Socialdem. 21st Century

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.

These myths can be seen in the video below of Stefan Molyneux’s interview of Lawrence W. Reed on the Great Depression.[embedded content]A quick point that struck me: both seem oblivious to the fact that Keynesian economists do not advocate tax increases in a recession or depression. This doesn’t inspire much confidence in the quality of the analysis.In what follows, I am using a Post Keynesian economic analysis to critique the economic theory underlying the discussion in this video, which...

Serious question in light of this:[embedded content]Note well: the question is not whether Trump will actually do anything after he is elected to raise minimum wages (excuse me while I laugh… because I would be genuinely astonished if he did), but whether, once he’s the official Republican party candidate, he will be smart enough to make a play for all those angry Bernie Bros who hate Hillary, the Democratic establishment and neoliberalism by presenting himself as pro-working class and as...

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In the video below and in his analysis here.[embedded content]Pat Buchanan, whatever the faults of his Paleoconservatism and no doubt you can find plenty of them, “gets it” in a way that most left-wing people do not. Buchanan understands perfectly well the catastrophe of globalisation and neoliberalism. But he also understands, more or less, the disaster of extreme cultural Postmodernist leftism and its bastard offshoots.I hate to break it to people on the left, and it may be a terrible truth...

A career and a job where one does economically and socially useful work is an important part of any successful, healthy and wealthy society. But more than this, it gives people an identity through the job that they have and a social dignity lacking in long-term unemployment.There are of course a lot of difficult, boring, dirty and sometimes dangerous jobs that have to be done, but a technologically advanced society like ours can use its inventive genius to create more and better machines and...

He already called them out on the 2003 Iraq catastrophe. He even said “Bush lied, people died.” He’s distanced himself from their extreme foreign policy.And now Trump savages arch-neocon Bill Kristol in the video below. I’m kind of struck by the way Trump’s fans seem dumbstruck by his abuse of Kristol, however, as though they don’t quite know how to react...[embedded content]But you can bet Trump won’t get any credit from the US left for saying what is essentially correct about Kristol....

Philip Pilkington is interviewed on his Forthcoming Book The Reformation in Economics (due out in October) here.