An economics, investment, trading and policy blog with a focus on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We seek the truth, avoid the mainstream and are virulently anti-neoliberalism.
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Sunday, November 20, 2016
Workin' Man Blues
Song went right over the audience heads; they should have listened closer.
The VIP box scan at 1:15 followed by Haggard's response is priceless.
Great symbol, Matt. Elite, privileged pricks, oblivious. The irony. Orthodox economics. It should all be so flipping obvious except their ideology blinds them.
Tom maybe what is going on is these alt-right people cant figure out the math so they are just looking at it via some sort of "human" factors...
They at some level know that this out of control rent seeking is not good but they instead of attacking it technically (they dont have the math chops...) they are attacking it racially...
They seem to equate "rent seeking!" with "Jews!" or something like that... so they want to push back on "Jews!" thinking that will take care of the rent seeking... which of course wont work anyway...
I would bet that most of these people studied social 'science' or some sort of Arts or Humanities in college....
I would say that Alt Right began as are reaction to and pushback against the left's identity politics and political correctness. They are asserting white identity and frankness. While white supremacists, racist, fascists, etc may be attracted to this, it not necessarily extremist.
The issues arise out of their in-your-face style and the refusal to separate off the actual "deplorables" like white supremacists, neo-Nazis and bigots. Trump broke tradition in his attempt not to be politically correct.
This is becoming an issue. Local high school kids are marching in the street here. There's a picture in today's paper of the marchers carrying a big banner, "When they go low, we go high." ( Michelle Obama)
The kids are saying that they may be too young to vote but not too young to see what's happening and to be active.
And Hudson I'm assuming is a Jew ... so here you have a Jew as one of the leading advocates AGAINST rent, meanwhile you have the alt-right going off on "Jews!" as the source of all the rent ... so how does their brains work????
Rent is difficult to quantify in practice. It means knowing fair value given all the hard to know risks and the prices those entail. We don't even know they are being captured until we see the end results the profit.
When we banned partially hydrogenated fats combined with bio-fuel requirements, somebody probably predicted that the rain forests, already battered would be systematically destroyed to make palm farms at an escalating pace, but no one would have imagined the size and scale of that risk properly. Everything we do, there are always people scheming to capture commons and extract rents. Always going to be a game of whack-a-mole. Were doomed to always being outraged.
I don't know whether Michael Hudson is Jewish or not. Why do you say he is? He went to the University of Chicago Laboratory School for High School - so the chances are high that one of his parents worked at the University of Chicago. He also got his undergraduate degree in history (not economics) from there. He was Jeremiah Kaplan's assistant at the Free Press in Chicago. His introduction to economics comes from economist Terrence McCarthy. It is interesting that he holds the rights to the works of György Lukács and to those of Leon Trotsky (assigned to him by Trotsky's widow.)
"sixteen tons" sells better than abstract rent, a worker toiling can always count the rent better than a financier in an air conditioned modular cubicle in a plushly appointed workspace.
Ryan, "You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt"
This is why, the ability of bankers to "create money out of thin air" really stick in the craw of the working man. This I believe is why the myth of "loanable funds" was created.
I thought I read somewhere that Hudson's godfather is/was Leon Trotsky so I am assuming he is/was Jewish I suppose he may not be... but if he is/was then my point is that I dont see how the alt-right can blame all rent seeking on "the Jews!", etc... it doesnt make any logical sense if one of the leading advocates of controlling rents is Jewish to be blaming "the Jews!" for economic rent...
but it might make sense if you were not qualified technically and blamed everything on one conspiracy theory or another...
With your interest in Christianity, you will find the article of immense interest
Quote: The meeting of about 70 people was organised by the Christian Council for Monetary Justice – (PS2). I was delighted to hear Michael introduce his talk with an account of how Jesus declared the intent of his ministry in his hometown synagogue by reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 61:
“The spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me; he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
His audience will have known that when Isaiah, and Jesus inspired by the same spirit, proclaimed the “year of the Lord’s favour”, the reference was to the Sabbath Year cancellation of debts and the Jubilee Year restitution of land (PS3).
We have to understand, said Michael, that Jesus was addressing a situation in which more than 25 percent of the farmland was pledged to usurers. And we need to understand how every major religion is essentially about how to handle debt – a word that in northern European languages also means guilt.
Michael Hudson is a fifth generation American, with Red Indian Chipawa blood in his veins from his mother’s side. He was born in Minneapolis in 1939. His father was a trade unionist and leading light in the civic management of what Michael describes as “the only city in the world run by Trotskyites.” The money establishment was, understandably, not very happy about this. Michael was just two years old when his father was made a political prisoner. His early childhood will have been traumatic, lightened by the study of music. This was never going to be satisfactory as a career, however, because of his wanting to get to grips with understanding the causes of the social-economic injustice that his father, as a follower of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), was not shy to confront.
