Socialdem. 21st Century

For keeping track of the news and analysis, whether on politics and economics, and now with more links to YouTube channels and blogs of interest too:(1) General NewsBBC NewsReuters.comGoogle NewsBloomberg NewsCNNAmerican ABCMSNBCFoxnews.comRt.comVice NewsDer Spiegel Online InternationalLe Monde diplomatiqueThe EconomistHaaretzTimes of IsraelJerusalem PostXinhuaChina DailyAntiwar News Sources (a great, long list of news websites)(2) British Newspapers and JournalsThe TimesIndependentThe...

And to the neoliberal vandals, neoclassical chalatans, Marxist fanatics, delusional SJW zealots, libertarian and Austrian nutjobs, open borders cultists, and regressive leftists – I’m laughing at you all.

From Robert P. Murphy’s Chaos Theory: Two Essays on Market Anarchy:“The insurance company makes its money by charging appropriate premiums, tailored to the individual client. If Joe smith has been deemed guilty in the past of violent behavior, his insurance premiums will be accordingly higher. But there are other factors that an insurance company would take into account when setting premiums, besides past behavior. And one of these factors would undoubtedly be: what sort of weapons does this...

The anarcho-capitalism system proposed by Murray Rothbard requires the abolition of government and the privatisation of all property and every service in society.For example, the anarcho-capitalism system abolishes the state and all state-based criminal law, and there would no longer be any criminal laws at all (see here and here).Under anarcho-capitalism, property rights become almost absolute, except for when someone may sue in private civil litigation under a system of private torts.Apart...

Michał Kalecki’s paper “Political Aspects of Full Employment” (1943) is an interesting paper.Kalecki first notes that most economists had by 1943 come to accept that governments can crate full employment by aggregate demand management and by central bank control of the interest rate (Kalecki 1943: 322–323).But then Kalecki notes that the political opposition to full employment policies had been quite severe in the 1930s, and makes this rather remarkable statement:“There are, however, even...

Here is a simple thought experiment by which we can discover how reasonable a person is.Case 1: Tibet Imagine the native people of Tibet whose ancestors have lived in Tibet for hundreds, if not thousands of years. We can take a poll of all people in Tibet and discover the following:(1) the majority of the people of Tibet regard Tibet as the homeland of the Tibetan people, but(2) at the same time they are perfectly willing to accept a reasonable number of migrants and refugees and even ethnic...

An interview conducted this month, in August 2016:[embedded content]

Bob Rowthorn, a former Marxist and left heterodox economist, puts his finger on one of the most important issues in the world today, even though he wrote this in 2003:“In both scale and speed, the transformation [sc. by mass immigration into Europe] that is now underway is without precedent. Britain is not alone in this respect. Many countries in Western Europe are undergoing a similar change in their ethnic and cultural composition through immigration and differential fertility, and in many...

… and it infects many people on the Left, often via the intellectual poison of Postmodernism. There is a simple antidote to this nonsense: if you do not believe objective empirical truth exists, then how can you ever say or imply that neoclassical or Austrian economic theories are objectively false? Or if that does not get through, try this: is it not an objective historical truth that the Holocaust happened? And if you still deny it is an objective empirical truth, then why do you think it...

The Old Left – before the 1960s New Left and post-1980s Postmodernist Left – was, generally speaking, strongly opposed to mass immigration, and for good reasons. The modern Left has forgotten this, and it is a terrible shame that many modern Leftists cannot take lessons from the past.But some good work is available. See Ha-Joon Chang in his book 23 Things they Don’t Tell you about Capitalism (Bloomsbury Press, London, 2011), and Dean Baker’s The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy use...