Free Market Fundamentalist Ideology is based on a Logical Fallacy.

Argumentum Ad hominem

 

Multi-billionaire William Randolph Hearst tried to destroy Orson Wells for making the film "Citizen Kane" that exposed Hearst for what he was--a fascist. Hearst turned his private investigators on to ordinary Americans in Hearst's effort to destroy all those that critical of him. Hearst and his minions pursued Wells for decades and had to move to Europe. In one case a police officer warned Wells not to return to his hotel room because Hearst photographers were waiting for him with a nake girl. Hearst set the pattern for the 1950's Red Scare witch hunt for communists that destroyed hundreds of lives. The same methods are used today. This battle between fascism and democracy occurs every few generations. Currently, democracy looks let it may come to an end, unless the same energy Orson Wells gave in this video is duplicated in our rejection of market slavery, race hatred, and authoritarianism in whatever form. Everything that is happening today has happen before in America: pandemic, race murders, racist corrupt police brutality, thugs hired by the billionaires, Red baiting, monopolies, a Stalinist judicial system, black listing, and a corrupt fascist media to distract attention from a fascist take over.

Part of a group of broadcasts which Orson Welles devoted to Isaac Woodard, a black World War II veteran who was blinded by a sheriff in South Carolina. Date of broadcast is August 11, 1946. This is a supplement to the post: Isaac Woodard, Officer X, and Orson Welles

Orson Welles Commentary: To Be Born Free


and
The Battle Over Citizen Kane KCET PBS 1996 01.​

 

Wall Street Socialists Get $11.23 Trillion Dollars in Bogus Repo Emergency Loans before the Pandemic, and Then Goes Gambling: Journalists are under gag orders not to report bank names
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 14, 2022
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Economist Michael Hudson raised the alarm on this massive illegal transfer of taxpayer money to the Wall Street gambling houses (Mega-Banks). Dr. Hudson reports "There was actually no liquidity crisis whatsoever." While the media talks about "Critical Race Theory," the Wall Street Fascist are raping you, and here is how:

"Even within economic circles, there is a growing nervousness that the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States – with the power to electronically create money out of thin air, bail out insolvent Wall Street megabanks, balloon its balance sheet to $8.8 trillion without one elected person on its Board while the U.S. taxpayer is on the hook for 98 percent of that, and allow its Dallas Fed Bank President to make directional bets on the market by trading in and out of million dollar S&P 500 futures during a declared national emergency – has carved out a no-law zone around itself.

The latest ruckus stems from the Fed’s release on December 30 of the names of the 23 Wall Street trading houses and the billions they borrowed under its cumulative $11.23 trillion emergency repo loan facility that the Fed launched on September 17, 2019 – four months before the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the United States by the CDC on January 20, 2020. (The $11.23 trillion figure represents the cumulative amounts borrowed from September 17, 2019 to the conclusion of the program on July 2, 2020. The Fed has thus far released the names of the banks and amounts borrowed for the last 14 days of September 2019 and the final quarter of 2019.)

On January 3, Wall Street On Parade published an article titled: There’s a News Blackout on the Fed’s Naming of the Banks that Got Its Emergency Repo Loans; Some Journalists Appear to Be Under Gag Orders."

This is a massive theft of Government funds in addition to the $29 Trillion dollars loaned to Wall Street during the 2008 market collapse. Hudson goes on to report:

"Hudson: “There was actually no liquidity crisis whatsoever...the reason that the regular newspapers don’t report it is the loans violated every element of the Dodd-Frank laws that were supposed to prevent the Fed from making loans to particular banks that were not part of a liquidity crisis...these three banks, Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs – which used to be a brokerage firm – and Citibank, that the Federal Reserve laws and the Dodd-Frank Act explicitly prevent the Fed from making loans to particular banks.
“It can only make loans if there’s a general liquidity crisis. And we know that there wasn’t at that time, because she lists the banks that borrowed money, and there were very few of them…”

Hudson continues to explain why this massive temporary loans always goes to the SAME Mega-Banks TRADING HOUSES!

