Let me again mention my book on Classical Economics and the Modern Economy the review of which I discussed here. It is not all that unusual that an author should be fond of a book he has written, so you will have to forgive me having written the following to a colleague who has also written a positive review of the book somewhere else. This is what I wrote:

It was indeed a phenomenal review. But then I wrote to someone else, as a joke, that it has made me want to read the book myself, which in fact is what I have now begun to do and am half way through. And while you may feel he has provided a more in-depth understanding, and undoubtedly he has, yours was as on-the-mark as any I could have hoped for.

In re-reading what I sent to the publisher more than a year ago, and possibly finished the copy editing process at least a year ago, I am amazed how well it has come out. It says everything I even now would want to say and it says it as clearly as I am capable of saying it. I found one gremlin (and they were always going to be there), but there is nothing I wish I had added and there were a number of surprises where I had said something I had forgotten I had even included.

But what reading the text made me realise even more than before, no one else, certainly no one else alive today, will ever see what the book is saying. It will perhaps be in fifty years when some library goes about selling off its discarded texts that someone might pick it up and read it then and really see the point, in the same ways as I saw Mill’s point 150 years after his Principles was published in 1848.

But for almost anyone alive today, I am much too obscure and no one will ever take my word for it against the massive edifice of modern theory. For all that, I have just read the small bit on productive vs unproductive consumption and have marvelled again at how such a perspective has evaporated entirely from the body of economic theory. It is not only obvious, but essential.

And then this came up which you would have to understand economic theory in an entirely different way from what you see in the textbooks to see just how stupid this is: V.P. Biden ’09: ‘We Have to Go Spend Money to Keep From Going Bankrupt’.

On Wednesday, Democrats passed a $3.5 trillion budget resolution and, with the help of 19 Republicans, a $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the total public debt outstanding as of Aug. 9, 2021, was $28,427,651,083,061.54, or roughly $28.4 trillion.

How this will prevent the US from going bankrupt we will now all live to see for ourselves.