How do you explain the politics of regression? Look, even the supposed liberals by 1975 had already lost the war on democracy, by agreeing to ignore Luther Gulick, and meekly accepting SocSec & Medicare taxes on labor ... but no taxes on any form of Corporate Welfare. If you accept regressive, why bother with faux negotiations of random details?
Yes, excessive taxes on labor were always positioned as "combating the relief attitude," but ONLY for lower class relief! Corporate or Upper Class entitlement suffered from no such stigma.
Nevertheless, liberals in 1975 were still executing at least a well-managed, staged retreat. That retreat only turned into a rout later on, with the 36 year, Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama "WALL STREET" dynasty. Where have all the ingenious, American pragmatists been, since the days of Hoover & FDR? Is someone or something weeding them out? Where are all the people who want nothing to do with either the GOP or DEM political gangs?
(hat tip to "Circuit")
Close, but all current policy interpretations of that fact still quickly veer out of paradigm - in yet another, unexpected direction, if not by old routes.
Among liberal & conservative ideologues alike, this discussion seems to revolve around a subtle and preposterous premise, that people never have hobbies, or quit jobs after saving enough capital to explore preferred options - i.e., that people act like machines, and have no dynamic imagination.
"There is no big trick to put more and more people on public service employment. If that is the only thing that one is interested in, obviously, the Federal Government can create the money by fiat and put more people on public service employment. The question is what are the short- and long-run implications of doing that in terms of keeping our economy productive, competitive and innovative....So I do not think it is just jobs; it is productive jobs and that is another way of saying that the Federal Government can go only part of the way in terms of assuring that we have a productive economy."
Well duh! Yet, what if it really IS just a buffer stock of jobs income? Why isn't anyone calling BULLSHIT! on that absolute presumption - that it isn't? There is no conclusive data either way, so let's just quickly find out, for Pete's sake! Un-assessed presumption is no way to keep running a country!!!
At least the 1975 liberals understood that a currency issuer can't run out of ways to denominate fiat. And, that was 1975 ... and still not enough follow up. In fact, we've conveniently forgotten to even retain this part of the discussion. It's like it never happened. Obviously the currency issuer can always allow the rising flood of desired transactions to be denominated - by creating currency on-demand ..... but we're refusing to even admit it! In fact, for most citizens, the obvious has now been posited to be insanity.
Just set a employment floor ..... of part time work, to provide a place for ALL citizens to re-start whenever gambits fail (no matter how frequently), so that all citizens have a base to start new efforts from. It's all in the perspective?
Let's just find out? And tweak it as results come in? It's no more risky than the stuff we've been trying. Otherwise, we're stuck on Individual Unemployment, Aggregate UnImagination and Cultural Inadequacy.
As Russel Huntley keeps saying, we seem to have gone steadily backwards since 1933. We accidentally realized (forced by context) that we could right-size our currency supply by fiat, & used that agility it to save our aggregate butts. Yet we never bothered to let all citizens in on the obvious, and then seemed to have slowly forgotten it, until it was nearly completely forgotten altogether, by shortly after 1975. Didn't we do the same thing, in 1776, 1861 & 1933? When will us morons stop pounding our aggregate head against the same wall?
How come no one's forgotten antibiotics, or genetics, or quantum mechanics, or relativity? Why is it only something as mundane as fiat currency operations that we've chosen to "forget?"
Now we're back to "discovering" common sense all over again, and the economics religion is once again closing ranks to fight the revolutionaries trying to "invent" prior common sense. I weep for my country and all citizens.
Was there something producing highly selective memory loss, placed in the water supply all along, or only in the textbooks? And whatever it was, was the dose doubled after 1975?
Now we're back to "discovering" common sense all over again, and the economics religion is once again closing ranks to fight the revolutionaries trying to "invent" prior common sense. I weep for my country and all citizens.
Was there something producing highly selective memory loss, placed in the water supply all along, or only in the textbooks? And whatever it was, was the dose doubled after 1975?
10 comments:
If preventing death from infectious disease were not an objective, we might forget to use antibiotics. Full employment is no longer an objective.
Great stuff, Roger. I thought you may get a kick out of the Eli Ginzberg quote about fiat currency. These guys knew about this stuff and had no problems telling Congress, the Fed Chairman, whoever...These old guys, Ginzberg, Boulding, Eccles, Eisner, they're the stuff folks should be reading.
It will happen eventually, but probably not before the current crop of thinking is more totally discredited than it is now after the next big one. It seems that neoliberalism with the attendant economic props has a way to run yet.
Then it will be, "Who knew that they these guys actually figured it out? Why didn't someone say so?"
Robert Solow (who is in favor of JG, as I show in my post) says that "any successful line of economic analysis is almost certain to be a group product". I think it's important
Tom, I've read you in the past say something very similar. I like MMT because it gives credit where credit is due. These old keynesians and institutionalists are in many ways the cutting edge when you think about it.
"The Best Way To Reduce Unemployment Is To Create More Jobs"
Sounds like something Yogi Berra would say.
...important to focus on the commonalities.
Elastic currency operations
"Why is it only something as mundane as fiat currency operations that we've chosen to "forget?""
Roger - How many people actually understood fiat currency operations in the first place?
Good point Rombach. Yet my point still stands. How many people understood quantum mechanics the 1st 10 years?
Yet that did NOT keep those who did from being welcomed worldwide. The benefits of learning it were welcomed, and the knowledge sought after.
When it comes to currency operations, even John Adams recognized the issue, back in 1776 ... but there is significant documentation of an open opposition from a persistently active banking lobby, throughout the centuries.
That's not so different, in the end, than statements like "The Republic needs no scientists."
We do need to use the scientific method of experiment-&-honestly-assess, in more places, every day.
Diffusion of knowledge takes time. The rate of dissemination has been increasing however, and with the combinatorial growth characteristic of digital networks it's now going exponential. But globally, humanity is still in a pretty dark age of ignorance and even developed countries have a shocking information lag.
The march of social, political and economics socialization is directly proportional to popular democracy, which is depending on an informed and educated electorate.
Without the promise of combinatorial growth due to digital networking, the advance would be expected to take centuries. However, with exponential growth a possibility, the time-frame could collapse surprisingly with the speed of change accelerating in an unprecedented way.
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