Free Market Fundamentalist Ideology is based on a Logical Fallacy.

Nobody could have predicted what Biden and Trudeau would have done these past three years or

NOBODY would still have had a variable mortgage rate on their homes........

My wife and I know somebody whose mortgage payment went from five thousand dollars per month up to seven thousand.... and now nine thousand dollar per month....... in less than one year!

Supposedly Biden and Trudeau are fighting INFLATION?????????????

So somebody's mortgage costs nearly doubling in less than a year is not "inflation????"

 

Has anyone heard of Adam Smith?

He wrote this book called Wealth of Nations.

It has probably been in the public domain for a century but it has only been available for download in Project Gutenberg since 2006.

If you search it for "and account" you will find multiple instances of "read, write and account". Smith also used the word education EIGHTY TIMES.

But have you ever heard a libertarian say that accounting/finance should be mandatory in the schools? The US could have done that since Sputnik. What would that have done to the economy by now?

 

What did Friedman and Hayek ever say about planned obsolescence?

Where is the data on the annual depreciation of automobiles since Sputnik ?

 

Here is a short video interview of Economics Professor at the University of Texas in Austin, Dr. James K. Galbraith, who is also the son of the famous economist Dr. John Kenneth Galbraith.

James K. Galbraith for Age of Economics - Full interview
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I'm not sure anyone is advocating absolutely free markets. Government, a the minimum, provides a legal framework to resolve disputes.

 

Economists Michael Hudson and Professor Richard Wolff (recent video) are closely following the recent economic inflation, interest rate increases, and bank collapses with powerful explanations of what is really happening behind the appearances. I kept a log of the exceptionally good video interviews and some written articles by Hudson.

Hudson has released a video interview on the recent Silicon Balley Bank Bailout of billionaires.

Why 3 US banks collapsed in 1 week: Economist Michael Hudson
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Also, an article by Hudson, "Why the Banking System is Breaking Up" March 13, 2023

Michael Hudson: “Cure the inflation no matter the cost” Who is the COST?
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Here is an older video critiquing Neoliberal Capitalism and road to debt servitude: Hudson's speech at the World Congress on Marxism in 2015

Hudson and economist Radhika Desai give an insightful summary of the economic forces conflicting in Europe and the Ukraine.

Michael Hudson: The EU has DESTROYED its Economy for NATO's Ukraine Proxy War ft. Radhika Desai

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Also, another excellent video discussion between Hudson and Desai on US monetary policies.

How US dollar hegemony continued off the gold standard, with Radhika Desai & Michael Hudson​

 

Man! Talk about missing history!

There is no Left political leadership at all. When we lose Chomsky, Michael Hudson, Harvey J. Kaye, and other older experienced progressive intellectuals, we will be up **** ****ing Creek without a paddle. There is no one to replace them that has their knowledge and experience.

Dr. Michael Hudson has given us a great gift: a historical narrative to interpret what is happening now in global economics, and he has recently written a book titled, "The Collapse of Antiquity." I'm getting it. Nearly, all the economic analysis on mainstream media is complete trash designed to mis-direct attention. Here is a transcribed summary of Hudson's entire discussion at the beginning of the video lecture. His student audience was completely stunned at the conclusion of his historical analysis (All transcript errors are mine; bold text added).

"KHAS Global Political Economy Lecture 14: Michael Hudson." (@ 9:32).

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"...the problem is not simply the U.S and Western Europe becoming rentier oligarchies, but about how their political inability to resist oligarchy goes all the way back to Classical Greece and Rome and the way in which Western Civilization failed from the very beginning to have a state power able to block the emergence of an oligarchy taking over Society by debt leading to a monopolization of land ownership. All of this really began in the 7th and 6th centuries BC and we're still suffering from the way the classical Antiquity collapsed. Rome collapsed into feudalism, but even though it collapsed, it bequeathed the pro-creditor and general economic ethic to the modern world namely that of Margaret Thatcher: the idea that government was bad, and you shouldn't have any government any kingship or any Tyrant that is capable of checking the oligarchy by canceling debts, and redistributing land well as it happens just today.

