Michael Roberts Blog
Grossman on capitalism’s contradictions
Michael Roberts
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Michael Robert — Henryk Grossman on capitalism’s contradictions (review)
Michael Roberts Blog
Grossman on capitalism’s contradictions
David F. Ruccio — The goose and the commons
Occasional Links & Commentary
The goose and the commons
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame
Monday, December 4, 2017
China Daily — Xi's vision on shared future for humanity
Graphic presentation. Keeper for future reference.
Ecns
Xi's vision on shared future for humanity
China Daily
Bill Mitchell — The EMU reform ruse – Part 1 through 4 (final)
Here are links to the full series of The EMU Reform Ruse
Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The EMU reform ruse – Part 1
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
Alan Longbon — Tax Reform: The Impact On Macro Fiscal Flows And Investment Markets
Seeking Alpha
Tax Reform: The Impact On Macro Fiscal Flows And Investment Markets
Alan Longbon
David F. Ruccio - Trickledown economics—then and now
Robert McElvaine, premier historian of the first Great Depression (whose books we have used to teach A Tale of Two Depressions), argues that Republicans today are repeating the same mistakes as the Republicans who were in charge during the 1920s, whose trickledown policies led to the spectacular crash of 1929.
As a historian of the Great Depression, I can say: I’ve seen this show before.In 1926, Calvin Coolidge’s treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, one of the world’s richest men, pushed through a massive tax cut that would substantially contribute to the causes of the Great Depression. Republican Sen. George Norris of Nebraska said that Mellon himself would reap from the tax bill “a larger personal reduction [in taxes] than the aggregate of practically all the taxpayers in the state of Nebraska.” The same is true now of Donald Trump, the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson and other fabulously rich people.
During the 1920s, Republicans almost literally worshiped business. “The business of America,” Coolidge proclaimed, “is business.” Coolidge also remarked that, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple,” and “the man who works there worships there.” That faith in the Market as God has been the Republican religion ever since. A few months after he became president in 1981, Ronald Reagan praised Coolidge for cutting “taxes four times” and said “we had probably the greatest growth in prosperity that we’ve ever known.” Reagan said nothing about what happened to “Coolidge Prosperity” a few months after he left office.In fact,
The crash followed a decade of Republican control of the federal government during which trickle-down policies, including massive tax cuts for the rich, produced the greatest concentration of income in the accounts of the richest 0.01 percent at any time between World War I and 2007 (when trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the hyper-rich, and deregulation again resulted in another economic collapse).
In 1929, the share of income captured by the top .01 percent (the über-rich, whose income share is indicated in the blue line in the chart above) reached 4 percent, and their share of wealth (the red line) even higher: 10 percent. Much the same kind of inequality existed in 2008, when the top .01 percent shares of income and wealth were 4.1 percent and 8.6 percent, respectively—on the eve of the Second Great Depression.
The only real difference is, while the top .01 percent shares of income and wealth fell during the depression of the 1930s (and continued to fall during the postwar period), they’ve been rising since 2008. In 2014 (the last year for which data are available), the top .01 percent share of income had increased to 4.4 percent and their share of wealth to 9.7 percent.
And now Coolidge’s Republican descendants are attempting to ram through a set of tax cuts that will allow those in the top .01 percent to keep more of their extraordinary income and to accumulate even more wealth.
All the while claiming that the benefits will trickle down to the rest of us.
In his position as a historian of the first Great Depression, who has also lived through the Second Great Depression, McElvaine certainly understands what’s going on:
Republican policies in the ’20s instead pushed to concentrate more of the income at the top. Nine decades later, Republicans are rushing to do it again — and they are sprinting toward an economic cliff. Another round of Government of the People, by the Republicans, for the super-rich will be catastrophic. The American people must call a halt before it’s too late.
David F. Ruccio - Trickledown economics—then and now
Thomas Fazi — Germany’s dystopian plans for Europe: from fantasy to reality?
For Germany, the idea of Europeanism has provided the country’s elites with the perfect alibi to conceal their hegemonic project behind the ideological veil of 'European integration'.What Germany could not do militarily, it is managing economically.
