Free Market Fundamentalist Ideology is based on a Logical Fallacy.

my question was about why we need government regulations on the economy. I never once argued that the market will self regulate, but that is besides the point.
your response is loaded with falsehoods so let’s just start with the first point...

Right off the bat you start with a false premise that 1) there are natural monopolies. 2) Your second false operating premise is that governments prevent natural monopolies when in fact throughout history, it has been governments that have created the monopolies (look at the police, fire, tele-communications sector heavily regulated by government. It is the governments that have created the monopolies).

the 3rd false operating premise is that governments prevent monopolies from exploiting consumers... Absurd... The monopolies that have existed throughout history were only able to exploit people because the government propped them up and protected them from competitors coming into the market.

And the 4th fallacy in you first point alone is the heart of the matter: Government protects consumers from exploitation . That means you think Government is good, businesses are evil.

 

One of my favorite economists is Steve Keen, an Australian economist from the University of Western Sydney, who is now Head of the School of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University.

Dr. Keen is noteworthy because he has compiled a devastating critique of Neo-Classical economics. Keen's own school of economics is formed on the economic theory of Hyman Minsky. Keen has constructed a live mathematical model that verify Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis, effects of endogenous money creation, critiques Marx's theory of value, and explains the effects of private debt on macroeconomic performance trends. In the recent video below, Dr. Keen discusses the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Theory (DSGE) calling it a "false god" of Neo-Classical Economic Theory:

Economics out of equilibrium--please!

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In an older video Dr. Keen presents a lecture debunking of the DSGE Macroeconomic Model at the Malaysian Central Bank's annual conference in 2013 and demonstrates his Minsky software package called Minsky for visually modeling national economies proving DSGE is a theoretical homunculus.

Professor Steve Keen Discussing DSGE
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Versus the self-regulating government doctrine that you espouse.
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In a democracy, voters are supposed to regulate the government, ensuring that it governs in their interest -- as opposed to private corporations, which govern in their owners' financial interest.

 

“Lassie faire capitalism”

Come home Lassie!

made me laugh.

 

That is not a false premise. It is an indisputable fact. Natural monopolies are simply markets with increasing economies of scale, and include physical infrastructure such as water and sewer systems, roads and railroads, electric power and gas distribution systems, social infrastructure such as defense and law enforcement, and information infrastructure such as postal service, libraries and social media.

No, that's just anti-economic nonsense from you. Those are all examples of natural monopolies that, in the absence of government, would be monopolized by private interests. It's true that governments have often created monopolies where they are not natural, such as IP monopolies, but that is not inherent in government: they've done it because they are subservient to aspiring private monopolists.

Fact, as proved by the higher average cost of electric power in areas where it is provided by private suppliers than in places where it is provided by publicly owned ones.

That applies to some government-created monopolies, like IP monopolies, but not to natural monopolies like those I listed above, which naturally tend to monopoly because of producers' cost structure.

No, it just means democratically accountable government is better for the public interest than unaccountable for-profit private ownership.

 

Autocomplete?

 

I see. So they people can be trusted to regulate a government in their own interests, but they can't be trusted to make economic decisions in their own interest.

 

Speaking of C.S. Lewis....

“...a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist....We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense,"advanced..."- Theologian C.S. Lewis wrote in his book, Mere Christianity, p. 80.

Lewis was also a severe critic of British Imperialism. Winston Churchill offered Lewis the prestigious award of “Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire,” but rejected the award for fear it would appear he supported capitalism. Lewis lamented, “We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the service of Moloch.” Moloch is the pagan god of child sacrifice.

 

It's not a question of trusting them -- they elected Trump, after all -- but of their right to participate in governing the authority responsible for securing and reconciling their individual rights.

The violation of others' rights is not an economic act. It is a political or criminal act. Decisions about how to secure and reconcile the equal rights of all are therefore rightly the purview of a democratic political process, not an economic one. Leaving the security of people's rights to economic decisions merely guarantees that those with economic power will rule those without it.

 

Private and Public Monopolies​

Free-Market ideologues often argue that government itself create monopolies since corporations are legal entities sanctioned by the state with special rights which even supersedes human legal rights. They argue, “Name me all of the monopolies that formed without the help of the government,” which is an equivalent way of saying from an interrogative the proposition,“There is no monopoly that is not created with government help," or “All Monopolies are created with the help of Government."

So to logically symbolize this second proposition would look like (∀x) (Mx ⊃ Gx) where...