On December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, 18 defendants, including Cannon, Skoglund, V.R. Dunne and Dobbs, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 12 months to 16 months for the “unlawful conspiracy of promoting the idea that the overthrow of the US government by force was desirable.”
Yes the Jews were under the metals which was also part of the laws... so when you are under metals, you need such things in the laws like jubilees, redistributions, etc periodically to re-set things...
Same as when you are ruled by morons who just think they are still under the metals...
These working class Trump supporters are gonna be quite disappointed when Donald argues for lower wages, as he already has.
The use of the term wages is key I think. "Wages" are for the working stiff and are a cost, "salaries" are for the mid mgmt and above, which are type of benefit.
While I have consistently criticized utopian thinking wherever as unrealistic on a large scale, many people do live in bubbles, sometimes created intentionally as "intentional communities." Such bubbles don't scale, so those that live in them generally have to interact at least minimally with the ROW (rest of the world).
I lived in such a left libertarian intentional community many years ago. The members described it as a "sane asylum" and contrasted it with the ROW as the "insane asylum." We were aware that there was no way it could scale since most of the ROW was insane. So we sought out the relatively few sane people with whom to interact and avoided the criminally insane, of which there are many.
Greg said - "These working class Trump supporters are gonna be quite disappointed.."
Yep, and then add to that -
- typical trickle-down huge tax cuts that gives the working class, at most, enough to buy an extra beer a week but hands off billions to the top 1% to sock away into do-nothing T-bills - a "big buy" infrastructure stimulus which is only tax credits to entice the top 1% to invest in privatizing only the cherriest assets that force rents out of the few that can still pay (forget Flint-like water treatment plants) - pops the economy for a year or so but then just adds to the elites rental income to park in T-bills, growing income inequity and undermining aggregate demand - all these 'wonderous expenditures' will have to be "paid-for" so replace Medicare/Medicaid with vouchers paid for by underfunded block grants to states - working man in Red states not likely to see a penny. Then it's on to privatizing SS.
Working man better not wrench his back; he's going to have to keep working until he drops dead. - Yee-haw, Freedom Fries, ya all! Make America Great Again!
If leading flow was higher that auto paper would be doing a lot better..
And further, so what are you saying I should go out and sign up for a new loaded Silverado and then renege on it then show I'm in the 80% and then just get a free $42k pickup truck?
Matt, Free $42k truck? How do you think a basic income guarantee works? That is one of the many reasons for pushing a job guarantee - however, many questions still remain about the JG - what prevents the JG from becoming just another "slave labor" program? Or at the very least jobs that are given without any care for what that person is capable of - which is what most JG programs currently being proposed appear to be (primarily because they are looking at the JG program as a buffer stock of the employed for the private sector)
Well if you are going to give an Old Testament style debt jubilee then what is supposed to happen to the collateral?
A JG wage should still supply the worker with enough income to make reasonable payments for transportation including a reasonable payment on a vehicle loan...
Haggard's lyrics here are perplexing to modern liberals. Doesn't fit their contemporary identity political ideology.
ReplyDeleteGreat symbol, Matt. Elite, privileged pricks, oblivious. The irony. Orthodox economics. It should all be so flipping obvious except their ideology blinds them.
ReplyDeleteTennessee Ernie Ford, "Sixteen tons"
ReplyDeleteJohnny Cash, "Sixteen tons
Time to start talking up class and economic rent.
"economic rent"
ReplyDeleteSeems like the Alt-right is only ones on the case:
https://youtu.be/MrXwvzdLJM0
This concept is something those people are apparently aware of too... so now you have to be a racist to advocate against economic rent?
Tom how do we diagram all of these groups? Pretty convoluted imo...
Tom maybe what is going on is these alt-right people cant figure out the math so they are just looking at it via some sort of "human" factors...
ReplyDeleteThey at some level know that this out of control rent seeking is not good but they instead of attacking it technically (they dont have the math chops...) they are attacking it racially...
They seem to equate "rent seeking!" with "Jews!" or something like that... so they want to push back on "Jews!" thinking that will take care of the rent seeking... which of course wont work anyway...
I would bet that most of these people studied social 'science' or some sort of Arts or Humanities in college....
Matt,
ReplyDeletedid you even see the video you just posted? He ropes in anything he "doesn't like" as rent seeking behavior. The best definition of rent seeking are by Michael Hudson - Veblen’s Institutionalist Elaboration of Rent Theory and The Paradox of Financialized Industrialization
Here is a video of Michael Hudson on Economic Rent
I would say that Alt Right began as are reaction to and pushback against the left's identity politics and political correctness. They are asserting white identity and frankness. While white supremacists, racist, fascists, etc may be attracted to this, it not necessarily extremist.