Open Democracy
Germany’s dystopian plans for Europe: from fantasy to reality?
Thomas Fazi
Thomas Fazi is the co-author (with William Mitchell) of Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto, 2017).
Daniel Larison - Preventive War and the Corruption of Language
Socialists should check out The American Conservative, it's has some superb articles.
Lindsey Graham is warmongering as usual, this time on North Korea:
Graham has never seen an unnecessary war he didn’t want to start, and he has been among the loudest advocates for starting one in Korea, but that is not all that interests me here. It’s his abuse of language that I want to consider. Graham talks about waging a “preemptive war,” but says that it should be waged in order to “deny” North Korea the capability to launch a nuclear-armed ICBM, and then says that it will be fought as a “last resort.” This is gibberish. If the U.S. is waging a war to deny another state the capability to launch an attack, that is preventive war pure and simple. Preventive war is not preemption, since preemption requires that there is an imminent threat to be preempted. It cannot be waged as a last resort since it is the most obvious example of using force as a first resort.
When Graham or anyone else talks about attacking North Korea in the hope of eliminating a North Korean capability, they are talking about preventive war, but they are usually careful not to call it that. Preventive war is both unjust and illegal. This has nothing to do with self-defense, and it certainly isn’t being done as a last resort. Warmongers muddle these concepts and confuse the meanings of these words in order to make the unnecessary war they want to start seem less reckless and insane to the public than it is. That is why it is important that the right names be used to describe the policy that Graham et al. want the U.S. to have, so that it is as clear as possible that a U.S. attack on North Korea wouldn’t be preempting any threat and would actually trigger a nightmare scenario in which hundreds of thousands and possibly millions could die. The danger in this case is that the North Korean government will take this rhetoric about getting ready to attack them as proof of Trump’s intentions and decide that they need to strike first.
The American Conservative
Daniel Larison - Preventive War and the Corruption of Language
Lindsey Graham is warmongering as usual, this time on North Korea:
The administration’s policy, he said, is “to deny North Korea the capability to hit America with a nuclear-tipped missile. Not to contain it."
“Denial means preemptive war as a last resort [bold mine-DL]. That preemption is becoming more likely as their technology matures. Every missile test, every underground test of a nuclear weapon, means the marriage is more likely.”
Graham has never seen an unnecessary war he didn’t want to start, and he has been among the loudest advocates for starting one in Korea, but that is not all that interests me here. It’s his abuse of language that I want to consider. Graham talks about waging a “preemptive war,” but says that it should be waged in order to “deny” North Korea the capability to launch a nuclear-armed ICBM, and then says that it will be fought as a “last resort.” This is gibberish. If the U.S. is waging a war to deny another state the capability to launch an attack, that is preventive war pure and simple. Preventive war is not preemption, since preemption requires that there is an imminent threat to be preempted. It cannot be waged as a last resort since it is the most obvious example of using force as a first resort.
When Graham or anyone else talks about attacking North Korea in the hope of eliminating a North Korean capability, they are talking about preventive war, but they are usually careful not to call it that. Preventive war is both unjust and illegal. This has nothing to do with self-defense, and it certainly isn’t being done as a last resort. Warmongers muddle these concepts and confuse the meanings of these words in order to make the unnecessary war they want to start seem less reckless and insane to the public than it is. That is why it is important that the right names be used to describe the policy that Graham et al. want the U.S. to have, so that it is as clear as possible that a U.S. attack on North Korea wouldn’t be preempting any threat and would actually trigger a nightmare scenario in which hundreds of thousands and possibly millions could die. The danger in this case is that the North Korean government will take this rhetoric about getting ready to attack them as proof of Trump’s intentions and decide that they need to strike first.
The American Conservative
Daniel Larison - Preventive War and the Corruption of Language
Paul Craig Roberts — Plunder Capitalism
Ok, I can't resist a title like that.