∀x = symbol for universal generalization as in ‘given any x’, or ‘all x’.
Mx = Monopolies
Gx = Created with the help of government.
⊃ = if, then as a predicate statement.

We can agree that "All Corporations are created with the help of Government" since they are incorporated by the state.
(∀x)( Cx ⊃ Gx) where "Cx" = “Corporations are created…” But “help” from the government doesn’t mean a business has permission to form a monopoly.

The Free-Market ideologue attempts to set up the following argument:

1. All corporations are created with the help of government.
2. (missing premise)
3. Therefore, All monopolies are created with the help of government.

But the OP (opposing position) is missing premise number 2 that must say, "All Monopolies are Corporate," (∀x) (Mx ⊃ Cx) to validly complete the argument.

The syllogism would look like this with the missing premise included.

1. (∀x)(Cx ⊃ Gx)
2. (∀x)(Mx ⊃ Cx)
3. Therefore, (∀x)(Mx ⊃ Gx)

Conclusion, 3, is reached by using the logical rule of hypothetical syllogism on premises 1, and 2 as in [(Mx ⊃ Cx) and (Cx ⊃Gx)] then (Mx ⊃Gx).

But is premise 2, "All monopolies are corporate" true? One can argue that only "Some monopolies are corporate," (∃x)(Mx * Cx) where "(∃x)" meaning an existential generalization meaning, "at least one x exists, or some," and "*" means "is". Clearly some monopolies are government controlled, (∃x) (Mx * Gx), like money creation, mail service, defense, public utilities, social security, telecommunications, and most regulatory agencies, but there are also "government granted monopolies." However, because of privatization corporations control some monopolies, there is clearly a cross over between government and private controlled monopolies. So to claim premise 2, "All monopolies are corporate" is false and cannot establish conclusion 3, “All monopolies are government created,” with logical consistency because you cannot generalize from the quantifier “some” (∃x) to “all” (∀x).

Also, some monopolies are exclusively private. That is to say “Some monopolies are not created with the permission of government,” (∃x)(Mx * ~Gx). There are two kinds of monopolies: vertical monopolies and horizontal monopolies. Vertical monopolies are where a corporation controls the product, or service from production to distribution like the refining of oil to gas. One company would drill the oil, refine the oil into products, and then ship it, and sell from its own franchise. A horizontal monopoly only controls one level of the process like refining, or shipping. Both of these monopoly types formed in steel, oil, and agriculture in the early 1900s until government weakened them through regulation.

I should make another logical point: both statements (∃x)(Mx * Gx) and (∃x)(Mx * ~Gx) cannot be false, but both can be true.

There is a straw man argument concealed in the OP thesis; namely that progressives are against all monopolies, which is not true. There are some natural monopolies like water, telecommunications, transportation systems, or electricity; “natural” meaning it is impractical to install a separate physical water line, or Internet cable for each individual corporate service provided. Unregulated private monopolies are the bane of consumers because private corporations only seek profit and granting them unlimited control of these community resources allows them to charge monopoly prices to the detriment of the common good.

One other point is being ignored. Private corporations have historically corrupted the regulatory power of government of protecting the common good to establish monopolies that only benefit factional interests. When Marx wrote that capitalism historically created monopolies by destroying its market competition, he took into account the role of the state being used by capital to establish those monopolies—it is the nature of capitalist competition to monopolize markets and not a case of freely choosing non-monopolistic free markets or state ran monopolies.

Yet, another issue is being ignored. Monopolies are much more rare than oligopolies in which a group of large corporations band together to fix prices. This oligopolistic form of market control is much more common. Even in 1941, the American economy was a collection of oligopolies and much of the Free Enterprise System was involved in routine price fixing. When economist John Kenneth Galbraith was appointed by the Roosevelt administration to control prices during WWII to prevent run away inflation as it happened in WWI, he discovered that large corporations already controlled prices.

Later, Galbraith wrote, “The theorem is that ‘it is relatively easy to fix prices that are already fixed.’ ”

 

I don't believe that was the argument. People always act in ways that they believe to be in their own interest. But the argument as I recall was that people making buying and selling decisions in their own interest is not an effective or suitable regulator of the markets. Above, @originalthoughts said "my question was about why we need government regulations on the economy". And the point is that we do need proper regulations on the economy because individuals buying and selling do not and cannot regulate everything about the markets that need regulation.

