads, Medicare and national defense and everything else you need.

Bill Clinton was a very, very good speaker. But like many people who are great speakers and great thinkers and have a lot of energy and ambition, he talked too much.

I think it's hard to have a brand portal and an economy of trustworthiness in one of them that sloshes over into another. But saying that there will be only a limited number of these giant brand portals doesn't mean a limited number of companies; it doesn't mean that everybody's going to be working for these companies. Quite the opposite. Most of us will be working through much smaller entities that simply use these portals as vehicles for getting and identifying customers.

We are now enjoying the liberation that comes with not having to be organization men and women, and that's fabulous. But there are new social consequences here of which we need to be aware, and the sale of the self and what that entails for the rest of our lives is quite sobering.