Tag Archives: capitalism

Socialism a century ago seemed to be the wave of the future. There were various schools of socialism, but the common ideal was to guarantee support for basic needs, and for state ownership to free society from landlords, predatory banking and monopolies. In the West these hopes are now much further away than they seemed in 1917. Land and natural resources, basic infrastructure monopolies, health care and pensions have been increasingly privatized and financialized. Instead of Germany and...

What Ed Harrison call "crony capitalism" is a feature of neoliberalism as government capture that favors special interests. "Crony capitalism" is an egregious example of the underlying assumption that capital formation should be favored over other factors in the interest of growth, based on the further assumption of trickle down. This results in upward distribution and growing inequality of income and wealth, which eventually leads to social dysfunctionality.Credit Writedowns Crony...

So what are the problems according to Blanchard and Summers? In their view, “the events of the last ten years have put into question the presumption that economies are self stabilizing, have raised again the issue of whether temporary shocks can have permanent effects, and have shown the importance of non linearities.” Only mainstream macroeconomists could possibly have thought that capitalism is self stabilizing. The rest of us—who have read Marx and Keynes as well as the work of Robert...

This neoliberal era has a habit of getting ahead of itself and exposing its internal contradictions. In fact, the Capitalist system, as Marx, Keynes and others have demonstrated, it inherently inconsistent. The imposition of neoliberalism has only heightened those inconsistencies and made it more likely that we will move beyond this period in the foreseeable future (fingers crosssed). Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest Retail Sales data for August 2017. The...

Future economic historians may look back wryly at this period when we worshipped the divine right of capital while looking down on our ancestors who believed in the divine right of kings. I could not have said it better myself. Bourgeois liberalism as rule by the ownership class is as outrageous an assumption as rule by divine right.  The defenders of rule based on ownership of property is justified as "natural" rather than "divine." Both justifications are baseless assumptions...

This is a longish article that puts forward analysis diagnosing the challenge and proposes a plan in outline for addressing it, based on full employment, a job guarantee and a basic income. The latter part of the article is about the opportunities present by our entering the Information Age. Those opportunities can be seized rather than left to the whims of the market and its penchant for rent-seeking in a neoliberal environment.A lot in crammed into this one piece. Hopefully, people will...

Review of Blade Runner 2049. The Wolf Report:Nonconfidential analysis for the anti-investorOf Love and Hegel S. Artesian

 Martin Wolf writes that successful leftism “must recognise the crucial role of incentives in shaping human behaviour.” This is correct. I’m not sure, though, that it is a big argument against Corbynism. This is because actually-existing capitalism itself contains many dysfunctional incentives – ones that constrain innovation and encourage rent-seeking - and Corbynism offer the hope of reducing some of these. I would say that there is a tendency in capitalism (economic liberalism) toward...

Income inequality has been rising so rapidly in the United States and around the world that it threatens to make economic growth less durable, according to research from the International Monetary Fund. "While strong economic growth is necessary for economic development, it is not always sufficient," four IMF economists write in a new blog. "Inequality has risen in several advanced economies and remains stubbornly high in many that are still developing," they added. "This worries...

"The rent is too damn high." The problem with capitalism is rent extraction owing to market power resulting from effects of social, political and economic asymmetry. Neoclassical economics models capitalism (economic liberalism) in terms of perfect competition. This is not only an ideal, but also it is an unreachable ideal owing to institutional arrangements, on one hand, and asymmetry resulting from history and culture. In addition, government is inextricably bound up in the economy...