Capitalism applies forces to ensure that profit is the #1 concern and purpose of any business. The SCOTUS even ruled that the first priority of corporations shall be the maximization of shareholder profits. And to carry out that directive, every corporation is very willing to cut corners to cut costs. That is why they are willing to pollute. That is why they have made dangerous products. That is why they perpetuate racism. That is why they persist in digging up and promoting the burning of fossil fuels. That is why our healthcare is the most expensive in the world. That is why our educational system is in shambles. And that is why our wealth and income disparity is so extreme that it is threatening the very fabric of our society.

Regulation of the excesses of capitalism are necessary for a functional society.

 

You're not being realistic and you reflect poor knowledge of history. EVERY FORM OF ECONOMY has always in every case been regulated, whether slave societies, feudalism, or capitalism of every functioning system. Bounds are needed as are protections. You can't escape it and your demands for zero regulation only serve to inject unrealistic notions to be debated, which keeps the conversation stuck in la-la land and prevents development of real solutions.

 

Corpocracy: How CEOs and the Business Roundtable Hijacked the World's Greatest Wealth Machine- And How to Get It Back
This 272 page book was written in 2007 by Robert A. G. Monks.

Robert Monks is a highly experienced corporate lawyer knowledgeable in labor law and pension plans. Monks begins his book, Corpocracy: How CEOs and the Business Roundtable Hijacked the World's Greatest Wealth Machine- And How to Get It Back (2007), with arguments of his critique of corporate governance practices and ends his work with very specific legal briefs for shareholders lawsuits, and statements of principles on institutional shareholder responsibilities. On his way from theoretical critique to practical legal arguments, Monks describes how corporations gained the status of natural-entities with personhood and free speech rights; the influence of Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell on Corporate political activism stated in what is known as “The Powell Memo” sent to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Education Committee on August 23, 1971; the formation of the Business Roundtable in 1972 inspired by the Powell memo; real life examples of awarding outrageous performance-unrelated compensation to CEOs; advocating shareholder activism and democratization of corporate governance practices as remedies to abusive executive compensation practices.

The Value-free Language of Corporations

Interestingly, Monks begins his book with a discussion of how language has been used of justify corporate management practices and how a school of economic ideology has engulfed all aspects of human behavior. Monks understands modern corporate language as a form of Orwellian New Speak, which interpret all human interaction and exchange in the scientific terminology of economics. All human activity is abstractly expressed in quantifiable units of mathematics. Corporate speak is able to hide behind the morally neutral science of economics to override all other concerns of social duty by using a value-free objective scientific language that ignores history, morality, and society. Corporate language only acknowledges profit maximization, business efficiency, and practices externalization of costs that transfers proprietary corporate costs to other spheres of society to bear.

This line of argument would be more expected from Jurgen Habermas, Theodore Adorno, or Karl Polanyi than from a corporate lawyer. Surprisingly, Monk’s critique of language and economics is closer to Adorno’s critique of the ideology of scientism, and capitalism’s abstract law of exchange and equivalence. According to the Neo-Marxian, Adorno, positivist-scientific systems drive out subjective experience as superfluous expressions of consciousness which are unnecessary for understanding the objective law-governed material world. Quantifying mathematical conceptualization becomes the primary mode for grasping all human experience and interactions.

Adorno believes language is a classificatory device that strips experience of any meaning not covered by conceptual pre-definitions leaving behind what Proust called the dechet of experience, or literally, the “debris of experience.” It is this lost refuse, or waste of experience that Adorno attempts to recover from mathematicizing natural-scientific thinking and objectifying language. What is considered by natural-scientific epistemology as pure objective facticity is really disguised radical idealism since all experience is first subjected to a categorization-driven knowledge model by which a cognitive subtraction takes place of all phenomena not covered by a concept. Adorno calls this process of conceptualization the “withering” of experience and the “decay” of language. “Disenchantment” is the named Max Weber used to describe this modern dissatisfaction with natural-scientific reductionism that drives out all subjective meaning by subordinating everything to calculative rationalization.

Monks is disenchanted with the ubiquitous econocentric view of human activity in which “the language of modern economics has no place for immeasurable qualities such as community well-being and fraternal strength.”(Ibid.,, p. 131). History, literature, philosophy, and law are seen to only have immeasurable cultural value while competitive possessive individualism that employ any means for accumulating pecuniary reward trumps all other societal values. The singular focus on wealth accumulation devalues all other values. This emphasis on material wealth has a profound influence on social institutions, and especially on corporation governance. Monks writes, “Like modem economists, classical ones assumed that rational people will try to maximize their personal satisfaction, but unlike modern ones, they didn't equate "personal satisfaction" almost exclusively with wealth. To the classicists, it was equally probable that one might seek to maximize leisure or social life or moral behavior-whatever might most improve quality of life, not solely one's assets or income. (Ibid., p. 22). The marketplace overrules all issues of social morality.

