The quality of debate and coverage of economics and economic policy in Canada is atrocious. Fiscal conservatism isn't fiscally responsible: it's fiscally delusional.
We live in the same country. Swap out Canada for Australia, oil for gas, coal and iron ore, change the party names; the rest of the story is exactly the same, and our First Nations both know it. Except for The Greens - the Australian Greens are not neoliberal. Most sit somewhere in a scatter plot between Keynes, socialism, and ecological economics, which of course means being pilloried in the corporate media for being “lightweights on economics” or “watermelons”. Meanwhile, our Labor federal treasurer - economic lightweight Jim Chalmers - is being congratulated by the likes of the IMF for his fiscal rectitude, running a surplus while ordinary Australians go down the toilet. Or, down 3 toilets since one is not enough if you’re borrowing a million bucks for it. Amusingly, Treasurer Chalmers is quite a fan of Mariana Mazzucato, whom I suspect is now trying to “save” capitalism.
My reading of Keynes was that he was trying to save capitalism from itself, and from Marxism. But after trudging through some “New Keynesian” literature it is clear that the capitalist “mainstream”, our new version of what Marx called “vulgar economics”, has done him in. If capitalism can’t accept Keynes’ gift, I doubt it can be saved from itself. The false reality of Economics can’t be saved from itself either.
Yes, it is a problem because it is the same ideology everywhere in the English-Speaking world.
The Conservatives work together globally. The first person to call Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was Australian Prime Minister John Howard. They advise each other, and they share policies as well as the the propaganda for how to achieve them. You also have people like Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and other media oligarchs who force-feed people propaganda.
When it comes to the actual math, New Keynesians are the same as fiscal conservatives. Australian Economist Steve Keen has pointed out it never properly Keynesian.
Post-Keynesians are the ones who actually carried on Keynes' work. Labour around the world has often taken from the UK, which was never Keynesian either.
There is a difference between financial capitalism and industrial capitalism, and in order for any system to function properly you need to have divisions of power and separate systems of accountability and control, not as a "marketplace of ideas" but in order ensure that justice can be done and broken systems addressed.
It is not just workers who have lost out to financial capitalism - so has the "real economy" and industry. Governments and mega corporations alike can crush people, whether it is deliberate, malicious, indifferent or oblivious. Arthur Okun wrote in the 1970s:
“A market economy helps safeguard political rights against encroachment by the state... In the polar case of a fully collectivized economy, political rights would be severely jeopardized. If the government commanded all the productive resources of the society, it could suppress dissent, enforce conformity, and snuff out democracy. As an entry on some of the “enemies lists” compiled by Nixon aides, I shudder in imagining my income and status during that era if the federal government had been the only employer. That ardent exponent of laissez-faire, Friedrich Hayek, quotes approvingly a brief passage from the disillusioned communist Leon Trotsky: “In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle, who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” I cherish this rare occasion when I can agree with both Hayek and Trotsky!”
LOL. Hayek, Friedman, Popper et. al, are my favourite enemies. Their brilliance at creating an ideology that has conquered the world cannot be denied, yet in entirely rejecting Marx’s method of analysis they blinded themselves to its consequences. They deny the “social” is a valid unit of analysis, yet what did they call themselves? The Mont Pellerin Society! Trotsky was right too. Changing the owner from the capitalist to the state just replaces one ruling class with another, and fixes nothing. As we have seen more recently in Russia, changing the ownership back to capital didn’t give people back their “freedom”. Collectivisation should mean ownership of the enterprise by its workers, not the state. 1 share and one vote, which cannot be sold, an equal share of the profit, and they vote for their CEO and board.
Yanis Varoufakis, amongst others (including The Greens in NSW), proposes something like this, and I think it is interesting. Part of the puzzle at least.
There are all sorts of ways to do it, but there is a difference between systems of government and economic systems, and one of the fundamental deficiencies and characteristic of the far right and far left and being authoritarian is that they don't have the rule of law. This is what people miss about the collective, of the public good. You have to protect the rights of the minority and the individual, and due process. Part of the problem with zealots is that they are so convinced of their own rightness, goodness and incorruptibility that they don't think their needs to be a law when they're in charge.