ReplyDeleteThe issues arise out of their in-your-face style and the refusal to separate off the actual "deplorables" like white supremacists, neo-Nazis and bigots. Trump broke tradition in his attempt not to be politically correct.
This is becoming an issue. Local high school kids are marching in the street here. There's a picture in today's paper of the marchers carrying a big banner, "When they go low, we go high." ( Michelle Obama)
The kids are saying that they may be too young to vote but not too young to see what's happening and to be active.
Unk,
ReplyDeleteAnd Hudson I'm assuming is a Jew ... so here you have a Jew as one of the leading advocates AGAINST rent, meanwhile you have the alt-right going off on "Jews!" as the source of all the rent ... so how does their brains work????
iow "rent" is a purely technocratic issue (I should add for qualified technocrats) not a racial issue...
ReplyDeleteiow its only becomes a racial issue if you are not qualified technically and are trying to advocate against it anyway...
Tom, Kids in Rhode Island saying something else:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-kkk-in-our-backyard-01117-20161116-story.html
Rent is difficult to quantify in practice. It means knowing fair value given all the hard to know risks and the prices those entail. We don't even know they are being captured until we see the end results the profit.
ReplyDeleteWhen we banned partially hydrogenated fats combined with bio-fuel requirements, somebody probably predicted that the rain forests, already battered would be systematically destroyed to make palm farms at an escalating pace, but no one would have imagined the size and scale of that risk properly. Everything we do, there are always people scheming to capture commons and extract rents. Always going to be a game of whack-a-mole. Were doomed to always being outraged.
Tom, Kids in Rhode Island saying something else:
ReplyDeleteThis is what the HS kids here are marching against. It was sparked by an incident in their school.
Rent is difficult to quantify in practice.
ReplyDeleteThis is an argument offered against dealing with it. It's hard, so let's just forget about it.
Workers are not impressed by the logic.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI don't know whether Michael Hudson is Jewish or not. Why do you say he is? He went to the University of Chicago Laboratory School for High School - so the chances are high that one of his parents worked at the University of Chicago. He also got his undergraduate degree in history (not economics) from there. He was Jeremiah Kaplan's assistant at the Free Press in Chicago. His introduction to economics comes from economist Terrence McCarthy. It is interesting that he holds the rights to the works of György Lukács and to those of Leon Trotsky (assigned to him by Trotsky's widow.)
Also here is Michael Hudson about himself - Bubbles Always Burst: the Education of an Economist
ReplyDelete"sixteen tons" sells better than abstract rent, a worker toiling can always count the rent better than a financier in an air conditioned modular cubicle in a plushly appointed workspace.
ReplyDeleteRyan,
ReplyDelete"You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt"
This is why, the ability of bankers to "create money out of thin air" really stick in the craw of the working man. This I believe is why the myth of "loanable funds" was created.
I thought I read somewhere that Hudson's godfather is/was Leon Trotsky so I am assuming he is/was Jewish I suppose he may not be... but if he is/was then my point is that I dont see how the alt-right can blame all rent seeking on "the Jews!", etc... it doesnt make any logical sense if one of the leading advocates of controlling rents is Jewish to be blaming "the Jews!" for economic rent...
ReplyDeletebut it might make sense if you were not qualified technically and blamed everything on one conspiracy theory or another...
Matt, yes Hudson was Trotsky's godson
ReplyDeleteWith your interest in Christianity, you will find the article of immense interest
Quote:
The meeting of about 70 people was organised by the Christian Council for Monetary Justice – (PS2). I was delighted to hear Michael introduce his talk with an account of how Jesus declared the intent of his ministry in his hometown synagogue by reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 61:
“The spirit of the Lord is on me
because he has anointed me;
he has sent me to announce good news to the poor,
to proclaim release for prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind;
to let the broken victims go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
His audience will have known that when Isaiah, and Jesus inspired by the same spirit, proclaimed the “year of the Lord’s favour”, the reference was to the Sabbath Year cancellation of debts and the Jubilee Year restitution of land (PS3).
We have to understand, said Michael, that Jesus was addressing a situation in which more than 25 percent of the farmland was pledged to usurers. And we need to understand how every major religion is essentially about how to handle debt – a word that in northern European languages also means guilt.
Also from the same article above
ReplyDeleteMichael Hudson is a fifth generation American, with Red Indian Chipawa blood in his veins from his mother’s side. He was born in Minneapolis in 1939. His father was a trade unionist and leading light in the civic management of what Michael describes as “the only city in the world run by Trotskyites.” The money establishment was, understandably, not very happy about this. Michael was just two years old when his father was made a political prisoner. His early childhood will have been traumatic, lightened by the study of music. This was never going to be satisfactory as a career, however, because of his wanting to get to grips with understanding the causes of the social-economic injustice that his father, as a follower of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), was not shy to confront.