Finally, my book class "The Collapse of Antiquity," is out and posted on Amazon today. This is the book that I worked on for a number of years and is the second volume in my history of debt revolutions, and the failure of the debt Revolutions in Rome and Italy and Greece to succeed and the defeat of the balanced economy as oligarchies took over in various Greek cities, and finally they were all conquered by Rome. So, all of this was also described in the Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible as if we're it says if we're living in the end time, but the end of what well today you could say that it's the end of modernism. I decided to show what is this post-modernism-- it's really neoliberalism. It's really the idea of the fighting back against everything that was Progressive in industrial capitalism which really was Progressive in the sense that it wanted to free economies from the legacy of feudalism. It wanted to get rid of the landlord class; that was the whole essence of Adam Smith John Stewart Mill, Marx, the Thurston family. The whole classical political economy was designed to value and price theory that would isolate economic rent as unearned income and make sure that either it was taxed away or that any rent yielding activity would be taken into the public sector, and land would be nationalized, and the basic utilities would be nationalized.

That was where capitalism seemed to be going in the late 18th century. You could look at what happened after World War I as a whole fight to prevent industrial capitalism from evolving into socialism, and instead making a detour that pushed it into a finance capitalism. If you look at the way in which Classical Greece
and Rome developed without kanship that had occurred throughout the near East of creditors and property owners taking over society enriching themselves by impoverishing the ninety-nine percent. You find certain historic invariables that you have today, and you could see of all of Antiquities.

My book describes the six centuries of failed Revolutions in Greece and Rome that were brutally put down by the Creditor oligarchy who won resulting in the Dark Age. The dynamic is exactly the same dynamic that we're feeling today in Western Civilization. Basically, we've seen for the last hundred years the academic economics defining a free market as just the opposite of how the classical economists described it. I'm sure that you all know from my writings that the idea of a market is who's going to be free? Well, will the ninety nine percent be free of a rentier class; free of a landlord class; of a predatory banking class; and of monopolists? Or will the landlords, monopolists, and financiers and creditors be free to in-debt the ninety nine percent and impoverish them? The question is who's going to be free? Well, certainly whenever the Romans talked about Liberty, they meant the liberty of the oligarchy not to be constrained, and by any popular power, or by Kings. The way that you would criticize any social reformer in Rome was to say, "Well, he's an egotist seeking kingship," and in Greece they would say, "He's seeking to be a tyrant." Well, the original tyrants in the 7th and 6th centuries were the founders of democracy; they were the people who overthrew the mafia like aristocracies that control the land; they took over, they canceled the debts; they redistributed the land, and they paved the way for progress. Well, no wonder they were called tyrants. At first, this wasn't a bad word. It was, I think, taken over from the Persians. But, after the fifth century the word "tyrants" became a bad word. Not a good word today. We would call them "socialists." Socialism has become a bad word today in many sectors. So, the word "tyrant" had sort of the same linguistic and interpretive fate and were sort of the legacy of feudalism and post-modernism. Post-modernism really has been created by the rentier classes that fought back against classical economy, and that's why you don't have the history of economic thought taught in the academic economics curriculum anymore."--Michael Hudson​

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Can you repeat that again? In English?

 

Here is Hudson's take on the recent four bank failures as JP Morgan Chase takes over First Republic Bank, and how government regulators are in bed with the bankers.:

4 US banks crash in 2 months: Banking crisis explained by economist Michael Hudson

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Dr. James Galbraith on the deterioration of America's economics and economic history:

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I watched John Kenneth Galbraith's video series Age of Uncertainty in 1977. That was right after I noticed that the economics profession ignores the depreciation of durable consumer goods.

How many hundreds of billions of dollars of so called durable consumer goods have Americans trashed since Sputnik?

Consumerism has to crash because the planet cannot sustain it. There were fewer than 4.5 billion back then and now there are 8 billion.

http://blog.lostsoulscorp.com/articles/economic-wargames/

 

"Free" market?? Don't make me laugh. A market in which some people's rights to liberty are owned and bought and sold by other people is not a free market. It is a slave market.