“And these are not short-term loans...they were 14-day loans; there were longer loans. And they were rolled over, not overnight loans, not day-to-day loans, not even week-to-week loans. But month after month, the Fed was pumping money into JP Morgan and Citibank and Goldman."

“But then she [Martens] points out that, or at least she told me, that these really weren’t Citibank and Morgan and Chase; it was to their trading affiliates. Now this is exactly what Dodd-Frank was supposed to prevent."

This looks like a routine American mafia operation to me. Your savings and retirement funds are in great danger of theft. See Dr. Hudson's full analysis of how the Wall Mafia is separating the American fools from their money.

Economist Michael Hudson explains inflation crisis and Fed's secretive $4.5 trillion bank bailout which is still posted at YouTube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7eAbbVMr_4

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Where does planned obsolescence fit into free market theory?

When the technology is too complicated for consumers to understand what does competition mean?

Then our nitwit economists say nothing about the depreciation of durable consumer goods since WWII. There were 200,000,000 cars in the US in 1994. Where did the depreciation go?

What is NDP?

 

Allied with landlords and monopolists, Wall Street is extracting economic rents from the economy that’s impoverishing US government, industry, and labor. Economist Michael Hudson discusses the choke-hold of pro-finance, pro-rentier capitalism reaching into the present COVID-19 crisis.

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Another great essay on current events including China, Ukraine and Russia, "America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies," by Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Here are a few key themes discussed by Dr. Hudson.

America’s Sanctions on Its Allies Hurt Their Economies, Not Those of Russia and China​

"The Iron Curtain of the 1940s and ‘50s was ostensibly designed to isolate the Soviet Union from Western Europe – to keep out Communist ideology and military penetration. Today’s sanctions regime is aimed inward, to prevent America’s NATO and other Western allies from opening up more trade and investment with Russia and China. The aim is not so much to isolate Russia and China as to hold these allies firmly within America’s own economic orbit. Allies are to forego the benefits of importing Russian gas and Chinese products, buying much higher-priced U.S. LNG and other exports, capped by more U.S. arms."

"What worries American diplomats is that Germany, other NATO nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains that can be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment. If there is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb them, what is the need for NATO? And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why do foreign countries need to sacrifice their own trade and financial interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors?... Even Germany is balking at demands that it freeze by this coming March by going without Russian gas."

"America’s rising pressure on its allies threatens to drive them out of the U.S. orbit. For over 75 years they had little practical alternative to U.S. hegemony. But that is now changing...At issue is how long the United States can block its allies from taking advantage of China’s economic growth. Will Germany, France and other NATO countries seek prosperity for themselves instead of letting the U.S. dollar standard and trade preferences siphon off their economic surplus?"

U.S. Dreams of a Neoliberalized China as a U.S. Corporate Affiliate

"America has de-industrialized as a deliberate policy of slashing production costs as its multinationals have sought low-wage labor abroad, most notably in China. This shift was not a rivalry with China, but was viewed as mutual gain. The rivalry was between U.S. employers and U.S. labor, and the class-war weapon was offshoring and, in the process, cutting back government social spending."​

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An excellent beginning, in demonstrating the way that statements of a philosophical nature can often be misleading & misconstrued, as analogical thinking is not the forte, of most. But I would think your critique is no more than half complete: I was expecting you to proceed onto some of the specific ways/devices/mechanisms, according to Free Market "rules," in which other lassez faire principles come into play, to upset the ideological apple cart; in other words, go through the the incentives of, just for example, business to offer cheap, inferior, resource-wasteful, and polluting products, for which society as a whole, not the manufacturer, bears the cost, but is unlikely to be able to both be aware of & to keep straight, the practices of every company, every product that each company produces, and what the net effect is, of each one's product line, on the rest of us.


Perhaps I merely haven't yet reached the point in your thread, when you get into this?

 

The Fight Club​

Here is a excellent online discussing involving economist Dr. Michael Hudson and the famous mathematician and economist Dr. Steven Keen about debt, taxes, and monetary theory from ancient Babylon to Wall Street banks.

Nika Dubrovsky, widow of the late David Graeber, has established "The Fight Club" to keep David's unique way of challenging conventional wisdom alive. Each "Fight" will pit leading advocates, thinkers and visionaries against each other.