Corporations are People Too

Monks’ first chapter critique of modern economics arrives at the same conclusions as critical philosophy providing a solid groundwork of supporting philosophical literature. In the next chapters, Monks traces the history of the modern corporations and how they gained such an overwhelming influence over our daily lives.

Monk’s traces the rise of corporate power to two natural-entity Supreme Court decisions that awarded corporate entities with special political rights and the rise of corporate activism to influence democratic political processes. The case notes written by a lobbyist, not the case decision itself, in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) decision claims corporations are legal persons and therefore have 14th Amendment constitutional protections like those of flesh and blood persons. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 to give freed slaves the right of “due process of law” but this decision’s interpretation includes corporate entities. The second case natural-entity court decisions is First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (197 Supreme Court decision led by Nixon appointed Justice Lewis Powell awarding the 1st Amendment right of free speech to corporate entities enabling them to influence elections.

Armed with illegitimate political power corporations became more politically active. The same Supreme Court Justice that decided in favor of the First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti case authored the famous “Powell Memorandum” of August 23, 1971 that is a manifesto of corporate activism to educate the public of business’ contributions to society, lobby elected leaders, affect legislation, influence popular media, and to aggressively increase American business’ political power. Only two months after the Powell Memorandum was sent the Education Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 64-year-old Lewis Powell was selected by Richard M. Nixon to fill the Supreme Court seat of retiring Justice Hugo Black.

Continues to below to post # 190...

 

...Continuing from post # 189.

The Slow Motion Corporate Coup

Within the same year of corporate lawyer Lewis Powell’s memo and his appointment as Supreme Court Justice, a new organization named “The Business Roundtable” was formed. This organization is only limited to CEO such as its founding chairman W. B. Murphy of Campbell Soup corporation. TBR and now has 160 members which include Phil Condit of Boeing, John Dillon of International Paper, John Snow of CXS Transportation ( later George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary), Drew Lewis of Union Pacific Corporation (later Reagan’s Secretary of Transportation). Other members are the heads of Aetna, Alcoa, Allstate, American Express, Archer aniels Midland, AT&T, Dow, FedEx, GE, General Motors, JP Morgan, American Express. (List of BRT members)

All 160 BRT members collectively have about $4.5 trillion in annual revenues, with 10 million employees. BRT comprises about one third of the total value of the U.S stock market. As Bruce Atwater, CEO of General Mills and BRT leader, once told The Business School Press in disapproval of a book Harvard Business School professor Dr. Jay Lorsch authored, ”Institutions like this one had better think twice in publishing this kind of material if they want our continued support.”

Corporations armed with new legal and political power change the character of corporate governance. CEO began to pay themselves massive salaries, bonuses, “rollover” payments of current salaries for years after a CEOs departs, and benefits packages using accounting tricks such as back dated stock options. Corporate CEOs created new elaborate schemes to hide legally required financial disclosure information used to evaluate general corporate health. A new parallel financial accounting services industry of corporate auditing and rating services appeared to assist in concealing CEO looting of corporate resources from shareholders. Monks highlights a few outrageous examples of recent executive compensation packages costing shareholders.

· Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell and former head of the BRT received a $198 million dollar payout ( to get rid of him as CEO) and a $5.9 million dollars pension per year and even more if he remarried even though Pfizer’s stock price dropped 40% during his leadership. He benefited from $6,240,414 in exercised stock options in 2005.
· Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli paid $150 million, then in January 2007 an additional $210 million severance package. His pension was an additional $2,250,000 per year, plus $18 million in other “entitlements.” Home Depot’s stock also declined while Nardelli was at the corporate helm.
· CSX rail system CEO John Snow from 1996-2001 received a $27 million loan against his stock options but its value dropped to $17 million. His options deal was cancelled saving him $10 million and was awarded an extra $4.3 million. The three-year CEO of CSX rail system was instantly credited with 19 years of service using a tool called Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan (SERP) after which Snow cashed out his unearned pension for $33 million.
· NYSE Chairman Dick Grasso was paid $188 million plus a $10 million bonus for re-opening the NYSE after the 9/11 attack.
· ESL Investments Corp. CEO Eddie Lampert whose company privatized Kmart, Sears and other retail businesses received $1 billion in the one year of 2005, and James Simon received $1.7 billion for 2006 alone. (Ibid.,pp. 62-63).

