The news is a few hours old but I am still waiting for the reaction of any of the Democrats, and of course, Miss Ocasio-Cortez. The left are the bringers of misery and destruction. The most blatantly socialist regime in the world today. No one in their right mind could support such manifest horrors. But our Marxist-Progressive loons, and their brothers in the media and elsewhere, are so ideologically blind that the misery and harm of others is nothing compared with the misery they would feel having to give up their idiotic economic and political ideas. Unless you are personally relieved to see these efforts to rid Venezuela of its socialist experiment you are yourself as loony as the rest of your socialist confreres.
I cannot think the Dems have much choice other than to welcome the change in public, but I suspect whatever they might say, they do not believe it for a moment, not in their secret heart of hearts.
Steve Hayward has a post that deals with one of favourite books on one of my favourite topics: Helmut Schoeck’s Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, from which he pulls this quote:
It would be a miracle if the democratic political process were ever to renounce the use of the envy-motive. Its usefulness derives, if for no other reason, from the fact that all that is needed, in principle, is to promise the envious the destruction or the confiscation of assets enjoyed by the others; beyond that there is no need to promise anything more constructive. The negativism of envy permits even the weakest of candidates to sound reasonably plausible, since anybody, once in office, can confiscate or destroy. To enlarge the country’s capital assets, to create employment etc., requires a more precise programme. Candidates will naturally try to make some positive proposals, but it is often all too apparent that envy looms large in their calculations. The more precarious the nation’s economy at election time, the stronger the temptations for politicians to make ‘redistribution’ their main plank, even when they know how little margin is left for redistributive measures, and, worse still, how likely they are to retard economic growth.
Then in the comments there was this which I thought rounded out the point:
I have been maintaining for some time now that the Democrat party platform basically incorporates all of the Seven Deadly Sins. The envy is obvious, as noted above. Sloth is seen is the idea of easily obtained welfare or a “universal basic income” granted to everyone just for existing. Pride in their overwhelming belief that they are so much better and wiser than “normals.” Lust from their championing any and every sexual aberration and perversion. Gluttony is embodied in the idea that one should be able to do everything and have everything, never having to deny oneself any pleasure or experience or pay for it themselves (free college and healthcare are just the beginning), and avarice plays its role in their desire to have the state take what everyone else has produced. And anger … well, just look at their attitude towards their inability to elect Hillary and their hatred of Trump. But I do think that the worst and most corrupting of all these is envy.
Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that provides no personal gain. You get nothing by being envious – unlike say from gluttony or lust – merely bile and self-loathing. But it works wonders for politics on the left in its own repulsive way.
Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. —The Observer, 22 February 2004
Now this.
The world is going to end in 12 years unless the government takes action, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Monday at a Martin Luther King forum in New York City.
Here’s an excerpt from her interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates:
“And I think the part of it that is generational is that millennials and people, in Gen Z, and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we’re like, the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change. You’re biggest issue, your biggest issue is how are going to pay for it? — and like this is the war, this is our World War II. And I think for younger people looking at this are more like, how are we saying let’s take it easy when 3,000 Americans died last year, how are we saying let’s take it easy when the end person died from our cruel and unjust criminal justice system?
How are we saying take it easy, the America that we’re living in today is dystopian with people sleeping in their cars so they can work a second job without healthcare and we’re told to settle down. It’s a fundamental separation between that fierce urgency of now, the why we can’t wait that King spoke of. That at some point this chronic reality do reach a breaking point and I think for our generation it reached that, I wished I didn’t have to be doing every post, but sometimes I just feel like people aren’t being held accountable. Until, we start pitching in and holding people accountable, I’m just gonna let them have it.”
OCASIO-CORTEZ ON MILLENNIALS: ‘WE’RE LIKE THE WORLD IS GOING TO END IN 12 YEARS IF WE DON’T ADDRESS CLIMATE CHANGE’
‘At some point these chronic realities do reach a breaking point’
It’s “immoral” how America’s economic system “allows billionaires to exist,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), said Monday at a Martin Luther King forum in New York City.
Here’s an excerpt from her interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates:
COATES: “I hate to personalize this, but do you think it is immoral for individuals to, for instance — do we live in a moral world that allows for billionaires? Is that a moral outcome and and of itself?”
OCASIO-CORTEZ: “No, it’s not. It’s not.
(Cheers and applause)
It’s not, and I think it is important to say that — I don’t think that necessarily means that all billionaires are immoral. It is not to say that someone like Bill Gates,for example, or Warren Buffett are immoral people. I do not believe that.”
COATES: “Like, he kicks his dog, stuff like that.”
OCASIO-CORTEZ: “Yeah, I don’t — I’m not saying that, but I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.