The inaugural fight was a debate between the renowned economists: Thomas Piketty, author of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, and Michael Hudson, author of “And Forgive Them Their Debts”.

This event was a follow up Q & A session with Hudson together with expert on modern monetary theory Dr. Pavlina Tcherneva and Steve Keen of Debunking Economics. Astra Taylor of the Debt Collective moderated. The conversation was a high-energy exchange of ideas and opinions about the history of debt and the role of money in society.

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The problem is not that Limited Government interference is folly, the problem is that the alternative is even worse.

 

Bingo. If you think, "Government is the problem," try no government.

 

"Prof. Wolff speaks about the failures by the Biden administration to find a way out of the current economic crisis. As inflation steadily increases and wages stagnate, our government’s only proposed solution—increased interest rates—does more harm than good. We’re stuck at a dead end with nowhere to go…except to a system better than capitalism, one that supports the masses."

Biden's plan to fight inflation with unemployment appears to be an effort to sabotage the economy to the degree there is no possibility of a New Deal re-structuring of the economy--at least for the ninety-nine percent. Wall Street enjoys the protection against markets provided by the socialism of the Federal Reserve.

Wolff Responds: Inflation, Prices, Interest Rates...A Policy Crisis
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As opposed to the correlation vs causation fallacy? What is more likely to be a net benefit. Millions of people making voluntary choices or 1 person (Or government) making involutory choices for millions of people?

 

Millions making voluntary choices, of course. But you need to shake hands with the fact that it was government that made the choice to forcibly strip those millions of people of their rights to liberty, without just (or any) compensation, and make those liberty rights into the private property of the privileged, especially landowners.

 

Economics for Grown Ups​

America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century: How the MIC, OGAM and FIRE Sectors Conquered NATO
by Michael Hudson
3/1/2022

Hudson's article discuses America’s three oligarchic blobs in control of U.S. foreign policy:

1. Military-Industrial Complex (MIC)
2. Oligarchic-bloc Gas and Mining sector (OGAM)
3. Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE)

He writes that Russia has numerous way around financial sanctions especially if China helps.

"The FIRE, MIC and OGAM sectors are the three rentier sectors that dominate today’s post-industrial finance capitalism. Their mutual fortunes have soared as MIC and OGAM stocks have increased. And moves to exclude Russia from the Western financial system (and partially now from SWIFT), coupled with the adverse effects of isolating European economies from Russian energy, promise to spur an inflow into dollarized financial securities."

The second article is by economist Dr. Jack Rasmus
Some Economic Consequences of the War in Ukraine
3/1/2022

Rasmus describes the

• Economic Consequences for Russia
• European Economic Impact
• The USA Economic Impact
• Long Run Consequences for Global Capitalism

And concludes that...
"The Ukraine war’s economic consequences will impact all the three economies—Russia’s, Europe’s and America’s. The impacts may be relatively different qualitatively and quantitatively. But actions taken against one have their inevitable economic reverberations on all. Inflation due to escalating oil and commodity price inflation will negatively impact all. Central bank policy responses will be weaker across the board. Slower economic growth will result as goods and services flows are interrupted and global supply chain problems continue and perhaps even worsen."

 

The Aesthetics of Fascism​

There is so much disinformation blaring from the internet the truth is difficult to identify. Notice all the gruesome pictures coming from the Ukrainian civil war. Contrast that with high-technical weaponry and human beings reduced to heat signatures that is a little more aesthetically pleasing while watching a night-vision video screen in which actual persons are blown into glowing pieces. What was it that Adorno wrote back in the 1930's?

"Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic."-Adorno ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin, 1935, p. 20).

Michael Hudson is an excellent touchstone to test the war narratives presented by U.S. state-private media oligopolies. The Ukraine is just the stage for the struggle between Russian proxies and Washington D.C. trying to keep control of Europe. Both the U.S. and Russia have planned for this conflict for years in advance so don't think you are getting information spontaneously and in a timely manner. Hudson has a great quote of his own....

"Question: Is this, is it going to have one side advanced more than the other or is it going to be a nuclear husk? What is your thinking?

