Saturday, February 9, 2013
Two Radio Links from this Week
First link to an audio "appearance" by Dan Kervick from earlier this week at a New Hampshire's WNHN radio here (Dan enters at about the 30:00 minute mark).
Dan talks about his recent post where he establishes a view towards both a PUBLIC form of enterprise and a PRIVATE form of enterprise and the appropriate roles that each form of enterprise play in a well functioning economy. Dan hits it out of the park here.
And another link here to what I might term a "fringe" radio show hosted by a Jeff Rense and an interview of Webster Tarpley; lately of the United Front Against Austerity.
Tarpley advocates an approach to "recovery" utilizing an approach in some ways similar to what Dan advocates, i.e. more or less via an expanded Public Enterprise.
They both cite recent output from economist/writer Paul Krugman in their presentations.
Tarpley takes some nice shots at the Austrian nutjobs and the U.S.'s Ron Paul morons, but Tarpley though is still out of paradigm here where he exhibits a misunderstanding of the operational impotency of monetary policy, and advocates for the Fed to provide long term, interest free "loans" I guess to the US Treasury in order to finance several trillion dollars worth of critical infrastructure projects to lead economic recovery; this is not necessary.
Functionally, the Fed is simply the Treasury's fiscal agent and top level accountant, absolute fiscal authority resides with our government via the appropriations laws passed by Congress and signed by the Executive, the Fed just keeps track of the balances that are appropriated, transfers the balances, and produces ex post reports that document these operations.
Tarpley cannot see that his Fed loan scheme is mathematically equivalent to beo & Joe's Trillion Dollar Coin procedure as the end result is the Treasury's account is fully provisioned with USD balances to account for future $Trillion appropriations that would authorize much needed public sector led infrastructure projects, upgrades and maintenance that would help to lead a true U.S. economic recovery.
But in summary, both of these approaches in the end have a view towards a more aggressive public sector led economic recovery for the U.S. A view that obviously seems to be currently gaining attention outside the mainstream of media and conventional public policy sources.
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8 comments:
Much thanks to Mr. Franko for indulging my hobby. That is, finding critics of the Austrian School who know absolutely nothing about the Austrian School (which amounts to all of them, without exception).
This guy has a PhD in history, and yet he was botching basic historical facts. Let me just give you two whoppers.
First, he says that the “wave of deregulation”–which he associates with the Austrian School–began under Richard Nixon. (!) This literally could not be more wrong. Richard Nixon instituted wage and price controls, and took the dollar off the gold standard (which was just barely hanging on at that point, in its weakened form under Bretton Woods). Indeed, Ron Paul went into politics to undo the monetary policies of Richard Nixon. So for Tarpley to say that Richard Nixon instituted a wave of deregulation that is associated with the Austrian School, is kind of like saying the Joker works hand-in-hand with the Justice League, because after all he helped a young Bruce Wayne become Batman.
Second–and this is the one that made me stop the video–Tarpley says that the very term “Austrian economics” is a misnomer, because the School wasn’t really from Austria. Instead, Tarpley claims that the ideas of Mises and Hayek (yes he says both of their names) come from the London School of Economics.
http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2012/06/prison-break-from-the-historical-narrative-of-webster-tarpley.html
A few weeks ago, I was exposed to Mr. Pilkington thanks to you guys. And now this. Manna from heaven.
Bob,
I'm not a libertarian so I probably will never be able to "understand" so-called Austrian Economics either... put me down on "the list" too! ;)
rsp,
Thanks Matt,
Juts one thing: WNHN is not a public radio station.
I'm afraid Tarpley is absolutely correct about the origins of the Austrian School coming out of the Imperialist London School.
Quote from Wiki: "In 1876 Menger began tutoring Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, the Crown Prince of Austria in political economy and statistics. For two years Menger accompanied the prince in his travels, first through continental Europe and then later through the British Isles."
What did Menger study during those travels of Britain with the Hapsburg prince?
Bob, what is the connection between the Hapsburgs and British Imperialism?
Same connection exist in the later Austrian school as we have the influence of Mont Pelerin Society.
From Wiki: "Hayek mentioned "two men with whom I had most fully discussed the plan for this meeting both have not lived to see its realisation": Henry Simons (who trained Milton Friedman, a future president of the society, at the University of Chicago) and Sir John Clapham, a senior official of the Bank of England who from 1940–6 was the president of the British Royal Society."
Why were the Austrian schoolers linked to the British Royal Society i.e. the grand daddy Western Imperialism?
Bob you don't know about real history so can't answer these questions. You do not know your history because you get stuff from Imperialist and racist pr organizations like the KKK created Von Mises Institute and their stable of pseudo-scholars.
continues...
As for Nixon and deregulation, we do have a major shift in this country with the Republican party's shift to the Southern Strategy.
Nixon's so-called prices and wages control where really "wage controls" design to push down labor cost and increase so-called price flexibility away from the traditional American system of high wages and price rigidity which is the basis of all economic development in history.
Where did Nixon get this idea to lower the price floor for wages? He got from Milton Friedman who was most certainly was influenced by the Austrian School and not even you Bob can deny this fact.
The Empire's deployment of Chicago and Austrian school of bogus economics during the 70's was to attack labor for causing stagflation when they fought wages to increase with productivity as they traditional always had and instead of the real cause which was the speculation and production decline driven oil prices shocks caused by the unregulated speculation and cartelism of the free market.
So yes, the Austrian school thinking was behind the Nixon's wage controls if you look at the actual history of the long war of Imperial capitalist against production in favor of speculation in context.
Michael Hudson's "Super Imperialist" proves the Imperialist nature of the post-Bretton Woods system of "free trade" created by Nixon under the influence of Uncle Milty and how we created a system where we MMTers like to point out we can print paper and steal real resources and everyone essentially has to go along with this system that really only makes the one percent of the the one percent better off.
Ron Paul's objection to Nixon's monetary policy essentially proves Ron Paul didn't understand the Bretton Woods system which as a fixed exchange rate system whereas the Austrian school would be more in line with today's market driven floating rates.
So Ron Paul and any Austrian attacking Nixon's monetary policies is attacking "the market" setting rates and defending a system of government set parities...i.e. central planning.
But you and Ron Paul are too stupid to know what actually happened and you just recite the lines created for you to speak by your betters because you are a good little slave totally governed by Empires frame.
Bob's article cites the Neoconfederate racist unhistorian Thomas DiLorenzo on Hamilton which is basically nothing but reciting Burist garage.
If you want defend Andrew Jackson's lawless attack on the Nation Bank I'm more than willing debate and rip your Burist revisionism to shreds as I have extensive primary source material documenting the illegal and corrupt nature of the Jackson administration.
Question 1 for Bob: Who did Aaron Burr work for?
Question 2 for Bob: Who did Von Mises work for?
Question 3 for Bob: What was the Haileybury School?
If you cannot answer these question then you know nothing about history of economic
septeus7:
I am always fascinated when our proposals to meticulously enforce the concept of equal protection and proscribe fraud and the initiation of force in order to preclude any special favors for business are twisted by you knuckleheads into:
a) A conspiracy to do the exact opposite; and/or
b) A process whereby some strange, inexplicable and undescribed force of nature transforms rules against special treatment for business into special treatment for business.
A conspiracy between Friedman and Hayek? Really?
Dan, 10-4 fixed my apologies to Arnie and crew up there...
Septeus,
How do you view libertaianism in general in all of this???
Is the basic problem libertarianism or is it more complicated than that in your view?
rsp,
If we're going to compare Friedman to Hayek:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/02/hayek-on-milton-friedman-and-monetary.html
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