(Applause)
And I think it’s wrong that — I think that it’s wrong that a vast majority of the country does not make a living great wage. I think it’s wrong that you can work 100 hours and not feed your kids. I think it’s wrong that corporations like Walmart and Amazon can get paid, they can get paid by the Government essentially, experience a wealth transfer from the public for paying people less than a minimum wage.”
My interest in ideology goes back as far as I can remember. No one can live without ideology. It is a sorting mechanism that gives everyone a perspective on the events of life. In the West, there are at the present two broad ideologies that are at an almost 50-50 division, and its outcome will determine our future as a civilisation. There is on the one hand, the Judeo-Christian ethic that has evolved across the past two millennia and is itself built on the Greek and Roman ethos that goes back further still. It is the basis for our free market economic system and our democratic form of political organisation.
On the other side there is a Marxist-Progressive ideology that has as its base a absurd Utopian perspective that believes all of our social and economic problems would disappear if we rid ourselves of our Judeo-Christian ethic and replaced it with some form of dictatorship of the representatives of the proletariat. Name the problem – racism, inequality, poverty – they will fix it. Just put power into their hands and all will be done. The carriers of this ideological perspective have a track record so abysmal that you can barely believe anyone would admit to believing such vile nonsense, but that’s the role of ideology. Once you accept a perspective on the world, you are impervious to criticism.
Which brings me to The Covington Boys, an issue I thought of as so trivial that it was hardly worth a passing moment. Even if a bunch of high school kids had said some mean things to an Aboriginal American war veteran, it never really seemed much of anything. Yet it is turning out to be a true watershed moment. Here is the summary: YOUR COMPLETE GUIDE TO HOW THE MEDIA TRIED RUINING THE LIVES OF INNOCENT TEENAGERS.
The media smelled blood when a video seemingly showed a group of teenage boys bullying an older Native American protester.
Newer videos showed that the protester had actually approached the students, who were also receiving slurs shouted by a group of radical activists.
The media’s misleading reports happened at a time when the students were facing death threats.
Not stated above is that the boys were attending an anti-abortion rally in Washington while wearing MAGA hats. That they are only high school students meant nothing since any symbol will do for a Progressive-Marxist ideologue. If you would like a longer explanation, you can find it here: Lessons From an Online Lynching (Why #StandWithCovington Is Going Viral).
A fine review of a book published in 1991 that is astonishing in its ability to see into the future and exactly captures the ideological world we are in right now. I will do my own review of it in the next week or so, but this will give you some sense of what there is. I will only say there is much much more and is the most insightful work on our present dilemma I have come across, but no one would write it today – well maybe Thomas Sowell – but I fear even more that no one would publish it. Here’s the review.
The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information by Jean-Francois Revel (New York: Random House, 1991); 408 pages; $25.When Jean-Francois Revel published How Democracies Perish in the early 1980s, he wanted to deliver a warning to the nations of the West that the Soviet Union was being allowed to win the Cold War. This threatened victory of communism, he argued, was not due to any inherent superiority in the Soviet model. Rather, it was coming about due to weakness in the democratic West. As a conservative, Mr. Revel was worried about a failure of will by the Western nations to stand up militarily to the perceived Soviet threat. But the core of his argument was an ideological one: the West had surrendered its vision and its understanding of why a free, open, market-oriented society was both moral and prosperous. Western intellectuals had accepted the premises of socialism and welfare statism. And as a consequence, the war of ideas and ideology around the world was being won by the Soviet Union.
Now, in the early 1990s, socialism in the form of the Soviet threat is gone. Communism has collapsed in the country in which it was first implemented because of its own internal weaknesses and contradictions. But the West, unfortunately, still suffers from the same ideological problems that Mr. Revel wrote about ten years ago. And this is the theme of his new book, The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information.
Every one of the premises of the Left has been refuted by the failure of the socialist experiment. Socialism brought neither freedom, justice nor prosperity. Rather, socialism produced cruel despotisms, privilege and corruption, and economic distortion and poverty. But this is a reality that is too disturbing for many on the Left to accept. To admit the truth would shatter their beliefs, dreams and desires.
So, instead of accepting the truth, the Left has continued to construct deceptions and distortions of reality to protect and guard their most cherished premises. Mr. Revel explains that the heart of these deceptions has revolved around the attempt to prevent discussions of human-rights abuses and economic stagnation in socialist states and to limit all such discussions to “right-wing” dictatorships or Western nations. The standard reply to criticisms of socialism has not been a straight answer to meet the charges. Instead, the critic has been accused of ignoring equal or even greater abuses in capitalist countries and being so paranoid about communism that he is blind to the ever-threatening resurgence of fascism. Hence, the critic has been sidetracked into a debate over the possible revival of fascist dictatorships and away from the reality of the socialist experiment.