The city mentioned above was Minneapolis MN - See Trotskyism and the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934
ReplyDeleteOn December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, 18 defendants, including Cannon, Skoglund, V.R. Dunne and Dobbs, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 12 months to 16 months for the “unlawful conspiracy of promoting the idea that the overthrow of the US government by force was desirable.”
Also Who are the 18 Prisoners in the Minneapolis Labor Case
There is a biography of Carlos Hudson in there - definitely not Jewish - the pdf is a photo copy so I cannot copy and paste it. Well worth reading
Among them
Carlos Hudson - Editor of 544 - CIO Weekly, The Industrial Orgainizer
Unknown,
ReplyDeleteYes the Jews were under the metals which was also part of the laws... so when you are under metals, you need such things in the laws like jubilees, redistributions, etc periodically to re-set things...
Same as when you are ruled by morons who just think they are still under the metals...
These working class Trump supporters are gonna be quite disappointed when Donald argues for lower wages, as he already has.
ReplyDeleteThe use of the term wages is key I think. "Wages" are for the working stiff and are a cost, "salaries" are for the mid mgmt and above, which are type of benefit.
Tom and all u libtards here's your utopia;
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKOb-kmOgpI
While I have consistently criticized utopian thinking wherever as unrealistic on a large scale, many people do live in bubbles, sometimes created intentionally as "intentional communities." Such bubbles don't scale, so those that live in them generally have to interact at least minimally with the ROW (rest of the world).
ReplyDeleteI lived in such a left libertarian intentional community many years ago. The members described it as a "sane asylum" and contrasted it with the ROW as the "insane asylum." We were aware that there was no way it could scale since most of the ROW was insane. So we sought out the relatively few sane people with whom to interact and avoided the criminally insane, of which there are many.
Can't view it in Canada. Harrumph :/
ReplyDeleteGreg said - "These working class Trump supporters are gonna be quite disappointed.."
ReplyDeleteYep, and then add to that -
- typical trickle-down huge tax cuts that gives the working class, at most, enough to buy an extra beer a week but hands off billions to the top 1% to sock away into do-nothing T-bills
- a "big buy" infrastructure stimulus which is only tax credits to entice the top 1% to invest in privatizing only the cherriest assets that force rents out of the few that can still pay (forget Flint-like water treatment plants) - pops the economy for a year or so but then just adds to the elites rental income to park in T-bills, growing income inequity and undermining aggregate demand
- all these 'wonderous expenditures' will have to be "paid-for" so replace Medicare/Medicaid with vouchers paid for by underfunded block grants to states - working man in Red states not likely to see a penny. Then it's on to privatizing SS.
Working man better not wrench his back; he's going to have to keep working until he drops dead.
- Yee-haw, Freedom Fries, ya all! Make America Great Again!
Abolishing the estate tax and the minimum wage will be great for workers too!
ReplyDelete@matt franko
ReplyDeleteeven under paper you need to re-set private debt- the top 10% have claims on the income of the botto 80%.
at some point debt deflation will grind the economy to a halt,
so a write off of debts would be necessary,or prolonged zombie economy with fiscal expansion so that balance sheets can deleverage.
Or a whole new system where private debt doesnt grow due to compunding interest charges.
@Ryan Harris-economic rent is easy,michael hudson spells it out ,land rent,monoply rents,natural resource rents and interest.
The only thing people borrow for is a house and a car ... and eventually those are paid off...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.autoremarketing.com/subprime/negative-equity-growing-especially-car-notes
ReplyDeleteMichael Hudson
ReplyDeleteHow Debt Makes the Rich Richer
If leading flow was higher that auto paper would be doing a lot better..
ReplyDeleteAnd further, so what are you saying I should go out and sign up for a new loaded Silverado and then renege on it then show I'm in the 80% and then just get a free $42k pickup truck?
Matt,
ReplyDeleteFree $42k truck? How do you think a basic income guarantee works? That is one of the many reasons for pushing a job guarantee - however, many questions still remain about the JG - what prevents the JG from becoming just another "slave labor" program? Or at the very least jobs that are given without any care for what that person is capable of - which is what most JG programs currently being proposed appear to be (primarily because they are looking at the JG program as a buffer stock of the employed for the private sector)
Well if you are going to give an Old Testament style debt jubilee then what is supposed to happen to the collateral?
ReplyDeleteA JG wage should still supply the worker with enough income to make reasonable payments for transportation including a reasonable payment on a vehicle loan...