Simultaneously, from the 1990s to early 2000s high corporate officials transferred from shareholders to themselves about $1 trillion, or 10%, of the total stock market value. During 1995 the ratio of withholding payroll taxes compared to corporate taxes was three to one; however, by 2002 the ratio was five to one.

The Momentary Involuntary Wall Street Retirement Pension Plan

Another massive transfer of wealth from ordinary persons to corporate leaders involved reformed pension programs that replaced defined-benefit pension programs that pay pensioners a set annual sum to defined-contribution pension programs, which is a fancy name for a savings account with some tremendous disadvantages. Defined-contribution pensions are forced saving accounts that the company matches “vested” employee contribution by 25 -- 50 percent to a maximum amount of $5,000 -- $10,000. Often the employer determines which kind of investment instrument funds employees contribute. Employees cannot exit such fund groups, like 401K plans, without paying heavy penalties so Wall Street traps their retirement money. And most of all, the risk for pension fund management is transferred to the employee who now needs a personal fee charging financial manager. So much for the “sovereign consumer” who is now subordinate to the truly sovereign fund manager.

Meanwhile, employers with contractual defined-benefit pension plans were dumping unpaid pensions on the government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) designed to protected employees from deadbeat employers and failed pensions. PBGC now has about $23 billion in abandoned pensions obligations with $108 billion more expected for working taxpayers. Yet, any one-year CEO could through the magic of SERP be instantaneously declared a 20-year employee with full retirement benefits to be paid in a lump sum. Instead of pensions being a burden on corporations, they can now record instant profit of greater earning, greater market stock value, including lower taxed stock options which corporate officers pay themselves.

Financialization and De-industrialization of a Privatized Economy

Monks describes how these natural corporate entities used their new legal powers and rights to change the very nature of American business practices by abandoning manufacturing’s managed capitalism model and morphing instead into high finance casinos gaming at the tables of Finance, Insurance, and Realist Estate. After lobbying congress to change government financial and business regulations, corporations turned to private equity (also called pirate equity) companies that buy healthy companies with borrowed money to only sale them later to other buyers loaded with even more borrowed money. The financialization of business led to nation de-industrialization as speculation replaced productive manufacturing. Monks cites financial-market industry’s value at about $22 billion in 1980, but by 1990 financial markets’ worth increased to $73 billion to manufacturing’s $113 billion total value. During 2004 finance markets soared to $218 billion leaving behind manufacturing at $105 billion—more than twice manufacturing’s total value! Since January 2001 when George W. Bush took office, one in five U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost.

Fiduciary responsibility was thrown out the window and replaced with borrowed money to gamble on exotic financial instruments in hopes of getting a slice of the $9 trillion in equities held by institutional funds. These huge funds—especially pension-- are subject to purposeless “churning” to extract massive management fees to profit the very persons that were supposed to manage these funds for the benefit of the pensioners.

The “Private” Party

Another trend of the Corpocracy is the privatization of public service and goods that directed vast sums of taxpayers’ money to “efficient” private contractors without government supervision. During G.W. Bush’s first six years in office 20 Federal contractors spend $80 million for lobbying the government after which federal contracts doubled for the private sector to $400 billion. The efficient private sector companies of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman were awarded $900 billion in contracts to modernize an aging fleet of ship in the U.S. Coast Guard’s “Deepwater” program. After upgrading ship after ship was declared “unseaworthy” including the 418-foot cutter, “National Security.” The cutters were eventually scrapped. In 2007, the Coast Guard took over management of the program.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and former Eli Lilly & Company executive and G.W. Bush budget director leased Indiana’s only toll road to Australia’s Macquarie Infrastructure Group and Cintra for $3.85 billion for all tolls paid for the next 75 years. The formerly $4.65 toll has since risen to $8 and then $9 to rise every year for the duration of the lease.

Mercenaries “R” US

The most worrisome sphere of privatization has been in the military. Americans still think in the old paradigm of the WWII citizen-soldier that goes to war for the greater good of society. Instead of the citizen-soldier, America now has a paid contractual voluntary mercenary military. A mercenary army conveniently breaks the connection between war and democratic society.

What is to be Done?

