Socialdem. 21st Century

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The Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) idea – or at least the idea shared by some supporters of MMT online – that imports are only ever a benefit and MMT is a viable policy for all nations are badly mistaken ideas.Now MMT would work for the US, Western Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea or Taiwan, but not for much of the Third World.That is, MMT-style policies are best suited for advanced capitalist nations, not necessarily for Third World countries, because most of them face severe balance of...

It’s a catastrophe, even though some people are crowing about the admittedly large real GDP growth rates in 2014 and 2015 (at 5.2% and about 6.9% respectively). In the media, we find breathless stories about Ireland being the “fastest growing economy in Europe” as if Ireland’s brutal austerity is a viable model for the rest of Europe.However, actual Irish real GDP still stands below its 2007/2008 peak, even after 8 years. The depth of Ireland’s collapse was on the scale of a depression (that...

If Trump is elected president, his economic policies will either (1) crash America or continue its economic stagnation, and accelerate its catastrophic decline under neoliberalism (because Trump will impose an extreme form of neoliberalism, albeit maybe with some trade or labour protectionism) or(2) turn America around and actually impose big Keynesian stimulus, and trade and labour market protectionism. (2) will make Trumponomics nothing more than Reaganomics Mark II.Why? We know why. It’s...

Just listen to his rhetoric in the video below.[embedded content]In other words, Trump poses as a billionaire white knight who is now a kind of class traitor: nobody can buy him because he is too rich! But all the other guys are bought and sold by corporate America.Trump is a Republican Bernie Sanders, and both are vehement anti-establishment candidates who claim they can’t be bought.

The fact that Donald Trump is loathed by the American Neoconservatives and has rejected key elements of neoconservative foreign policy is brought out well here.The worst and most extreme elements of American foreign policy since 2001 have been largely the result of a wing of the Republican movement called the Neoconservatives or “neocons.”The older Neoconservatives gravitated from the Democratic party to the Republican party in the late 1970s, and under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush...

In the video below. This is the appalling world we live in. All of them endorse it to some degree, despite the lip service to the rejection of it as an official policy. Trump even more so. But it seems that the fallout from the use of torture under George W. Bush has made even the CIA itself turn against torture and its personnel reluctant to use it. So Trump, even if elected, might not get his way.[embedded content][embedded content]

We all know that Donald Trump has said some extreme and hateful things, but here he is in the videos below condemning the 2003 invasion of Iraq (in the first), and also admitting that he was once a supporter of a single payer health care system in the US. It is unclear exactly what his current health care proposal is, but it would seem that he wants (1) universal access and (2) to provide a heavy dose of government funding for anyone who cannot afford private health care.These things are...

As should other countries: it’s plain common sense.The EU and Eurozone are catastrophic. Of course, sanity prevailed and the UK never joined the Eurozone, but the EU itself is still catastrophic.Britain should leave the EU as quickly as possible, for the following reasons: (1) to protect the UK’s economic and political sovereignty;(2) to protect its democracy;(3) to protect its welfare state and social services;(4) to have some hope for a Post Keynesian-style or MMT-style economic policy in...

The trouble with this idea of Marx is that, as formulated in volume 3 of Capital, Marx has insulated it against empirical refutation. As Michael Heinrich has argued here, it collapses into an anti-empirical and analytic tautology, which cannot be proven by empirical evidence. For Marx, it becomes a long-run tendency so that even if we had 1,000 years of capitalism and there was no long-run tendency of the rate of profit to fall visible in the data, Marx can evade criticism by claiming that...