Socialdem. 21st Century

It’s shocking when Boris Johnson, more or less, makes more sense than some leftists on the European Union. [embedded content]Even a leftist like George Galloway is saying many of the same things as Boris Johnson:[embedded content]

This is a very interesting question, because for at least the first 60 years of its life the GOP was the party of economic nationalism and tariff protectionism in America.In this sense, all of Trump’s protectionist rhetoric is just taking the GOP back to its protectionist roots, as is rightly pointed out here and here.Republican protectionism of the 19th century was in turn just another manifestation of the set of policies called the “American System” advocated by Alexander Hamilton and...

You can see it here: This is from the Shadowstats.com site.The official US unemployment statistic most frequently used in the media is U-3. But U-3 excludes short-term discouraged workers, marginally-attached workers, and those who want full-time work but cannot find it and are forced to make do with part-time or causal work.U-6 includes these types of people, and, by U-6, US employment in 2016 stands at 10%.But it is worse than this, because there are long-term demoralised and discouraged...

It’s easily summed up: (1) 19th century industrial capitalism drew in women and children into exploitative and cruel working conditions, which helped to shatter family life and undercut the wages and employment prospects of men;(2) 19th century and early 20th century trade unions, socialist movements and labour-based political parties fought to ban child labour and improve real wages for men so that men could be breadwinners for their wives and children, without throwing women and children...

Imagine a pure thought experiment: an abstract, logical world where everything is true by definition.In this world, we have a fair dice. The pure mathematical a priori probability of rolling a 6 on this dice is 1/6. That probability has necessary truth – but limited only to the abstract fair game of dice one is imagining. The analytic a priori propositions that express the imaginary world and probability in question do have necessary truth – but limited to this abstract analytic a priori...

People well informed about the current US presidential election should know that the neoconservatives – America’s all-star team of warmongering foreign policy GOP elite – have had a massive falling out with Donald Trump (e.g., see here). That assault on the neocon and GOP elite is summed up by this amusing cartoon here.The result of all this has been that now one neocon faction prefers to vote for Hillary, and the other faction led by neocon-in-chief William Kristol is supporting an...

Just watch this clip from his interview with Larry King in 1999:[embedded content]Yes, you heard right. The man was for universal health care in America in 1999. He began as a moderate or liberal Republican (or what was sometimes called a “Rockefeller Republican”), different from the quasi-libertarian conservative Republicans.If Trump wants to win over Bernie voters and actually do something no other US president has ever done, he ought to return to that issue, but framed in a way that does...

I am getting sick of these people. I see them on Facebook and Twitter and their arguments are pathetic.Some of them appear to be living in a quasi-Marxist internationalist fantasy world. The motto of the pro-EU left may as well be: “We want to destroy Europe in order to save it!”The EU and Eurozone are outrageous, catastrophic neoliberal disasters. They have caused tremendous suffering. The EU is a corporate tyranny of unelected and incompetent neoliberal lunatics. They are basically...

The current American presidential campaign evokes a bygone era: the 1896 campaign of William Jennings Bryan.Here is William Jennings Bryan below as photographed in 1896: In the 1890s, America was in the last stages of the Classical gold standard, and from 1873 to 1896 – as in the rest of the Western world – America was hit by an unexpected and steady general price deflation.This benefited some people, but severely hurt others. Throughout the Western world – and certainly in Britain – the...

Philip Pilkington has a forthcoming book called The Reformation in Economics: A Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Economic Theory, which is due out in October.See more details here: Philip Pilkington, “Achtung! My Book is Coming Out Soon: Here is a Brief Overview and Some Media Links,” Fixing the Economists, May 31, 2016. There is also a fascinating interview on the book here, well worth listening to.