Monks offers some solutions and strategies to resistance a powerful Corpocracy such as shareholder activism to enforce fiduciary responsibility, private shareholder advisory firms, and changes to laws governing corporations.

Shareholders ownership is “de-materialized” into abstract stocks that are bought and sold in a fast paced computer driven market exchange that weakens the concept of ownership responsibility by shareholders. Ownership becomes fragmented and diluted leaving corporate decisions to a selected board of directors that do not have strong investment positions. Shareholders must become more active in corporate governance. Trustees must take seriously their legal responsibility to manage company assets for the benefit of stockholders.

Shareholders can use advisory firms to provide information of corporate performance by measuring the cost of corporate governance and compensation practices. Two such firms are Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and The Corporate Library which rate corporate practices. Also, the NYSE should de-list companies that do not provide operation information to shareholders.

There must be changes in business law to insure companies live up to their fiduciary responsibilities. Shareholders can resort to court litigation in response to CEO looting of shareholder assets. There already exists a model create by Congress for stopping corporate abuses, but it has been nullified by deregulation policies in recent years.

Retirement funds of employees are protected by the existing ERISA (Employment Retirement Income Security Act) statute that requires trustees to "discharge his duties ... solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries and for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to participants and their beneficiaries." Shareholders need to see that Sarbanes-Oxley legislation is followed which require chief financial officers (CFO) to personally certify their companies' financial statements to avoid fraudulent reports that mislead shareholders.

In the last thirty years we have seen corporations subvert the legal model designed by Congress to prevent abuse of power in corporate governance: shareholder elections rigged, boards of directors stacked with CEO appointees, corporate bylaws rewritten to allow unearned benefits for CEO and other officers. This corruption of corporate power has been very successful. And we see the same proven strategies used by corporations to defeat shareholders exported to corrupt the American political system at large: use of voter suppression, election fraud, bankrolling congressional, senatorial and executive candidates with massive injection of corporate money, lobbying of lawmakers, direct re-writing of laws by corporate legal teams that favor corporate monopolies and massive tax loopholes. These same boardroom forces that exploit shareholders is now taking aim at all American citizens with the same purpose of shifting wealth to the Corpocracy.

End.​

 

This is Elon Musk the paradigm of entrepreneurship in America? He just repeats the old Neoliberal Free Market memes of customer choice, blind action over thought, self-regulating markets, and rugged individualism except for Wall Street banker bailouts.

Even Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos was a better propagandist. Elon Musk is about as articulate as G.W. Bush! In the video below Musk advocates the business model of "decisionism"--Just do it! Forget about those complicated spreadsheets and boring power point lectures! Doctors, throw away those pesky patient charts! Nuclear scientists, ignore those cumbersome bureaucratic regulation--turn up the core heat on that sucker! Pow! In short, Musk says, "Get her done!" Whack! Just body slam that problem! Ouch! Punch out that bad review! Bam! Action is better than meetings! Wham!

How to increase profits according to Musk's philosophy of business management.
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And don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out of California!

Musk's Business Model: "Get-her done!"
Elon Musk on Tesla, SpaceX and Why He Left Silicon Valley | WSJ
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American Psychopath​

Speaking of the devil, after Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 there was a massive collapse of the US economy, the worst since the 1929 depression. The left had won the "culture wars," but the Republican party and corporate Democrats began a Chinese scale "cultural revolution" in the United States that started with the infiltration of the American Fundamentalist Churches first, and gradually through out other institutions of American society.

The new American ethos was "Greed is Good" and a couple of generations have emerged knowing nothing else but encouragement of anti-social behavior. Basically, the Neo-Liberal Fascists encouraged Americans to become sociopaths if they are not already psychopaths (psychopaths are born, but sociopaths are made) for the economic good of society. America took the call for market nihilism to heart and see the consequences today.

Psychopathy is not a clinical term in either the DSM-IV or the ICD-10. The nearest equivalent to it is, in the DSM-IV is Antisocial Personality Disorder, while the ICD-10 uses the term "sociopathy" or "Dissocial Personality Disorder". With this in mind, I will focus on both the characteristics of the DSM-IV definitions, as well as the general "public definitions" of a psychopath.

