Magpie — Capital Errors: from Bad to Worst (of All).

Magpie joins the human capital fray.

Magpie's Asymmetric Warfare
Capital Errors: from Bad to Worst (of All).
Magpie

Randy Wray — Oh Me Oh My! MMT IS ABOUT!

Here’s an unintentionally hilarious piece by Tim Worstall at Forbes: 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/01/12/watch-out-mmts-about-as-bernie-sanders-hires-stephanie-kelton/2/ 

Watch out, he warns, MMT has come to Washington! Our nation’s capital!
No doubt ruin and wastage will follow. 

Why? Well. Nothing wrong with the theory of Modern Money Theory, he admits. 

“It’s not actually that I disagree very much with the economics that is being laid out in MMT: indeed, I’m terribly tempted to agree that they’re actually correct in much of what they say.”… 

And really nothing wrong with the policy, either. No, it is all politics. 

What he’s afraid of is that if politicians understood that they cannot run out of money, they’d spend like they cannot run out of money. 

And off we’d go to Weimar and Zimbabwe land. 

It is the same line that Paul Samuelson took, when he argued that the job of an economist is to lie. Or, better, to preach the old time religion and superstition. Put real fear into the politicians and the voters they represent. 

Government is just like a household, you know. Careful, Gov, you’ll run out of money. You’ll have to go hat-in-hand to Bond Vigilantes when you run out. Uncle Sam will have to go to the Salvation Army for a cup of soup. 

It is the same old fear mongering by someone who does not trust the democratic process and does not understand budgeting.…

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Oh Me Oh My! MMT IS ABOUT!

L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, University of Missouri at Kansas City

Chris Dillow — When Labour Isn't Fungible

The poverty of classical liberalism. Why a jobs program is necessary.

Stumbling and Mumbling
When Labour Isn't Fungible
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Robert Reich — Beware Capitalist Tools

Forbes Magazine likes to call itself a “capitalist tool,” and routinely offers tool-like justifications for whatever it is that profit-seeking corporations want to do. Recently it has deployed its small army of corporate defenders and apologists in the multi-billion dollar fight to keep the effective tax rates of global corporations low.

 

One of its contributors, Tim Worstall, recently took me to task for suggesting that a way for citizens to gain some countervailing power over large global corporations is for governments to threaten denial of market access unless corporations act responsibly.

He argues that the benefits to consumers of global corporations are so large that denial of market access would hurt citizens more than it would help them. The “value to U.S. consumers of Apple is they can buy Apple products,” Worstall writes. “Why would you want to punish U.S. consumers, by banning them from buying Apple products, just because Apple obeys the current tax laws?”



Wortstall thereby begs the central question. If global corporations obeyed all national laws — the spirit of the laws as well as the letter of them – and didn’t use their inordinate power to dictate the laws in the first place by otherwise threatening to take their jobs and investments elsewhere, there’d be no issue.

 

It’s the fact of their power to manipulate laws by playing nations off against one another – determining how much they pay in taxes, as well as how much they get in corporate welfare subsidies, how much regulation they’re subject to, and so on – that raises the question of how citizens can countermand this power.

Beware Capitalist Tools
Robert Reich | Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration