The problem of Capitalism

Just not a fan of poorly put together site. It wrongly portrays heterodox approaches as amateurish, with economics really the playground of the orthodox.

Rather than referring to some utopian rules based system (which arguably was lost all the way back with America's refusal to accept an international trade organisation, eventually generating a right wing Washington Consensus), I'd focus on aspects such as complexity economics...

 

Sorry, I made arguments which you ignored, thus you conceded.

 

The trouble with right wingers is that they assume the economic argument is on their side. It isn't. And when pushed, they just dodge.

You've made ridiculous claims about Keynesianism. Why can't you defend them? Why can't you reject hysteresis effects in unemployment? Why can't you reject post-Keynesianism use of cost plus pricing as a mechanism to understand capitalism's natural tendency towards economic crisis (and stagnation, which you ludicrously argued could be used to reject Keynesianism)?

Gosh, it's like you don't actually understand Keybesianism....

 

Your only commitment is to not changing a thing about your comfy lifestyle. Maybe that's your idea of justice .. not having to bestir yourself to action, while someone else takes care of things.

Meantime .. 'victims'? First Worlders indulging their worst whims and urges then crying poor? Riiiiiiight.

 

Bit rich to talk about justice to a Georgist when you're just pandering to right wing grunt...

 

OK...yes, I've been told Keynes' 1944 Bretton Woods proposal for a "clearing union" (to which all nations would belong) was "utopian", as no doubt was Dr. Evatt's idea of a UNSC without veto. (Evatt was a former high court judge who gained the support of at least 50 of the delegates representing smaller nations, at the 1946 San Francisco conference).

So Keynes and Evatt were mere "utopians"... (I use Griffith's "human condition" explanation to explain the utter irrationality, insanity and sadness that men of this calibre should be regarded as such, by world leaders who are stuck in ancient competitive, tribalist, war-mongering, Neanderthal instincts ) ….but back to economics:

Despite your fond hopes ( which I recall you expressed some time ago) that Corbyn might actually be electable, it doesn't appear to be so at present. (Some-one described him as a good man who is not necessarily interested in economic analysis).

Now, if Corbyn actually understood MMT, and thereby could inculcate widespread understanding that governments do not face purely financial constraints - the constraints are real resources including labour - then he might have a chance.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2019/03/05/mmt-sense-or-nonsense/#563feed45852

 

How does this fit with the reality of US billionaires paying lower tax rates than the middle class, amid the chronic financial stress of 50% of the US population? Justice??

 

Its McDonnell who is leading on Labour's economic plans. Those plans have been developed in conjunction with economic experts (in contrast to the Tories, where Chancellor goes hand in hand with hedge fund and banker). Rather than the People's Quantitative Easing proposal from last time, they're hitting the important issues: Democracy within the workplace, Green New Deal etc.

 

I can't comment on America's taxation system, but I have no problem whatsoever with people being ultra-rich. If being ultra-rich becomes a problem, we're doomed. If you can't figure out why, we're unlikely to reach agreement.

Justice is ensured via the incredible opportunities we all have access to in the First World, and is protected via our complex laws on discrimination etc.

Meantime, it would be a useful exercise (for you) to examine the average life of this 50%. Are they living like paupers? Or are they living well above their means? The difference is pretty stark and easy to spot. The former eats beans & rice, shares housing, and doesn't spend a cent on 'fun and vices'. The latter spends everything they have on rich food, solo housing, and 'fun and vice. Since we both know the answer is that the vast majority of America's financially stressed are living above their means by choice, how can you call it justice to demand that others fund it?

 

L.E.F.T

Your ignorance of the commie spectrum is showing again, Dear.

 

McDonnell, with the plan for 'Budget Responsibility'?

Here is Professor Bill Mitchell's analysis of the Left in Britain:

Is the British Labour Party aboard the fiscal dominance train?– Part 1

I consider that it (the Labour Party) is stuck in the old paradigm – with a policy rule that allows for monetary policy dominance. Their major fiscal statement allows for some fiscal flexibility but would be at the behest of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee.

In other words, the elected Chancellor, who is answerable to the people via the ballot box, takes orders from the Monetary Policy Committee and cannot suspend the ‘Fiscal Rule’ until the MPC says so.

The Party is thus being left behind because they have been taking advice from economists that are stuck in the old paradigm, notwithstanding their efforts to claim otherwise.

At the heart of this old paradigm is British Labour Party’s so-called Fiscal Credibility Rule, a product of its liaison with New Keynesian academics.
……...
It was designed by economists who have repeatedly written that the conduct of macroeconomic policy, designed to address fluctuations in non-government spending and maintain stable growth and stable inflation, is best left to unelected and largely unaccountable central bank policy committees.
.........
There is no scope anymore for views that espouse the dangers of fiscal deficits and the desirability of fiscal ratios that promise to reduce public debt ratios and the like.

Sure enough, the New Keynesians are desperately trying to reposition themselves as the world passes them by. But if British Labour really wants to be progressive and stay ahead of the curve it should distance itself from these characters and seek advice from genuine MMT economists.

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=43224

The latest polling is a disgrace for the Left.

That's because the general population believe that government budgets are like household budgets - and that the Right are therefore the better financial managers, with lower taxes and balanced budgets being key to economic management.

So even if Labour was elected, they would not be able to eliminate poverty and create full employment, as explained above by Mitchell.

In Australia, the ALP couldn't even win with a policy of closing tax loopholes that advantage the rich.

Pathetic.

 

Well do some research and read the linked article - it's regressive.

My problem is with entrenched poverty. I don't accept your 'blame the victim' ruse.

Justice can only be ensured by a Job Guarantee ie guaranteed universal access to above poverty employment- as proposed in Article 25 of the UNUDHR.

The tender mercies (….) of the neoliberal "invisible hand" 'free market' are in fact a priori incompatible with any notion of justice.

Funding a Job Guarantee is not dependent on taking from others.

Meanwhile you are happy to claim the 50% who cannot find $1000 from savings in an emergency are over-consuming. While this is true in some cases, rising costs and stagnant median wages are a significant factor, quite apart from the problem of entrenched, systemic poverty in an "invisible hand" neoliberal free market system.

 

I didn't think much of what you copy and pasted. New Keynesianism is irrelevant to McDonnell. It's use only indicates to me that the false debate spawned by monetarism is still tiresomely ongoing. If you wanted to give him a badge, it would probably be institutionalist. That is where real change occurs, such as the shift from Anglo Saxon Capitalism to market socialist.

 

1) What do you mean by 'entrenched'? Are you talking about the uneducated refugees who have arrived in the First World in the past 50 years, with not a cent to their names and not even speaking the language .. who've produced university graduates within a single generation? Those who understood that the immense opportunities afforded by the West had to be accessed via their own choices (ie, effort)? Those who didn't live above their means, and spent every spare waking moment (as well as many moments when they could have been sleeping) sitting with their kids to ensure that poverty did not become 'entrenched'? Or are you talking about people who find it far easier to submit to their poverty, than to do what it takes to ensure their kids don't inherit it?

2) You can guarantee jobs, but you cannot guarantee work. We (the First World) have made working optional via our insane wealth, and non-productivity is now 'entrenched'. The genie is out of the bottle. Consider .. people are so lazy that they won't even do what it takes to live within their means - preferring to drown in penury than give up their rich foods, their iphones, their big tvs, and their private residences. What makes you think you're going to make productive citizens of them?

3) Yes it is. You are going to be paying a huge number of people for producing little to nothing. That is an insanely expensive exercise.

4) Do any of your 'can't find $1000' folk own an iphone? Big tv? New pair of shoes? Ever eaten fast food? Live alone? Live in big expensive cities with high rents? I could go on all day. We both know you can't win this argument. When so much as a single dollar is spent on non-necessaries like those listed, the person in question has made a clear choice. No one has forced them to waste what little money they have. And if rising costs and stagnant wages are reality - as they most definitely are in both your country and my own ... then we must simply change our tactics to keep pace with that. Move to a cheaper town. Spend even less on the niceties, enlarge the collective to provide more buying power and human resources. Adapt, or perish. CHOICES. That's how those aforementioned refugees stayed ahead of the game. They didn't do it by sitting in their 24/7 airconditioned apartment in an overpriced city, eating take out in front of their huge tv and simultaneously checking their iphone for SM updates.

 

MMT stems from the Veblen, Institutionalist, and Keynes macroeconomic schools.

As long as the general population believe governments must balance their budgets, then - given the current "invisible hand" competitive, 'free' market neoliberal model, in which money creation is a privilege mostly reserved for the private banks - given that present reality, it will always be difficult for the Left to summon a majority in favour of wealth redistribution by taxation.

Rather than 'market socialism', MMT posits elected governments funding policy choices via a central bank which is part of the 'consolidated government sector'. overseeing and operating alongside the existing private sector money-creation, "invisible hand" competitive market model.

How would you describe 'market socialism'?

 

When poverty affects more than one person.

Wrong. There is an infinite amount of work to be done. (And as for 'worth', maintenance (including cleaning) is as essential as management).

Refuted above.

They are part of an insanely competitive race to the top /race to the bottom "invisible hand" system, which allows some individuals to amass more wealth than entire countries.....insane (like MAD....)

 

1) You mean parents who choose not to make the effort to ensure their kids are educated out of poverty? If even ONE family can escape poverty via public education and self-discipline (and far more than one have done just that), then anyone can. CHOICES.

2) I didn't say there was no work to be done ... I said you cannot make people work. We live in the First World - it's too late for universal productivity. That ship sailed decades ago.

3) We all are. And each of us decides how we'll make the incredible boons of the First World work for us. That's what's incredible about it .. we get to make that choice. Abject poverty is not forced upon us via some terrible Third World caste system, or a totalitarian Govt. We are rich, and free.

 

Free will is not absolute; therefore equivalence of choice is not universal.

Nonsense, people want to work, that's why, eg, the casualties of the first world 'rust belt' are calling for what they see as 'globalism', to be reversed.

And this (mostly private sector, market driven) competition in which we are all competing needs a referee (ie public sector management), like all competitions, obviously.

 

1) EXACTLY my point, Dear. It's the exercising of our respective WILL, which determines how things go for us - it's not an external issue. This is precisely what I've been saying all along. Glad you're accepting that apparently difficult reality.

2) Sorry, it's a nonsense to suggest that high motivation for productivity is universal in the First World. That hasn't been true for generations. When many of those who claim to be desperate to work do nothing to improve their material conditions in the meantime, it's not difficult to grasp just how disasterous your idea would be.

3) Yes, the market IS the referee. There is none better, since it's made up of we, the people. No authoritarian Govts, or nutty despots.

 

Difficulty with comprehension?

The ability to "exercise our respective will" is not equal, ie 'free will' is not absolute.

There are environmental, nurturing, genetic, and conscious/unconscious mental processes that influence individual choice.

Everyone wants to work. The problem is you insist on defining the value of work extremely narrowly - as "productivity" determined in an 'invisible hand' competitive private sector market. Fact is we also need to define public sector productivity by a different metric eg producing shared community well-being.

The "invisible hand" private sector market alone, motivated by individual profit-seeking, can never be the referee - almost by definition....

That's why we have arrived at the present situation where 10 people have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion, among which number are several losing their lives due to poverty-related diseases, if not actual starvation, in the time it takes us to write these messages...ongoing, everyday...

 

1) Once again ... EXACTLY. We choose whether those impediments to our will are going to be excuses, or impetus to break the mold. We CHOOSE. It's absurd to suggest that perpetuation is somehow compulsory.

2) Not everyone wants to work. How are you unable to grasp that, in a nation where millions don't, even though they could? And how on earth can work BE work if it's unproductive? You want people to be paid for staying in bed?

3) What in hell is a 'poverty related disease'? Obesity? Come on .. now you're talking crazy.

 

No we don't, even if we think we do; and only a fool would deny that anyone of us is capable of becoming eg a Nazi prison camp guard, in certain circumstances. Bad "choice"....

Of course every one wants to work, that's how we support ourselves (see more on the "don't want to work" myth below)

And btw, the world's teachers - and their aides who are sadly lacking in numbers - are intrinsically - though not in dollar terms -worth more than the totality of the world's derivates plays ("financial weapons of mass destruction": Buffett), even though education accounts for a mere fraction of the 'financial' industry casino trades. But obviously education is the beginning of true wealth, cf the financial industry casino which merely shuffles, and sometimes destroys wealth (as in the GFC).

(Talk about not being able to grasp a simple point re "value" ….)

Obesity is only one of an almost infinite number of poverty related diseases. (btw, obesity: due to poor food choices influenced by price and/or ignorance; cf starvation caused by lack of food). Chronic financial stress related diseases, and poor environment related diseases are too numerous to specify.

Indeed, in the richest country in the world:

The average life expectancy in Fairfax County, 82 years for men and 85 for women, is comparable to what it would be in Sweden. In McDowell County, on the other hand, life expectancy is 64 years for men and 73 for women, more like the average for Iraq.

That huge disparity in life expectancy coincides with another significant difference between the counties: income.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-income-affects-health-2015-4?r=US&IR=T

and:

Poverty isn’t $24,300 a year for a family of four. Poverty isn’t 14.5% of Americans. Poverty is the constant stress of not having enough to eat, of not knowing where you’re going to sleep tonight, of knowing you are one emergency away from sleeping on the streets.

Poverty Myth: Poor People Don’t Want to Work

One of the most common poverty myths – yet almost 60% of adults living in poverty who are able to work do so. If we are serious about tackling poverty, we have to recognize that the issue is not one of willingness to work, but of a lack of well-paying jobs.

https://4thworldmovement.org/overco...wtPBFkU6z29nu3CQpPfL4nbYWHvjsnX8aAji_EALw_wcB
…...

Meantime, I will presume you have conceded the need for a public sector referee (aka "the consolidated government sector" in MMT) dedicated to the continuous sustainable utilisation of all available resources including labour, as opposed to the unsustainable booms and busts of the private sector's business cycles via "invisible hand", competitive (purely personal profit seeking) markets.

 

Market socialism is essentially the protection of property rights through democracy within the firm.

The problem with most macro approaches is that they have no understanding of the importance of capital-labour relations. That's a weird outcome, given classical economics didn't fudge that issue.

 

1) If you have to reach back nearly a hundred years and a world a way to make your point (Nazi Germany? Seriously?), it was an easy win. Meantime, in 2019 in our FIRST WORLD DEMOCRACIES, no one is forced to make poor choices. Claiming pursuasion is the excuse.

2) No matter how much you think the desire to work is universal, the reality is otherwise. There will always be a proportion of us who run with the First World boon of surviving nil enterprise. Nothing will stir them to fend for themselves, as long as they can access tomorrow's meal. It's a 'lifestyle choice'. WE made this problem (via spastic welfare), WE must adapt to the consequences of it.

3) Obesity is a disease of impulse and nil discipline. It's not caused by poverty .. it's caused by the same thing that causes poverty (impulse and nil discipline). More importantly ... it's a rich society phenomena, not a poor society phenomena. I guarantee you'll find very few fat people in the poorest parts of Bangladesh.

 

I love how you pretend to be left wing and then throw out this supple side economics 'blame game' guff