Dirk Ehnts — John Maynard Keynes: “I could create, I could afford” (Public Service Employment)

Here is a quote from John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1933:

If I had the power today I should surely set out to endow our capital cities with all the appurtenances of art and civilisation on the highest standards of which the citizens of each were individually capable, convinced that what I could create, I could afford – and believing that money thus spent would not only be better than any dole, but would make unnecessary any dole. For with what we have spent on the dole in England since the War we could have made our cities the greatest works of man in the world.

econoblog 101
John Maynard Keynes: “I could create, I could afford” (Public Service Employment)
Dirk Ehnts | Lecturer at Bard College Berlin

The quote is from National self-sufficiency (Yale Review, 1933).  See the whole of Section IV. It's brilliant.

David F. Ruccio — Piketty and the principle of taxation

As it turns out, while working on a new research project (on “Utopia and the Marxian Critique of Political Economy,” for aconference in November), I chanced upon a much earlier discussion of wealth taxes: a speech given by Friedrich Engelson 8 February 1845 in Elberfeld. 

Engels argued that communists had no intention of introducing “common ownership overnight and against the will of the nation.” Still, it was possible to move in the direction of “practical communism” by adopting certain measures—such as “general education of all children without exception at the expense of the state” and “a complete reorganisation of the Poor Relief System.”

"Both these measures require money. In order to raise it and at the same time replace all the present, unjustly distributed taxes, the present reform plan proposes a general, progressive tax on capital, at a rate increasing with the size of the capital. In this way, the burden of public administration would be shared by everyone according to his ability and would no longer fall mainly on the shoulders of those least able to bear it, as has hitherto been the case in all countries. For the principle of taxation is, after all, a purely communist one, since the right to levy taxes is derived in all countries from so-called national property. For either private property is sacrosanct, in which case there is no such thing as national property and the state has no right to levy taxes, or the state has this right, in which case private property is not sacrosanct, national property stands above private property, and the state is the true owner. This latter principle is the one generally accepted — well then, gentlemen; for the present we demand only that this principle be taken seriously, that the state proclaim itself the common owner and, as such, administer public property for the public good, and that as the first step, it introduce a system of taxation based solely on each individual’s ability to pay taxes and on the real public good."

Occasional Links & Commentary
Piketty and the principle of taxation
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame

Daily Bell — Privatization ... What Is It?

The Daily Bell
Privatization ... What Is It?
Staff Report

Conclusion: The name for this is not privatization, by the way, but "fascism."

They got this one pretty much right. But here's a howler on "inflation".

Drumbeat of Monetary Sophistry
By Staff Report

ROFLMAO