Michael Hudson: I don’t think it’ll be nuclear, although it could, given the crazy neocons with the Christian fundamentalists in Washington, people like Pompeo thinking that Jesus will come if you blow up the world. I mean, these people are literally crazy.

I worked with National Security people 50 years ago at the Hudson Institute, and I couldn’t believe that human brains were as twisted as they were, wanting to blow up much of the world for religious reasons. And for ethnic reasons, and for personal psychology reasons. And these are the people that have somehow risen to a policy-making position in the United States, and they’re threatening not only the rest of the world, but of course the US economy as well.

But I don’t think atomic war is likely. I think that the United States is going to try to convince other countries that neoliberalism is the way that they can get rich. And of course, it’s not (Source)."

Ross Ashcroft Talks With Economist Michael Hudson About the Ramifications of the War in Ukraine
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Biden using Reagan's Recession Playbook against America Again​

I keep seeing the same pattern--the same strategy-- as in the year before and immediately after Ronald Reagan became president. I lived through that horror.

After the Arab Oil embargo of 1979 when a barrel of oil doubled in price, inflation soared. And it was this oil inflation that the Republicans and corporate Democrats exploited to accelerated the inflation crisis. The U.S. was also experiencing hyper-inflation because of the Vietnam War costs that was not paid for by taxes during the imperialistic war.

After the Reagan administration entered office the neo-liberal monetarists (Milton Friedman, for one) hit the brakes even harder by raising interest rates to fight inflation.

The American people thought that it was a good idea because of high prices, but they really didn't understand that the strategy was to fight speculative inflation with monetarist induced recession--that is, to fight inflation with unemployment. When workers are flat broke, consumption drops, and eventually prices will drop. The austerity remedy is as bad as the disease, but with benefits for the oligarchy. Recessions are profitable for Wall Street speculators even during the 1929 crash.

Soon after the Reagan administration hit the highest unemployment rate since the 1929 depression they allowed corporate America to suck up distressed assets by instituting a national corporate merger frenzy establishing monopolies that lasted to through Obama's administration and even today.

The merger frenzy exacerbated unemployment as workers subject to mass layoffs were declared as "redundant." Wages dropped further as some workers were rehired under subcontractors whose cost is a tax write off. Labor unions were decimated. Job security disappeared. Since fast food managers are not paid overtime, some food workers were promoted to "managers," to become what is known as "Big Mac" processor managers.

The 1981 mergers increased on Wall Street with massive mergers absorbed by banks and trading houses such as Morgan Stanley, Salomon Brothers, First Boston, Smith Barney, E.F. Hutton, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs to name a few.

The working class never recovered to this day. The process is slow. Once Americans realize what was done to them, it would be like complaining about the weather.

Biden thinks his economic plan is now complete: the "fix" is in, while business will do the rest out of self-interest.

 

"...as if we were an ox under a yoke, a castrated animal carrying a burden it does not see."
--Nietzsche, The Joyful Science. ​

I have noticed that the oligarchs on the financial monopoly media are just giddy over the increasing inflation and the devastation they are planning to unload on working people--especially young people starting out. This inflation surge is deliberate, planned, very profitable, tested and proven to work. Small business owners that often identify with Wall Street will be wiped out and will no longer be competition for the large monopolies such as the national restaurant chains.

Cable media is lying to you, distracting you, manipulating you. The Republicans and corporate Democrats are waging class warfare against you like never before, while that ****ing piece of ****, Joe Biden, is letting them ruin your life for the next forty years.

Recessions are great for Wall Street and even make the most money when people are desperate and have no recourse but to be exploited. Speculative inflation solves all there business problems! Lowers wages, employees can be abused without limit, no unions, higher profits, and a broken generation.

This is what happened to the younger generation under Reagan's assault on American working people that was very successful but is now forgotten. Young people cannot rely on their memory, or work history to foresee what they will be subjected to by these vicious institutions, and that is why they suffer the most.

It's not raining, American capitalism is pissing on you and on one in power will come to your rescue!

Our only hope is that the Washington D.C. mafia-fascist whorehouse collapses when the world figures out that the American dollar is based on absolutely nothing, but their own exploitation, suffering, and death.

