Thursday, January 5, 2012

Morgan Warstler on Guaranteed Income


Read it at Andrew Breitbart presents Big Government

Guaranteed Income: The Christian Solution to Our Economy
by Morgan Warstler


(h/t beowulf from the comments)

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

beowolf from what comments?

Tom Hickey said...

Anon, I just put the missing link in the post.

Anonymous said...

That was painful to read!

wh10 said...

Warstler is the most uncivil, annoying commenter in the econoblogosphere.

Tom Hickey said...

He is so over the top he is actually funny in strange sort of way reminiscent of David Lynch's stuff that takes it to the limit and then beyond, so all you can do is laugh.

Anonymous said...

I call Morgan Warstler a "Darth Vadar Marxist". Those are folks who seem to accept a whole bunch of Marx's theorizing about class warfare, but who then try to encourage everyone to join the dark side of the greedy capitalists.

beowulf said...

"Warstler is the most uncivil, annoying commenter in the econoblogosphere."

I dunno, the competition for that accolade is pretty stiff! :o)

I'm not a fan of making the JG the must-have provision of MMT, but if you insist on it, Morgan suggests a framework that is more feasible, politically and operationally, than any other JG proposal I've come across.

Clonal said...

I think, what Warstler suffers from is the "it shall never happen to me" AKA "I am immune from this" syndrome. Also sometimes known as "If anything bad happens to anybody other than me or mine, it is their own fault"

Anonymous said...

Couldn't C. H. Douglas's idea of a social credit be incorporated into MMT?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit

Unforgiven said...

Or in Warstler's case, an Antisocial Credit?

Anonymous said...

Ah, wingnut crazy in the morning. And with statist solutions, no less. Ayn would not be pleased.
I would also like to put him in a vineyard picking grapes for a day...he would last about an hour.

Anonymous said...

his name sounds so much like warrens.

Anonymous said...

social credit = national dividend

What happened to SC could happen to MMT, which leaves us no choice but to advocate specific measures. Social credit became an umbrella term for political parties whose policies bore little resemblance to theory. It was sufficient that they called themselves 'social credit'.

Tom Hickey said...

Yes, I am concerned that this is happening to MMT as people want to use bits and pieces that they call MMT. Then the term becomes ambiguous and does't really stand for anything specific. After a while, it is misrepresented and devolves into a pejorative epithet like "Keynesian" used by opponents to mean inefficient and intrusive big government intervention.

Tom Hickey said...

Anonymous: Couldn't C. H. Douglas's idea of a social credit be incorporated into MMT?

Yes. Douglas was a forward thinking and his ideas are suggestions for the development of a Post-Capitalist economy out of capitalism itself. It's basically doable and MMT advocate should not be satisfied with just stabilizing the status quo, IMHO, since the major institutions are not conducive to freedom and democracy. The ideas of Douglas should definitely be on the table for consideration, as should the ideas about economic rent of people like Henry George. I would also include the ideas of Frederick Soddy and Herman Daly on steady state economics, and institutionalists like J. Fagg Foster.

Here's Randy Wray: "So we close with the normative aspect of institutionalism: money should be neutral. The Neoclassicals claim it
already is, but that is pure nonsense. We can make money neutral by euthanizing the rentier, that is, by driving the interest rate to zero. And by moving immediately to full employment and stable prices through an employer
of last resort program."
source

Michael Hudson is actually very open to this kind of thinking and bolder about advancing in than his MMT colleagues, who are understandably trying to get MMT accepted as a basis for economic policy. Granted that would be step up, but it is not the top of the ladder.

wh10 said...

I'd like to amend my previous comment. I now agree he is hilarious.