Tag Archives: market state

In the end, MMT looks like an extreme version of conventional economics in which there is no independent monetary policy and there are a lot of unused resources. But when resources get tight, the reflex is command and control central planning. This cuts to the quick of it. The question is how much market state (where free markets determine outcomes, in theory at least) and how much welfare state (where the economy is managed based on desired outcomes). This is an ongoing dialectic among...

Some Republican policymakers continue to propose basing eligibility for assistance programs on participants’ ability to meet strict work requirements — most recently with House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway’s proposal to reauthorize SNAP (formerly food stamps)[1] — despite a lack of credible evidence that the requirements would work as intended.[2]To build support for work requirements that take away assistance from adults who cannot work a set number of hours per month,...

Thomas Palley has a new paper: The Case for Concerted Action Thomas Palley – Re-theorizing The Welfare State And The Political Economy Of Neoliberalism’s War Against It V. Ramanan

The basic income means that you are requiring somebody else to use up their finite lifespan to produce output, take it from them by force and give it to somebody who *refuses* to contribute to the production process. There is no value exchange, only theft. That is no different to the process the idle rich use today — and are rightly resented for it. So you have to justify, politically, why society should support people *for their entire life* who simply refuse to contribute when they...