The second line of defense, Mr. Revel argues, is the use by the Left of the charge of racism. Insisting that there is no greater evil and danger in the world than racism and racial discrimination, the Left reduces all social and cultural tensions between people to one dimension: race. In discussions about the Third World, the only human-rights abuses of significance to the Left are those in South Africa under apartheid — and for the Left, apartheid is nothing more than a degenerate form of capitalism. That millions have died from socialist-produced famines in black-ruled African countries — that Marxist regimes in black Africa have tortured and murdered tens of thousands of their own people — does not even go down an Orwellian memory-hole; for to be erased from the record would imply that these events in Africa were reported in the press, when, in fact, they occurred in an informational void, ignored by most of the press in the West.
When the Left has been challenged about socialist tyranny in Africa, the response has often been that freedom without development is meaningless. As @&. Revel says, “I was under the impression that freedom was good in itself, independent of the standard of living of the population…. In reality, if democracy without development was meaningless, then neither the French or the American revolution nor the British reform movement should have been undertaken.” And he asks, “[Wlho would be qualified to fix the degree of development above which a democracy ceases to be ‘nothing’ and becomes ‘something’?”
All of dim tendencies in evading the truth of the socialist experience and fabricating smoke screens in reality’s place, Mr. Revel argues, have been bolstered by a journalistic community that views itself as an advocate of “good causes,” rather than as reporters of events; by an academic community that views its task as one to remold the minds of the youth in their charge; by an intellectual community that has nothing but ridicule and hate for their own society. The perspective from which most of the members of these communities approach their duties is moderate to extreme Leftism.
And even now in a post-communist era, the lies and flights from truth will continue to persist. Why? Because what many of these people really want is not so much the success of socialism as the destruction of capitalism. Their hatred, fear and contempt of human freedom and the market economy will survive the demise of a thousand socialist experiments. And that is the real face of the enemy.
Let me link to one other that seem to make the point, and it is relatively recent as well, from 2011: Managed truth: The great danger to our republic which begins with a very astute comment:
French social critic Frederic Bastiat (1801–1850) once said, “The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.”
He also discusses the arrival of Keynesian economics as part of this process.
In his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), Keynes advocated the planning of a nation’s economic life, political supervision of private industry, and manipulation of the currency, that is, a massive increase in the size and scope of government. The first enthusiastic review of Keynes’ General Theory by a professional economist was by G. D. H. Cole, an avowed Marxist and a founding member of the Fabian Society. Two of the strongest proponents in America were government officials in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, Lauchlin Currie and Harry Dexter White, both proven communists. Keynes himself was quoted as saying, “The Republic of my imagination lies on the extreme left of celestial space.”[24] Despite this, Keynesian economics dominated the American economy until the election of Ronald Reagan, after which it was declared dead. Unfortunately, the corpse continues to convulse and has now arisen as a zombie, more difficult to kill than ever.
From The Times reprinted in The Australian. Insane enough just as an economic principle, but to have it endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and then presented as a sensible idea by the Economics Editor of The Times [!!!!!] shows how low we have fallen. This is the entire column and if you cannot work out how insane this is, you do not have even the most preliminary grasp of how an economy works. But let me give you a hint. The aim is to open the spigot to public spending almost to an infinite extent since a government printing money in one’s own economy and then spending it apparently has no downside. And then when the price level starts to rise, you increase taxes to put things right again. I love the idea of trying to raise taxes as prices are rocketing while interest rates are held level. That this is not seen as obvious idiocy and an invitation to disaster really makes me wonder how far gone economic theory has gone. That it is even being published in respectable newspapers is more depressing than almost anything else.
Modern Monetary Theory: Who’ll be brave enough to try it?
US Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a champion of Modern Monetary Theory.
In the past decade, the world has suffered two global crises: the financial disaster of 2008 and the eurozone sovereign debt crisis two years later. Policymakers responded with bailouts, cheap funding schemes, zero interest rates and quantitative easing. In one sense, the past ten years was a period of intense economic experimentation. In another, nothing has changed.
Following previous crises, macroeconomic ideas were replaced. After the Second World War, Keynesian, under which governments spend to create demand and protect jobs, was ascendant. After the inflation-induced recessions in the 1970s, the big idea was monetarism, using interest rates and the money supply to keep prices under control.
And now, after two existential crises? Nothing. The fundamental macroeconomic ideas have not changed. Labour and the Tories do battle on the scale of the deficit, like two old fools arguing who should pay for the last round long after the bar has closed. Beyond that, John McDonnell’s socialist revolution is pilfered from crumbling communist textbooks. It’s all a bit disappointing.
A new idea is slowly gaining momentum, though, particularly in the United States, where the charismatic Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been championing it. The idea is modern monetary theory and, as with many new ideas, it is not actually that new. Its origins date back to 1993 and it even featured in the 2016 US election. Bernie Sanders’ economic adviser was Stephanie Kelton, a prominent advocate of MMT.
