Stephen Williams — How mainstream economics has led to clueless governments

More framing.

This is a really good article. Concise, precise, and clearly formulated so that anyone can understand it. Disseminate widely.

Here is the lede:

Governments of all stripes base their policies on mainstream economics. Powerful challenges to the mainstream, especially from ecological economics and modern monetary theory, explain why we are in a hole and can’t seem to get out.

If this article is largely correct, we can conclude that the economics profession is a major cause – directly or indirectly – of most modern evils.

In saying that, I draw heavily on the work of Australian academic economists Professor Robert Costanza, Associate Professor Philip Lawn, Professor Bill Mitchell and Dr Steven Hail.

Taken together, their work – in conjunction with colleagues overseas – claims that mainstream economics is fundamentally wrong left, right and centre — although I don’t mean to imply that these four scholars agree on every point.

Mitchell – a co-originator of modern monetary theory (MMT) – shows that we could have full employment quickly with a job guarantee, that federal budget deficits are normal and desirable, that the federal government never needs to borrow money, and that federal taxes do not fund anything.

The Federal Government should focus on non-inflationary full employment and not budget outcomes, because we can run deficits forever without borrowing.
In short, the Federal Government does not have the budget constraints of a household, business, or state government, because it can create unlimited money — but should spend prudently to avoid inflation and ecological overshoot....

Independent Australia
How mainstream economics has led to clueless governments

Stephen Williams

See also

For many, Brexit is a right-wing project because the principal authors are an extreme element of the British Tory Party. However an Australian academic will be putting forward a very different view at a public meeting in Galway.

Bill Mitchell is professor of economics at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, a widely published author, and a notable proponent of Modern Monetary Theory. He is also the co-author, with Italian political theorist Thomas Fazi, of Reclaiming the State – A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty in a Post-Neoliberal World.
That book will form the basis of his talk in Galway, entitled Reclaiming the State, which takes place on Wednesday October 3 at 8pm in the Harbour Hotel. Prof Mitchell argues that progressives and the political Left should not regard Brexit - and the current problems of the EU and monetary union generally - as a cause for despair, but as an opportunity to embrace a progressive, liberating, vision of national independence, to reject the EU’s austerity straitjacket and to implement a democratic socialist platform, “which is impossible within the EU, let alone the euro-zone”.

In Reclaiming the State, Mitchell and Fazi dispute that national independence has become irrelevant in a globalised world. They contend that it is only by reclaiming the state from supranational institutions, such as the EU, that people can break away from the neo-liberal economic dogma of the privatisation of resources and public services, deregulation of finance, the reduction of workers’ rights in collective bargaining, cuts to social programmes, and the lowering of taxes on wealth and capital at the expense of the middle and working classes.

The event is organised by The Desmond Greaves School, and will be chaired by Terry McDonough, Professor Emeritus of Economics at NUI Galway.

Galway Advertiser
Public meeting to ask ‘Is Brexit is an opportunity for Ireland?’