We live in the same country. Swap out Canada for Australia, oil for gas, coal and iron ore, change the party names; the rest of the story is exactly the same, and our First Nations both know it. Except for The Greens - the Australian Greens are not neoliberal. Most sit somewhere in a scatter plot between Keynes, socialism, and ecological economics, which of course means being pilloried in the corporate media for being “lightweights on economics” or “watermelons”. Meanwhile, our Labor federal treasurer - economic lightweight Jim Chalmers - is being congratulated by the likes of the IMF for his fiscal rectitude, running a surplus while ordinary Australians go down the toilet. Or, down 3 toilets since one is not enough if you’re borrowing a million bucks for it. Amusingly, Treasurer Chalmers is quite a fan of Mariana Mazzucato, whom I suspect is now trying to “save” capitalism.
My reading of Keynes was that he was trying to save capitalism from itself, and from Marxism. But after trudging through some “New Keynesian” literature it is clear that the capitalist “mainstream”, our new version of what Marx called “vulgar economics”, has done him in. If capitalism can’t accept Keynes’ gift, I doubt it can be saved from itself. The false reality of Economics can’t be saved from itself either.
Yes, it is a problem because it is the same ideology everywhere in the English-Speaking world.
The Conservatives work together globally. The first person to call Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was Australian Prime Minister John Howard. They advise each other, and they share policies as well as the the propaganda for how to achieve them. You also have people like Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and other media oligarchs who force-feed people propaganda.
When it comes to the actual math, New Keynesians are the same as fiscal conservatives. Australian Economist Steve Keen has pointed out it never properly Keynesian.
Post-Keynesians are the ones who actually carried on Keynes' work. Labour around the world has often taken from the UK, which was never Keynesian either.
There is a difference between financial capitalism and industrial capitalism, and in order for any system to function properly you need to have divisions of power and separate systems of accountability and control, not as a "marketplace of ideas" but in order ensure that justice can be done and broken systems addressed.
It is not just workers who have lost out to financial capitalism - so has the "real economy" and industry. Governments and mega corporations alike can crush people, whether it is deliberate, malicious, indifferent or oblivious. Arthur Okun wrote in the 1970s:
“A market economy helps safeguard political rights against encroachment by the state... In the polar case of a fully collectivized economy, political rights would be severely jeopardized. If the government commanded all the productive resources of the society, it could suppress dissent, enforce conformity, and snuff out democracy. As an entry on some of the “enemies lists” compiled by Nixon aides, I shudder in imagining my income and status during that era if the federal government had been the only employer. That ardent exponent of laissez-faire, Friedrich Hayek, quotes approvingly a brief passage from the disillusioned communist Leon Trotsky: “In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle, who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” I cherish this rare occasion when I can agree with both Hayek and Trotsky!”
LOL. Hayek, Friedman, Popper et. al, are my favourite enemies. Their brilliance at creating an ideology that has conquered the world cannot be denied, yet in entirely rejecting Marx’s method of analysis they blinded themselves to its consequences. They deny the “social” is a valid unit of analysis, yet what did they call themselves? The Mont Pellerin Society! Trotsky was right too. Changing the owner from the capitalist to the state just replaces one ruling class with another, and fixes nothing. As we have seen more recently in Russia, changing the ownership back to capital didn’t give people back their “freedom”. Collectivisation should mean ownership of the enterprise by its workers, not the state. 1 share and one vote, which cannot be sold, an equal share of the profit, and they vote for their CEO and board.
Yanis Varoufakis, amongst others (including The Greens in NSW), proposes something like this, and I think it is interesting. Part of the puzzle at least.
There are all sorts of ways to do it, but there is a difference between systems of government and economic systems, and one of the fundamental deficiencies and characteristic of the far right and far left and being authoritarian is that they don't have the rule of law. This is what people miss about the collective, of the public good. You have to protect the rights of the minority and the individual, and due process. Part of the problem with zealots is that they are so convinced of their own rightness, goodness and incorruptibility that they don't think their needs to be a law when they're in charge.