At first glance, the theory seems barmy. As long as a government borrows in its own currency, it need never default because it can always print the money it needs. Described that way, MMT sounds like that other MMT, the magic money tree, or Jeremy Corbyn’s “People’s QE” – the kind of thing Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe tried with devastating inflationary consequences. But that’s because we’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
Warren Mosler, a former banker and hedge fund manager, went back to basics when he was developing the idea. The challenges governments face are growth, unemployment and inflation. To achieve those goals today, central banks use rates to regulate the economy while governments manage the public finances.
Mr Mosler and Ms Kelton look at the world differently. Running a budget deficit is not a sign of overspending, they say. Inflation is. Viewed though that lens, deficits look fine so long as inflation is under control. If inflation is low, unemployment high and the private sector is not picking up the slack, the government’s role is to create productive work through tax cuts or spending. The new jobs will create enough demand to drive up prices.
But who finances the deficits? That’s where money-printing comes in. It is here that convention is flipped on its head. Under MMT, tax and spending decisions are taken to regulate the economy, ignoring the impact on the public finances. If inflation picks up, rates don’t budge (Mr Mosler would have them set at zero). Instead, taxes rise to suck demand out of the system. In doing so, the budget may move into surplus. The central bank’s role is simply to finance the deficit.
Surely markets will hate this and punish governments with higher borrowing costs? Proponents reply that the government does not need to borrow from the market. When the state cuts income taxes, it creates more domestic savings. Those savings are exactly equal to the state’s additional borrowing. As a nation, one hand owes the other. The central bank only need mark the debt on the government’s ledger.
The key here is to think of the state as a monopolist, not a household. A government that borrows in its own currency has a monopoly on the money supply so cannot run out and go bust. Foreign investors might lose money on their dollar assets, but the debt can always be paid. The model does not work for countries without their own currency, such as eurozone members. As they do not control their currency, they must live within their means and ultimately balance their books. They are not monetary monopolists, just households for the purposes of budget management.
Although MMT has been jumped on by deficit-spending left-wingers, the theory is not intrinsically fiscally irresponsible. Mr Mosler claims to have developed the idea after a steam room session with arch-hawk Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary. JW Mason, an economist at the City University of New York, reckons it would lead to smaller budget deficits over the long term, provided politicians are bold enough to combat inflation with higher taxes.
Ultimately, the theory reframes and simplifies our conception of the economy, drawing the focus on to the core priorities of employment and inflation. The deficit would no longer be an obstacle. There would be no tension between fiscal and monetary policy, just a single lever. Responsibility for economic management would fall to politicians, ending the outsourcing to technocrats that has provided legislators cover for so long. And there would no place for an independent central bank.
In a way, MMT is nothing new. Japan’s national debt is 2.4 times the size of its economy, three times UK levels, but most is owed to Japanese pension funds and its money-printing central bank. In Britain, the 527 billion pounds of debt raised by the state between 2009 and 2012 was largely matched by the Bank of England’s 375 billion pounds of QE. Today, Donald Trump is blowing up the US deficit and driving up inflation in what looks like a practical demonstration of MMT.
There, in a nutshell, is the problem. The theory states that President Trump should be raising taxes, not cutting them. But would politicians ever have the courage to raise taxes if domestic inflation is climbing, despite high unemployment? The whole reason central banks were given independence was because politicians cannot be trusted to make unpopular decisions.
What MMT does prove, however , is that we will not run out of new ideas as long as we can describe the world in different ways. That, at least, is encouraging.
He thinks it’s great that we have new ideas to consider. We will certainly never run out of stupid ideas. One more post-modernist crank. This was the most acute comment at The Oz which exactly states what needs to be said, written by “Tony”.
This is seriously dangerous stuff. Fundamentally, money is not wealth, i.e. income producing assets, goods and services etc, but rather just a system for exchanging such. One can argue about Keynesian and Monetarist policy till the cows come home but ignoring the fundamentals of wealth creation through favorable investment (not speculative) conditions and rising productivity always produces rising living standards for workers and good margins for capital. The State can then appropriate (Tax) a portion of that generated wealth. Fundamentally, increasing the money supply by Gov does not produce more wealth- that is impossible- but at the margins it is useful for ironing out the natural cycles of investment but that is it.
It is bananas to think that printing money actually creates real wealth and is safe to do so as long as we borrow from ourselves or foreigners in our own dollars. If this fallacy were true, why would anyone invest or work at all? Lets just print money and borrow in AU$ and sit at home relaxing on a “universal income” paid by Gov. Wow, that sounds great. Where do I sign up? OK, vote Greens or ALP, no probs.
Law of Markets 