Mike Norman Economics

Former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky was quoted as saying during the 1979 Austrian election campaign that: “I am less worried about the budget deficits than by the need for the state to create jobs where private industry fails”. That is the statement of a social democrat. That is a progressive Left view. In June 1982, with French unemployment at 7.2 per cent (having risen from 2.4 per cent in 1974 after a near decade of austerity under the right-wing Prime Minister Raymond Barre), the...

How the Western ruling elite made their wealth, and today with that wealth they are buying up the World. They call it free trade, liberalisation, capitalism, and democracy, and convince people it is about the protestant work ethic, a reward for hard work, but it's more like a game of monopoly where the winners get an exponential rise in wealth with less and less effort.  In fact, with hardly any effort at all when the slave trade made them their enormous wealth to start with.And then Western...

In Europe during the Middle Ages feudalism was the social order of the day. Society was structured between landowners and the landless. Astonishingly in the UK today that social order is, again, on the rise. A growing number of leasehold homeowners are at the mercy of a new class of rent-seeker - actively exploit them in their own homes through onerous ground rents and permission fees. Many of these homes were bought through the government sanctioned Help To Buy Scheme which has fuelled...

Julian Assange exposed the terrible crimes of the empire but no one in the MSM is defending him. He's a hero but they make him out as some bad guy, and most people seem to believe it.  There was once a moderate left in the MSM but now that had gone. The public is unaware and doesn't seem to care, but how can it care if they don't get the facts, only a boring, uninteresting, unexciting, mediocre politics, with celebrity gossip, along with endless photographs of the Royal Family. No real news...

Things to keep in mind as the world prepares for the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki.Sic Semper Tyrannis America's Russia Derangement Syndrome Publius Tacitus

Backgrounder. Short. Immanuel WallersteinTwo Cheers for Mexico’s AMLO: A Great Victory for the Left Immanuel Wallerstein | Senior Research Scholar, Yale University, formerly a professor of sociology

Rallying the world to cut off Russia from the world stage and cripple its economy has been been a goal of the US power establishment since the collapse of the Soviet Union, so there’s no reason to believe that even the people who are making the claims against Russia actually believe them. The goal is crippling Russia to handicap China, and ultimately to shore up global hegemony for the US-centralized empire by preventing the rise of any rival superpowers. The sociopathic alliance of...

Distributive bargaining is win-lose aka zero-sum. Integrative bargaining is win-win aka compromise. Distributive bargaining is based on the assumption of conflict between the interest of the parties in dividing a fixed pie, while integrative bargaining is about cooperation on common interests and compromise on other interests to grow the pie. Trump's bargaining style based on his business background is distributive and based on competition, where there is a winner and a loser at the...

Imagine, if you can, that corporations truly are like people. They would vary in their dispositions. Some would be selfish and short-sighted, caring only about their own immediate gain. Others would be more prosocial and far-sighted, genuinely caring about the world around them and willing to do their part to promote the common good. As with real people, the cooperators would be in danger of exploitation by the knaves, but they would also be able to protect themselves by banding together,...

Here, Steve Keen goes over his familiar ground of too much private debt which will lead to the next financial crash so a debt jumble is required. Well, you will all be familiar with that but it is still a great interview nonetheless. Where it got really interesting is near the end where Steve Keen talks about private banking and China.Private banks can make the money out of thin air and charge a small interest to cover the costs of the service, but if the borrower fails to repay some of his...