Socialdem. 21st Century

Friedrich List saw right through the English argument for free trade in Germany in his National System of Political Economy:“In our days the English legislation not having separated German agriculture from the British manufactures, Germany, with a progress of twenty years in an industrial career achieved at immense sacrifices, would he blind to allow herself to be diverted by the repeal of the English laws from the great national object she is now pursuing. We have, indeed, a firm conviction...

Read it here for yourself:http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/declasspart4.pdf Even though there are several passages where US government officials assert that the Saudi government wasn’t involved, the evidence in the report says otherwise. If this isn’t a scandal that stinks to high heaven, then I don’t know what is. And still parts of it are redacted – sometimes whole paragraphs.See here and here. However, I think the title of this is a bit silly. I...

That is, if you are a highly paid, middle class professional in the West, as Dean Baker notes:“The trade agreements that the United States has negotiated over the last three decades have been about getting low cost auto workers, steel workers, and textile workers. In addition, immigration policy has been designed to ensure that custodians, farmworkers, and dishwashers all work for low wages. These policies have been successful in pushing down wages for large segments of the work force, not...

Once again TheIllusionist has written a thought-provoking comment about the cultural left and neoliberalism:“Here’s an interesting something that I’ve been talking about with people recently: maybe the cultural left is actually PART OF neoliberalism.I started thinking this after the Brexit debate. I hang around in London finance circles and what struck me was that the exact same rhetoric that was being used by the cultural left types on my Facebook feed was being used by the finance people....

In one respect, it’s true there’s an awful lot of hypocrisy about welfare from big business, since wasteful corporate welfare is pervasive in our societies. On the other hand, some aspects of business welfare are actually sensible and justifiable, even in a social democratic nation. E.g., agricultural protectionism.It is well known that you simply cannot have a productive, stable agricultural sector in a true free market, because wild and violent swings in the prices of commodities destroy...

Actually lots of issues discussed as well:[embedded content]I’m on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lord_Keynes2

Friends, do you self-identify as leftist, but find yourself answering “yes” to many of these questions?: (1) do you think left-wing politics is fundamentally about good economics? Do you think we need full employment, Keynesian macroeconomic management of our economies, a high wage economy, and an end to offshoring of our manufacturing and service jobs to the Third World by treasonous corporations and neoliberal governments?(2) are you a Bernie Bro who loved Bernie’s economic policies but...

Well, partially, anyway.Just look at Pat Buchanan and Sean Hannity on – WTF?? – Fox News partially steal the Left’s agenda on economics, as they talk about the poisonous disaster of free trade, outsourcing, loss of manufacturing, the decline of the middle class, and mass unemployment in America. Just listen to Pat Buchanan praise Bernie and Ralph Nader at the end![embedded content]The world has turned upside down. This is why we need a reformed left, friends.I’m on Twitter: Lord Keynes...

Thomas I. Palley gives a lecture on Post Keynesian economics below, a talk which he gave at the FMM Conference, The Spectre of Stagnation? Europe in the World Economy, in October 2015 in Berlin.[embedded content]

Good fun. The comments on Singapore are also very interesting.[embedded content]