Leaked Applebee's Email vindicates Karl Marx as they celebrate their employees' fall into greater poverty.
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Henry George said it better:

"Near the window by which I write, a great bull is tethered by a ring in
his nose. Grazing round and round he has wound his rope about the
stake until now he stands a close prisoner, tantalized by rich grass he
cannot reach, unable even to toss his head to rid him of the flies that
cluster on his shoulders. Now and again he struggles vainly, and then,
after pitiful bellowings, relapses into silent misery.
This bull, a very type of massive strength, who, because he has not wit
enough to see how he might be free, suffers want in sight of plenty, and
is helplessly preyed upon by weaker creatures, seems to me no unfit
emblem of the working masses."

What has tricked the working masses into imprisoning and starving themselves like the bull? Not, as Marx claimed, the employer-employee ("capitalist-worker") relationship, but the legal removal of the workers' liberty rights and their conversion into landowners' private property. What stops workers from working for themselves, accumulating their own capital to invest in their own productivity? Nothing at all but the legal requirement to pay landowners full market value just for their permission to do so. And why do the workers acquiesce in this system of legalized theft? For no other reason than that they hope one day to partake in it themselves. Tempted and tantalized by the prospect of one day owning a little postage stamp of land under their dwellings, they have shoveled their wages into landowners' pockets in return for nothing, and undertaken decades of debt peonage to mortgage lenders.

No. Marx completely misunderstood capitalism and how it robs and exploits workers. It is not the employer or "capitalist" who has stripped the worker of his right to liberty, thus his options, and thus his bargaining power, it is the landowner. Marxism-socialism merely consists in blaming the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker (capitalism blames the worker for it).

 

Let me point out (if it's not already been pointed out so far) that you droned on and on about the Fallacy of Composition, but you do not give one example of or any explanation how it applies against arguments of free market proponents.

That kind of seems like a giant thread fail to me.

 

In my essay Bertrand Russell's Critique of Fregean Logico-Mathematical Objects I wrote...

"In another example of misplaced scientific reductionism, economist Steve Keen has critiqued Neo-classical and Neo-liberal economic theories for treating macroeconomics as applied microeconomics: these two methodologies are on completely different levels of abstraction. Dr. Keen argues that “…psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry…nor is macro-economics applied microeconomics (video lecture: 6:51 min., Debunking Economics: the Failure of Neo-classical Economics with Steve Keen). Keen quotes 1977 Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist, Philip Anderson's saying of multi-levels of scientific abstraction: “Instead at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behavior requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other (video: 6:41 min.)”.

Steve Keen has shown mathematically and historically that neo-classical Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Theory (DSGE) is based on the fallacy that the natural state of the macroeconomic is equilibrium when in fact it is dis-equilibrium. Free Market Neo-Liberal Laissez-faire ideology assumes the opposite which is the (DSGE) equilibrium model. Nobody has shown Dr. Keen wrong. The Right-Wing fascist economists don't even bother to argue with Dr. Keen anymore since free-market economic theory has completely collapsed.

This is why American "Economic Department" needs two departments: 1.) one department to teaches DSGS theory which is wrong, and 2.) a second "School of Business" to teach how businesses are actually ran some of which are engineered to never generate a profit.

American economic is based on a cult religious belief in a god that does not exist.

 

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Equilibrium occupies exactly the same position in modern mainstream neoclassical economics that circular orbits occupied in pre-Keplerian cosmology: a false but unchallengeable ideological assumption based on no evidence that makes everything else impossible to understand.

 

Libertarianism is the opposite of slavery. There is nothing in the philosophical underpinnings of the libertarian ideology that would allow human being to own each other.

 

"An economic system should be constructed so as to conform to human nature...each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves."--von Mises Libertarian James McGill Buchanan Jr. wrote in his 1975 book, "The Limits of Liberty,"

 

Slavery -- labor compelled by force -- has other forms than chattel slavery. The POWs that Japan compelled to work in WW II were never anyone's property, but they were still slaves. Likewise, when a private prison corporation tells inmates, "You can stay in your cell or go out and work for one of our client firms for $1/day," that is labor compelled by force -- i.e., slavery -- even though no one owns the inmates.