James Pethokoukis is has a master's degree in journalism and no credentials in economics. Perhaps this explains at least part of his failure to understand that globalization under neoliberal doctrine — "free markets, free trade, and free capital flows" results in the great leveling as capital flows where resources, including labor, as least expensive in order to be be competitive. This implies that wages and capital investment in developed countries, where resources are most costly, will fall as the emerging world rises. This will continue under such a system until an equilibrium level is reached.
Obviously, domestic workers in developed countries are disadvantaged by this policy and will continue to be unless government step in to soften the blow, or neoliberal globalization is ended.
The policy of the present administration is the latter.
But it is not the only policy available for addressing the issues that neoliberal globalization entails.
MMT economists recommend recognizing that receiving real resources from abroad is a real benefit domestically. Moreover, a currency sovereign has the ability to purchase the use of real resources to prevent their being idled. Such a government also has the capacity for improving the value of real resource use through public investment in education, health care, infrastructure, R & D, etc. while addressing temporary problems with welfare provision and an employer of last resort program funded by the currency issuer.
The Week
Republicans have a big new economic idea. It's terrible.
James Pethokoukis |Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of the AEIdeas blog
The author admits that this is no historical basis for Zionism but we should just pretend there is anyway, since Israel is already a nation state and failure to do so will encourage anti-Zionists to attack Israeli statehood, and that would be a bad thing. Huh?
Why Zionism should be untouchable
Why Zionism should be untouchable
Oh my god that Zionism piece.
ReplyDelete"Nations do not wink out of existence. They do not pack and up dissolve themselves, dispersing their populations throughout the other nations of the world. Once a nation is founded — not just as an idea but as a concrete entity taking up physical space and defining and defending its borders — it becomes a community of people that acts out of self-interest and displays a will to self-preservation.
The only way for an actually existing nation to cease to exist is for it to be invaded, conquered, forced to surrender, annexed, or suffer some combination of these or other military actions against it. The only way for an actually existing nation to cease to exist, in other words, is for it to be defeated in war."
The question I desperately want to ask the author is "Would giving the vote to the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank constitute the nation of Israel ceasing to exist?" It seems like it would not in the sense that he means - it's not like the country's physical infrastructure or Jewish population would go away. So if that's consistent with supporting the Israeli "right to exist" then sure, be a Zionist. But it really doesn't seem like that's how Zionists define it. Instead the issue is whether this "nation state like any other" should treat the possibility of a particular ethnic group no longer having a demographic majority as an existential threat. Or to put it more bluntly, should Israel treat that possibility the same way white supremacists do in the United States?
Why Zionism should be untouchable
ReplyDeleteI responded to this, but then I decided that my comments were unfit for polite company.