For the Steven Pearlstein’s (and Tea Partiers and other right-wingers), the problem is not unemployment or capitalist exploitation but the fact that we’re “living beyond our means.” For them, the sky is falling and it’s a result of high levels of private and public debt: a level of debt that leaves us vulnerable to that [...]
Archive for March, 2010
Here’s the conclusion to the Real News Network’s interview with Bill Black, entitled “To rob a country, own a bank”: The other four parts can be found at the New Deal 2.0.
Labor theories of value
Posted: 30 March 2010 in UncategorizedTags: capitalism, economics, labor, Marx, value
The responsible answer to a query such as “I would be curious to know what you consider the biggest flaw in the labor theory of value to be” is “to which labor theory of value are you referring?” But that’s not how Tyler Cowen responds. Instead, he repeats the familiar misunderstanding of Marx’s labor theory [...]
Publicly owned banking
Posted: 29 March 2010 in UncategorizedTags: banks, capitalism, crisis, Vermont
An alternative to private, for-profit banking. What an idea! North Dakota has had a state bank since 1919. And Ellen Brown reports on the fledgling movement to create more publicly owned banks. Actually, what is surprising is that there’s only one such bank in the United States. And only 7 political candidates in as many [...]
At the time, few understood Sinead O’Connor’s decision to tear up a picture of the pope during her 3 October 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live. Now, evidence of the church’s child-abuse scandals—which have spread from the United States through South America to Western Europe—is there for all to see. And, according to the most [...]
This is what the current “recovery” looks like, in terms of employment, compared to all other postwar recessions in the United States, according to the Minneapolis Fed.
David Brooks, never one of my favorite columnists, actually does a pretty good job summarizing the history of mainstream economics: Act I • the era of economic scientism, “the period when economists based their work on a crude vision of human nature (the perfectly rational, utility-maximizing autonomous individual) and then built elaborate models based on [...]