What we are witnessing in the US and indeed throughout the western world is the total failure of capitalism. Capitalism is now merely a looting machine. The financial sector no longer supplies capital for production. What the financial sector does is to turn discretionary consumer income into interest and fee payments to banks. Aggregate demand can only grow through debt expansion, and the consumers reach a point where they cannot expand their debt.Domestic colonization.
Capitalism, hiding behind “globalism,” which is misrepresented as a good thing when it is death itself, locates production where labor is cheapest, thus depriving First World labor of good wages and work opportunities and putting First World countries on the path to becoming Third World countries. Short-term profits and executive and board bonuses and stock options are maximized at the cost of the destruction of the domestic consumer market.
What we are witnessing is the complete looting of America and the entirety of the West. While the Western World collapses, the insouciant, submissive people sit there sucking their thumbs while they are being ruined.
Nothing is left of the West except looters at work.Plunder Capitalism
Paul Craig Roberts
Related
Salon
Gangster capitalism and nostalgic authoritarianism in Trump’s America
Henry A. Giroux | McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy
Kai-Fu Lee and Jonathan Woetzel — China, the Digital Giant
Retraining the displaced will be a major challenge for China’s government, as will preventing the major digital players from securing innovation-stifling monopolies. But the government’s readiness to embrace the emerging digital age, pursuing supportive policies and avoiding excessive regulation, has already placed the country at a significant advantage.Digitization also addresses the issue of the economic effect of China's aging population and the one-child policy's affect on replenishing the labor supply.
Project Syndicate
China, the Digital Giant
Kai-Fu Lee, co-founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, and Jonathan Woetzel, a McKinsey senior partner and a director of the McKinsey Global Institute
Peter Dorman — The Great Awokening
Peter Dorman takes the liberal position that politics, which is concerned with power, is determinative. Marx posits that it is the economic and financial infrastructure that is determinative.
Against such views, traditionalism holds that consciousness is determinative.
While everyone agrees that change is complex and its quality, direction, and speed depends on many factors, some see certain factors are more determinative than others.
That is to say, all these views and there are others, too, are partially correct and therefore are relevant.
From the point of view of the "consciousness first" position, the question really can be reduced to the interplay of "consciousness" in so far as it determines the mindset of a group and culture and institutions that manifest the systemic structure and functioning of a group.
While culture and institutions certainly influence the systemic structure and functioning of groups, cultures and institutions are themselves manifestations of mindsets, both individual and collective. Thus, the "great person" (usually "great man") theory is partially true, and so is the social construction theory.
Humans are both shaped by their environment and also shape it. Unlike other highly intelligent animals, humans can and do shape events and environments consciously and intentionally based on "human capital," e.g., knowledge, skill, creativity, reflexivity, ability to cooperate, etc.
"Human capital" can also be managed consciously and intentionally. It can improve, or remain relatively constant over an extended period, or degrade. While "consciousness" is an impossible metric to measure directly, at least at present, it's effects can be measured in terms of individual and social characteristics and contributions.
Traditionalisms are now warning that humanity requires a "spiritual awakening" or "spiritual renewal" in order to meet the emerging challenges brought along with seizing extraordinary opportunities made possible by scientific discovery and technological innovation.
Traditionalisms warn that we are getting ahead of ourselves in the ability to control the genie we have let out of the bottle, and now we need to step back and reassess what we are facing rather than lurching headlong into dangerous territory.
The growing possibility of nuclear conflict, geographical and demographic changes resulting from global warming, and the threat of epidemic are stark realities, while increasing social dysfunctioning that implies widespread individual dysfunctioning is becoming pervasive and homelessness is being normalized.
These are not only social, political and economic problems and challenges but they are also indicative of a spiritual malaise and a growing disconnect from the holistic unfolding of human potential. One-sided development calls forth a dialectical response in reaction. Herbert Marcuse addressed this back in the Sixties in his One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Beacon, 1964)
Perennial wisdom provides guidelines, but knowledge in the book stays in the book until it is owned in consciousness and acted on. Humans are capable of visualizing an ideal but they must act on it to progressively actualize their ideal.
