Socialdem. 21st Century

This is a video of Robert Skidelsky’s lecture on Keynes’s General Theory, given on 10th May, 2016 at Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland: [embedded content]I have a few minor points: (1) It is important not to let Keynes’ use of the expression “animal spirits” confuse people. Austrians and libertarians seize on this point, as I pointed out long ago here. Keynes used “animal spirits” in the sense of “a spontaneous [human] urge to action rather than inaction” as relevant to the actions of...

Here: [embedded content]When was the last time a Republican president was so hostile to free trade and dismissed the usual “free market” apologetics as the “dumb market”? Of course, it is possible that Trump will excessively rely on tax cuts and deregulation and provoke a race to the bottom in his trade policies. Or his tax cuts could be combined with protectionism, plus some harmful deregulation (which could be undone by a future Democratic president), and these policies might actually do a...

An interesting discussion of the life and career of John Kenneth Galbraith:[embedded content]One of the speakers is Richard Parke, the author of John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007), the best biography of Galbraith I’ve seen.

Stephen Cohen recently appeared on Democracy Now and discussed a number of topics, including Syria, Trump, and Russia. If the videos don’t appear for you, see here and here.[embedded content][embedded content]

One of many comical moments we now seem to have in the wake of Trump’s victory, and, curiously, on Fox news:[embedded content]Yes, mass immigration is a weapon of class warfare. Tucker Carlson is correct (although he did not put it explicitly in the way I just did). The response of this “socialist” is lame. Even if you raised the minimum wage in the US, illegal mass immigration still causes downward pressure on wages because so much of the labour that illegal migrants do is off the books or...

Finally, somebody calls out the hysteria:[embedded content]

An interview with Steve Keen on a lot of issues, including neoclassical economics, private debt and a people’s QE:[embedded content]

Here is one reason in this video:[embedded content]The video appeared in the feminist Lena Dunham’s Twitter feed here. The video is accompanied by the bizarre title “It’s not the end of men, it’s the evolution of men into better men,” but the video doesn’t talk about “evolution”: it plainly says “extinction.”There’s something horrific about this video. Replace the word “white” with “black,” or with “Asian” or “Jewish,” and you can see precisely why and instantly. Replace the words “straight...

Who made the following statement on illegal immigration into the Unites States?:“All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That's why our Administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more, by hiring a record...

We must remember that Mises – as a Classical Liberal – was a doctrinaire supporter of laissez faire open borders.In Mises’ book Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944), written during the Second World War, he admits an exception to open borders:“Pacifism is doomed in an age of etatism. .... [sc. Liberalism] did not declaim against war; it sought to establish conditions, in which war would not pay, to abolish war by doing away with the causes. It did not...