These persons, in general, display many of the following traits:

· Glibness/superficial charm
· Grandiose sense of self-worth
· Need for stimulation, with a proneness to boredom
· Pathological lying
· Conning and manipulating behaviors
· No sense of remorse or guilt
· A very shallow emotional affect - they display emotions they don't really feel
· A lack of empathy for others
· They are parasitic - they live off of others
· They are impulsive, and show poor control over their behaviors
· They tend to be promiscuous
· Their behavior problems start early in life
· They cannot form long-term plans that are realistic
· They are impulsive, and irresponsible
· They do not accept responsibility for their actions - another caused it
· Marital relationships are short, and many
· They display juvenile delinquency
· They violate probation often. Their criminality is diverse.

First, the economic benefits of Neo-liberalism went to the American oligarchy and resulted in the collapse of US manufacturing and jobs (Sweeping new study shows 50 years of 'trickle-down economics' was a 'sham').

Secondly, a stratum of society that are absolute nihilists have been given power and immense wealth by the Neoliberals. Take Elon Musk for example: Musk is an ideological paradigm of the kind of person American corporatism wants to represent American capitalism, and use to privatize the US Space Program for private industry--that is what all this Space X is about. Musk's rockets failed until NASA stepped in to help, and then gave him a contract to build rockets. This isn't the first time workers had to train their own replacements. Corporate oligarchs don’t want Carl Sagan, they want a psychopath like Musk. Sagan talked back too much and before he died torn into the Reagan crooks in a number of interviews seeing the coming of Christian fascism.

The narrative that Musk and the media give of his success is absolutely false. Elon is not smart: he is arrogant and privileged. Elon claims to be a physicist that dropped out of Stanford Physics department after two days. His role is to justify the privatization of government services for space, war, education, water, infrastructure, and any revenue generating government service by turning them over to private entrepreneurs. People are only objects to be used and we can see this characteristic nihilism by looking beyond the happy talk corporate propaganda bullshit. I ran across an article written by his first wife, Justin Wilson, in which she described Musk and it’s not pretty.

I was a Trophy Wife

Elon Musk To Divorce Again From Second Trophy Wife Talulah Riley​

"On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution....Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common..."(Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, 1848, page, 24).

 

Dr. Michael Hudson is one of my favorite Marxist economist. Hudson worked on Wall Street as a bank analyst: he knows all the secrets.
Allied with landlords and monopolists, the finance sector is extracting economic rents from the economy that’s impoverishing US government, industry and labor says Michael Hudson discussing the chokehold of pro-finance, pro-rentier capitalism reaching into the present COVID-19 crisis.

Polarization, Then a Crash: Michael Hudson on the Rentier Economy
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Michael Hudson (born March 14, 1939) is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. He is a contributor to The Hudson Report, a weekly economic and financial news podcast produced by Left Out.Hudson graduated from the University of Chicago (B.A., 1959) and New York University (MA, 1965, PhD, 196 and worked as a balance of payment economist in Chase Manhattan Bank (1964–196. He was assistant professor of economics at the New School for Social Research (1969–1972) and worked for various governmental and non-governmental organizations as an economic consultant (1980s–1990s).

 

government management of the market is not "self-regulation" , in the sense of "invisible hand" free markets

 

What is your opinion of MMT? I believe Keen accepts the money creation in treasury/central bank tenet of MMT.

 

It seems obvious the Fed government, at the start of the pandemic, should have suspended the free market, and guaranteed the funding of the living expenses of essential and non-essential workers, with the latter staying at home (on their income reduced to living expenses), while the former continue receiving wages at the normal rate...all funded directly via treasury, with the Fed changing the digits in peoples' bank accounts....

If that had happened, 350,000 people would still be alive in the US, possibly approaching half a million people before the pandemic is over...

 

I like Hudson a lot, but I don't think he is a Marxist in the normal sense. He identifies himself as a classical economist, and his interpretation of Marx is idiosyncratic in the sense that he takes Vol III of "Capital" as a kind of New Testament that supersedes the Old Testament of Vols I and II. His interpretation of Vol III ends up being rather Georgist because of his emphasis on certain passages where Marx acknowledges that the exploitation of labor by the capitalist (i.e., employer or factory owner) is forced on the capitalist by competitive pressure, and really only profits the landowner.

Hudson is very much worth reading, but if his books are too tough going for you, there are lots of worthwhile youtube videos of him.