Achieving ideal society is not necessarily utopian. It involves progressively increasing positivity and decreasing negativity. Everyone also already seek to do this for themselves and their near and dear, although they differ in what constitutes positive and negative.
Expansion of collective consciousness requires transcending individualism and tribalism in the direction of apprehending the universal and acting in terms of it rather than narrow self-interest or the interest of one's limited in-group.
This requires going against an evolutionary trait that encourages self-interest and favoring one's in-group. However, the history of humanity is the story of growing universality, and indeed, it can be equated with becoming "truly human."
How does a "spiritual awakening" start? It starts with individuals. Get out of your head and into your heart.
Econospeak
The Great Awokening
Peter Dorman | Professor of Political Economy, The Evergreen State College
Econospeak
The Great Awokening
Peter Dorman | Professor of Political Economy, The Evergreen State College
Tyler Durden — BIS Issues Alert: Tightening “Paradoxically” Leading To Excessive Risk Taking; Reminds What Happened Last Time
What’s really puzzling Claudio Borio, however, is that the market euphoria, or “ebullience” as he terms it, has continued as the Federal Reserve has proceeded with its tightening. While Borio acknowledges the BoJ has left its accommodative policy unchanged and the ECB may have “at least relative to expectations”, he notes that the Fed is the “issuer of the dominant international currency and its sway on markets remains unparalleled”. In Borio’s view this has led to a paradox, as he explained.
Hence a paradox. Even as the Fed has proceeded with its tightening, overall financial conditions have eased. For instance, a standard indicator of such conditions, which combines information from various asset classes, points to an overall easing regardless of the precise date at which the tightening is assumed to have started. Indeed, that indicator touched a 24-year low. If financial conditions are the main transmission channel for tighter policy, has policy, in effect, been tightened at all?
If you think you have it figured out, give Claudio Borio a call. 😃
BIS Issues Alert: Tightening “Paradoxically” Leading To Excessive Risk Taking; Reminds What Happened Last Time
Tyler Durden
See also
The New Arthurian Economics
24 years, Borio says. It's not a coincidence.
The Arthurian
Jason Smith — Information transfer economics: year in review 2017
With 2017 coming to a close, I wanted to put together a list of highlights like I did last year. This year was the year of dynamic information equilibrium as well as presentations. It was also the year I took some bigger steps in bringing my criticisms of economics and alternative approaches to the mainstream, having an article at Evonomics and publishing a book....Information Transfer Economics
Information transfer economics: year in review 2017
Jason Smith
SP Cash Levels
Cash levels at all time highs.
Cash in the S&P 500 Industrials (Old) sets record for Q3,’17 with $1.58 Trillion, up $50 billion in Q3,’17; Information Technology dominates with $730 billion in cash
— Howard Silverblatt (@hsilverb) December 3, 2017
Saturday, December 2, 2017
June Sekera — Denial of the public non-market system, and the consequences
Public non-market production makes up a quarter to a half or more of all economic activity among advanced democratic nation-states. Yet the public economy’s ability to function on behalf of the populace as a whole is seriously imperiled in many western democracies, and particularly jeopardized in the United States. The surging influence of mainstream economics has been a prime factor in the degradation of the public domain over the last several decades – a phenomenon that James Galbraith (2008) has called “the collapse of the public governing capacity.”
Market advocates, exploiting neoclassical economic theory, have foisted market axioms and precepts onto government, intent on transforming public goods production in imitation of an idealized and idolized market model.
The ravaging of government in the interests of ideology and private profit has proceeded largely unhampered because we have no adequate theory to explain the nature and dynamics of the non-market public economy, no intellectual infrastructure to explain how its purposes and processes differ crucially from those of the market, and no effective explanatory model that shows why such differences matter substantially for democratic governance and the well-being of the populace....The post is short and to the point.
However, I think the last sentence may be an exaggeration.
MMT does address this issue in terms of public purpose, and it is not original in doing so. John Kenneth Galbraith's career as public policy economists was all about addressing this and at one time he was listened to, and he played a policy making role in government, too. Many Post Keynesians also focused on this.