 

Breaking News! Reality Intrudes

The power elite knows the Neo-Liberal de-industrialization paradigm is collapsing and by necessity the US must return to Keynesianism since China has advanced into Market Socialism (which the US already has on Wall Street). The US must return to FDR's post-WWII economic plan for Germany: De-Militarization, De-Nazification, De-Cartelization, and Democratization. American corporations, especially in digital technology, are only interested in constructing cartels. Hear journalist Ben Norton's hour-long talk giving one deviating argument after another, critiquing America's destructive collapsing economic vision.

How China became the world's industrial superpower - and why the US is desperate to stop it.
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Agreed. The people (i.e. buyers and sellers, i.e. the market) should be be free. But contracts will always need to be adjudicated by the government (i.e. the legal framework). I mean, it should not be the Wild West out there.

 

Absolutely. Freedom without a legal structure isn't freedom. The question is where the government steps in. Obviously, informant contracts, safe labor conditions, product safety come to mind immediately.

 

Well, I'm not sure what "informant contracts" are. Probably because I'm an ignorant redneck. But yes, safe labor conditions and product safety certainly ought to be able to properly handled via tort law.

 

Don't be so hard on yourself. Cut yourself some slack. There's lots worse things a guy can be.

But of course, it's been known for many decades -- specifically, to economists who aren't ignorant rednecks -- that they can't. Workers' compensation programs were established specifically because using tort law to address workplace safety was an absurdly complex and costly nightmare. Product safety cannot be addressed by tort law because it is too difficult to prove that a specific product caused a specific plaintiff to suffer a specific harm. Just as one example: lead glaze on tableware. Lead poisoning causes many subtle and highly variable symptoms, including (speaking of ignorant rednecks) irreversible cognitive impairment.

 

No. China has not been socialist (i.e., with collective ownership of the means of production: natural resources and producer goods) since the early 1980s. It has not been capitalist (private ownership of natural resources and producer goods) since 1949. It has been geoist (collective ownership of natural resources, private ownership of producer goods) since the early 1980s. That is why it has achieved the greatest economic miracle in history.

 

Like markets make sense for high complex products that most people cannot evaluate. IBM introduced the Datamaster 23 while I worked there as a Customer Engineer. I regarded it as a piece of junk.

https://www.weibull.com/hotwire/issue21/hottopics21.htm

The Bathtub Curve and Product Failure Behavior
Part One - The Bathtub Curve, Infant Mortality and Burn-in

 

So, given that knowledge, nobody would manufacture lead glazed tableware because they know they would be sued.

 

No, they would -- and did -- definitely manufacture it because they knew they would NOT be sued, because
1) nobody would suspect that their tableware made them sick,
2) even if they suspected, nobody would be willing to pay a lawyer to pursue an unwinnable lawsuit,
3) even if they suspected and had deep enough pockets to pay a lawyer to pursue it, they would lose.

 

But you just said that it's common knowledge that it makes you sick.

 

No, I said no such thing. You simply made it up. Not unexpectedly.

 

This is your statement I was referring to.

So given that we know lead glaze causes those health problems, anyone who attempts to sell it will face getting sued.

 

No it's not. That is a statement identifying a fact about lead glaze on tableware, not a claim that that fact is common knowledge.

Which YOU, for example, only know because I told you...

Indeed, given the irreversible effect of lead poisoning on cognitive ability, there seems to be a strong likelihood that someone you are rather intimately acquainted with has habitually eaten off some lead-glazed tableware at some point in their life.

No, I already proved that claim is false. A consumer wouldn't even have any easy way of knowing that tableware is lead-glazed. You are just makin' $#!+ up to try to preserve your absurd and proved-false political "philosophy" from destruction by a collision with the facts of objective physical reality.

 

I disagree. I think in a society will regulation provided by civil society that it would be fairly straightforward for manufacturers that use lead glazing to be identified.