 

Keynesian Economics​

I want to follow up on what Pilkington has written about monetary policy in his article Monetary Policy and Metaphysics – How Economists, Try to Naturalise Terrible Policies and Disappear Into Their Own Theories, and its bad historical record of countering recessionary business cycles. Keynes is the boogeyman of Austrian economists, Conservatives, Neoliberals, and anyone that has an axe to grind against progressive economic policies during the last 50 years. In today’s highly ideologically charged environment Keynesianism has become a rhetorical bin into which anything Conservative economists disagree is discarded. These apologists have created multiple Keynesian strawmen to discredit him, and even Keynesian economists themselves have, without bad intentions, contributed multiple versions of Keynesianism that naturally arise by historical interpretation. However, many critics fail to distinguish Keynesian economics and the economics of Keynes. Economist Joan Robinson coined the term “bastard Keynesianism” to describe post-war Keynesian orthodoxy which neglected certainty, time, and psychological expectation in their mathematical models acting as a simulacrum of the economy.

Keynes learned from experience that fiscal policy is more effective than monetary policy for influencing aggregate demand to counter business cycle downturns.

Fiscal policy has a more direct effect on demand than indirect actions like changing the interest rates to increase or decrease investment, which is subject to greater market uncertainty. Keynes applied both fiscal and monetary solutions in combination depending of the historical situation. These were not automatic theoretical formulae to be applied blindly, but remedies based on historical context, empirical observation, and even intuition of how people behave.

There is debate even among Keynesians of the role monetary policy played in his thinking. Keynes is best known for his advocacy of fiscal policy although his actual influence on governments engaging in deficit spending is over emphasized. Keynes served as a special consultant to the British Treasury during the 30’s and 40’s with very little legacy impact on the British Treasury budget deficits. There were only two years between 1947-1972 that Britain actually ran deficits. Keynes said, “the ordinary Budget should be balanced at all times.” (Bradley W. Bateman, “Keynes and Keynesianism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Keynes, ed. by Roger E. Backhouse & Bradley W. Batman, Cambridge University Press, Kindle Edition, 2006,p. 273).

Why should monetary policy not be used counter-cyclically? Keynes learned from the 1930s US depression that simply reducing the interest rate did not guarantee spending for investment and an increase in production. John Kenneth Galbraith explains Keynes’ argument that went against the orthodox economic theories of his day.

Say’s Law was the accepted theory among orthodox economists, which claimed there could never be a shortage of purchasing power in the economy: workers’ aggregate wages could theoretically buy back all goods produced. Say's Law describes the balance between circulating money supply and the value of all production within an economy. When these two are equal, there is neither inflation nor deflation. However, when money and production are unequal as with a shortage of goods in relation to the money supply then inflation results, or if there is a surplus of goods recession results. Say Law presumed that the economy would find equilibrium at full employment in the self corrective interaction between wages, prices, interest rates and unemployment.

Keynes’ ‘liquidity preference’ thesis held that in a money economy if persons preferred to hold their income in cash (or any asset that could quickly be turned into cash) from income insecurity, or for current transactions, a general imbalance between savings (over savings) and investment would cause an economic downward spiral. With this view of liquidity the primary economic factor was not interest rates, but variations of income (wages) and employment. In fact, chronic unemployment could be the natural equilibrium of the economy, and not Say’s equilibrium of full employment. This challenge to Say’s Law was the revolution in thinking Keynes brought to his lifetime.

Keynesian economist Joan Robinson said the Keynesian revolution was about time. She made the distinction between history, and equilibrium. Historical time is uncertain and indeterminate involving the creative free will of human beings. Equilibrium is a theoretical construct that is a mathematical point in logical time. Keynes questioned the simulacrum of mathematical economic equilibrium and instead turned to human behavior in real time, in lived historical time, to understand economic activity.

next...The Counter-Revolution of Monetarism.

 

The "invisible hand" is rhetoric, a conceptual label to simplify a . That is something that one exercising a modicum of critical thinking would recognize, yet it is quite apparent that, in this case, you eschew such endeavors.

And, doe snot the "invisible hand" apply also to the state? Supposedly, the government is "Of The People". The very same people you hold in contempt when they clamor for their own freedom in economic exchange (and paternalize in social exchanges.) How can the invisible hand, that is the rabble acting in its own interested, be trusted when selecting those who will rule over that same rabble?

 

Do they have a right to vote for a government that tramples individual rights and punishes those who attempt to exercise them? Can they do this for their children and deny their children the opportunity to revert that vote?

It is a question of trusting them. If people cannot be trusted with economic self-regulation, then they cannot be trust with political self-regulation.

Then the state is, at best, criminal.

You argue, then, that the danger of not having criminals that claim legitimate authority to rule over you is that criminals who don't bother with the pretense of legitimacy will attempt to rule over you.