The problems are, first, the assumptions both substantive and procedural (methodological) of conventional economists, and secondly, the dominance of this approach in academic economics and also policy making circles.
Real-World Economics Review Blog
Denial of the public non-market system, and the consequences
Excerpted from June Sekera, “Missing from the mainstream: the biophysical basis of production and the public economy”, real-world economics review, issue no. 81, 30 September 2017, pp. 27-41,
Andre Vitchek - Borneo – Island Dying, People Oblivious
Andre Vitchek says how Borneo of Indonesia is being destroyed by imperialist capitalist exploitation. Through mining and logging the landscape has been reduced to mud as corporations scramble to make their investors fabulously rich.
Now it is all black around her. It is desperate and depressing. But she doesn’t look suicidal, miserable, or even guilty. She does precisely what she was told to do under General Suharto’s military dictatorship, which was sponsored by the United States and the rest of the West. She does what she was taught to do right after the dictatorship collapsed (at least on paper) – in the present era of savage capitalism and unbridled thieving, which has also been clearly supported from abroad. She is making money. She is simply producing dough. She does not rely on anybody, she is well aware of the bottom line: nobody will give her anything. Even if she were starving to death, she would get nothing. And so she opts to be ‘independent’, as well as strong, aggressive, arrogant and observed from some distance, mildly insane.
She is of course religious, as everyone in this country is forced to be from his or her childhood. Most likely, she doesn’t give a damn about this life, as there is, she believes, something much better, ‘somewhere else and big’, right after this suffering on Earth.
She is a tough woman, a ‘survival of the fittest’ kind of person, in short a ‘new Indonesian’.
Can one blame her? Perhaps yes. Perhaps no. She has to live, to survive in this inhuman, savage system, designed and injected from somewhere, from far away.
Still, the land is burning. Here and all around Sintang, all around Borneo, and in all corners of this entire Indonesian archipelago.
I used to come here every weekend,” whispers Ms Mira Lubis, a professor at Tanjungpura University in Pontianak city:
“It used to be so serene, so beautiful. This beach… My beach… My father was a doctor. He worked very hard. When he got tired, he took us all here, an entire family. I used to play in the pristine sand, with my brothers… I used to swim here. Now just look around…”
She shows me her childhood photos. I can see ‘her beach’, as it used to be, decades ago. I can see it now. She has tears in her eyes.
I look around. And it is all ruined: someone poured concrete over the sand: terrible job, thoroughly amateurish. Ugly stalls are everywhere, like sores. The sand area was reduced to just a couple of meters. Some huts and ugly, crumbling structures double as a ‘seaside hotel’.
The beach appears to be totally abandoned and forgotten. The only thing that is never forgotten in Indonesia is an entrance fee; charging random visitors for entering anything, even this devastated place. In this country, nothing is public, nothing is free, and nothing is for the people. Even destruction is promoted as an attraction, as a ‘tourist destination’. You stop your car near the emergency room of a hospital: you have to pay… You enter a disaster area, a place ruined by a mining company somewhere in East Java: you are forced to pay. Scarred nature, ruined land quickly becomes a sightseeing attraction! You essentially pay for everything in Indonesia, especially if you are dirt poor.
Mira is walking slowly along ‘her beach’. She is deep in thoughts; she looks devastated. Her calm childhood memories are now confronted by reality, which appears to be simply monstrous. Her green island inhabited by ancient cultures and thousands of species of animals, birds and plants, now resembles a computer-generated image from a second-rate horror film.
Ronen Berelovich - The Zionist Story.
An absolutely superb documentary by the Jewish film maker, Ronen Berelovich. He says how only 5% of Israelis, those who have served in the armed forces, have any idea what goes on in the occupied territories and so he made this film so that no one could have the excuse they didn't know.
Paul Robinson — Collusion
The investigation into suspected collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government has claimed its first three victims: one (Paul Manafort) for completely unconnected money laundering charges, and two (George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn) for lying to investigators about things which were not themselves criminal, and which are therefore crimes which would never have happened had there never been an investigation. To date, the evidence of direct collusion between Trump and the Russians is looking a little thin, to say the least. Now, into this maelstrom steps Guardian reporter Luke Harding with his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russian Helped Donald Trump Win.
Collusion spends over 300 pages insinuating that Trump is a long-standing agent of the Russian secret services, and hinting, without ever providing any firm evidence, that Trump and his team acted on orders from the Kremlin to subvert American democracy. I’ll be honest, and admit that I picked this book up expecting it to be a series of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, and to be utterly unbalanced in its analysis, and in that sense I’m not an unbiased reader. At the same time, I was interested to see if Harding had come up with anything that everybody else had not, and was willing to give him a chance. I needn’t have bothered. For alas, my worst suspicions proved to be true, and then some.…This collusion narrative is now jumping the shark more than the birther narrative about Barack Obama's birth certificate. In that sense, DJT is just experiencing a dose of his own medicine.
Irrussianality
CollusionPaul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa
Lord Keynes — Bibliography on Post Keynesian Economics (Updated)
Social Democracy For The 21St Century
Bibliography on Post Keynesian Economics (Updated)
Lord Keynes
Dilbert on modeling, math, and assumptions
If you didn't catch these Scott Adams Dilbert cartoons over the last couple of days.
Darius Shahtahmasebi — Israel Has Built a Robot Army — and It Should Scare the Sh*t Out of You
Robotization of the military. The story is about Israel, but other countries are also doing so, including the US, Russia, and China, which all have the necessary industrial capability.
While this will be an expensive area to develop, it's a whole lot less costly than supporting a human force and less controversial with respect to domestic politics.
It's coming down to who has the most industrial power and computing power.
The Chinese have an natural advantage in that their strategy is based on swarming and they are by far the largest country in population, their only competitor on this metric is India. (China is also the forth largest country geographically, with Russia first, Canada second and the US third.)
Israel is more or less forced to develop this approach since it is small country both in population and landmass compared to its potential adversaries, Iran especially. In addition, Israel lost its last encounter with Hezbollah and is still smarting from that.
The AntiWar
Israel Has Built a Robot Army — and It Should Scare the Sh*t Out of You
Darius Shahtahmasebi
Systemic vs. Localized
Scientific aspects of Systemic vs. Localized examined here at Revere Health.
A localized disease is an infectious or neoplastic (benign or malignant tumor) process that originates in– and is confined to–one area of the body or organ system.
A systemic illness is one that affects the entire body, rather than a single organ or body part. Many organs and tissues might be involved in the complex disease process.
Matters can be correctly analyzed via/from either of these aspects.
Friday, December 1, 2017
Finley, Franck, and Johnson — Economic consequences of revolutions: Evidence from the 1789 French Revolution
Political revolutions often bring swift regime change leading to short-run economic change, but the long-term consequences are less clear. Some argue that revolutions pave the way for capitalist market growth, while others argue they are only political in nature with limited economic consequence. This column uses extensive evidence from the French Revolution to show that the effects vary across the country and over time. The analysis speaks to questions of concern to developing countries regarding the relationship between institutional change, inequality, and long-run economic development.
vox.eu
Economic consequences of revolutions: Evidence from the 1789 French Revolution
Theresa Finley, Assistant Professor of Economics, Sigmund Weis School of Business, Susquehanna University; Raphael Franck, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Economics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Noel Johnson, Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
Michael Roberts — Boom or bust?
Review and critique of the latest OECD World Economic Outlook, from a Marxian POV. Useful.
The key for me, as readers of this blog know, is what is happening to the profitability of capital in the major economies. If profitability is rising, then corporate investment and economic growth will follow – but also vice versa. But if profitability and profits are falling, debt accumulated will become a major burden. Eventually the zombies will start to go bankrupt, spreading across sectors and a slump will ensue. Financial prices will quickly collapse toward the real value of their underlying productive assets.Michael Roberts Blog
Indeed, according to Goldman Sachs economists, the prices of financial assets (bonds and stocks) are currently at their highest against actual earnings since 1900!
What the OECD and IMF reports show is that if there is a downturn in profitability, the next slump will be severe, given that private debt (both corporate and household) has not been ‘deleveraged’ in the last nine years – indeed on the contrary.…
Boom or bust?
Michael Roberts
Branko Milanovic — Adam Smith: is democracy always better for the poor?
Interesting article and a relatively short read. Here is the conclusion.
Smith’s lesson here has broader applicability. An oligarchic democracy may be worse for the poor than an arbitrary government. A state, relatively autonomous from the elite, may care more about the “general interest” than an ostensibly democratic government that is in reality the government of the rich. Smith highlights, I think, in both his discussion of social cleavage in interests when it comes to colonies and in his discussion of slavery, the ambivalence of the connection between the state and class. In more democratic (but exclusivist) settings the state may be less autonomous and more directly “hitched” to the interests of the ruling class. In an autocracy, the state may be less subject to the power of moneyed interests, and more concerned with the position of the poor. Our facile and somewhat lazy approach that more democracy implies a greater concern or improvement for the poor is shown here, by the founder of political economy, to be possibly—at times—wrong.Global Inequality
Adam Smith: is democracy always better for the poor?Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Noah Smith — Bigger Deficits for Bad Tax Cuts Is a Bad Deal
Noah Smith puts Stephanie Kelton and MMT in the crosshairs of his sights.
The Rubin Report - Professor Micheal Munger - An Alternative to Welfare
A libertarian supports the Universal Basic Income.
Today’s welfare system discourages aspiring for the American dream. What if we tried a universal basic income instead? For the full interview with Prof. Munger,
Today’s welfare system discourages aspiring for the American dream. What if we tried a universal basic income instead? For the full interview with Prof. Munger,
Deborah Orr - Ten years on, we’re getting into another debt crisis
Another boom, but can it last?
We are 10 years on from the start of the financial crisis, and unsecured consumer debt has reached more than £200bn for the first time since 2008. It’s up 10%, year on year. The best that can be said of the matter, as compared to the pre-crash debt boom, is that at least there are worries about it.
The Bank of England and the credit ratings agency Moody’s are among those who have warned that the situation could be problematic. Which seems like an understatement. These guys are talking about big-picture risks to the economy, which generally adores debt. But at street level, the Financial Conduct Authority warns that one in six people with debt on credit cards, personal lending and car loans is in trouble. That’s 2.2 million stressed-out individuals.
RT - US empire ‘too fragile’ for a free press – analyst
The arguments made against the American Empire are so compelling that Washington intends to silence them.
RT’s Capitol Hill press credentials have been revoked after the network was forced to register as a foreign agent. This handicapping of RT journalists’ ability to report on US politics doesn’t surprise Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute, who says the neocons find RT’s arguments too compelling to allow people to hear.
RT’s Capitol Hill press credentials have been revoked after the network was forced to register as a foreign agent. This handicapping of RT journalists’ ability to report on US politics doesn’t surprise Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute, who says the neocons find RT’s arguments too compelling to allow people to hear.
Booming Euro Area Factories
More bad news out of Europe this morning, I'm afraid it seems EZ area industrial expansion is at 17 year highs.
Unfortunately, current ECB led fiscal redistribution scheme via negative rates and financial asset purchases seems to be working.
ECB collecting EZ interest payments and somewhat equitably redistributing them back to the Treasuries of the member nations for fiscal spending and deficit reduction; ie redistributing EUR balances that would probably otherwise be saved by the non-govt recipients.
Very frustrating for all the "deficit too small!" people...
Unfortunately, current ECB led fiscal redistribution scheme via negative rates and financial asset purchases seems to be working.
ECB collecting EZ interest payments and somewhat equitably redistributing them back to the Treasuries of the member nations for fiscal spending and deficit reduction; ie redistributing EUR balances that would probably otherwise be saved by the non-govt recipients.
Very frustrating for all the "deficit too small!" people...
Booming euro-area factories expand at fastest pace since 2000 https://t.co/qwHfC43mga via @aspeciale pic.twitter.com/FnFpTeqm25— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) December 1, 2017
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)