Goldiblocks

An internet friend, Nadine, sent me a link to a recent interview with Michael Hudson. I appreciated. Actually it was only a reaction video to an interview with Hudson, “Michael Hudson Actually Caused All This!”

However, Hudson often makes me cringe. He is MMT aware, and friendly-ish, but not a proper MMT expert. This makes for sound cringebites worth commenting upon briefly.

I just wanted to get a few things off my chest with these latest cringebites.

There was No Gold Standard

OK, there was a period of gold standard, but you need to appreciate the pretence that is was. Apart from commodity traders looking to make a buck aprasitcally, or jewelers, or electrocnics folks, few people needed gold, and so never redeemed currency for gold. When you have a omnetary system where people are not redeeming for gold in any meaningful way, you do not have a gold standard.

But you can still call it a Gold Standard era if there is a legal prmiose to redeem for gold. I’ll give you that, but that is all.

So I can unashamedly post this sport of comment,

@5:00 that is a myth. It was not truly a gold standard. It was thought to be. But few states ever redeemed currency for gold, and the paper claims on gold reserves regularly exceeded the total gold supply at Fort Knox or wherever, I believe by several times over, so this is not a gold standard, it was a political pretense at such to impose worker austerity, and applicable as policy by justification because of fixed exchange rate regimes (which are entirely unnecessary self-imposed constraints, more austerity).
      Moving to floating exchange rates meant the pretense was officially over, but the gold standard had been gone well before that move. Yet gold standard mindsets prevail in the form of fixed exchange rate mentality, which is inapplicable today, but the policies designed for fixed exchange rates (aka. fiscal austerity and interest rate/inflation targeting) remain, entirely unnecessarily. The correct and only necessary target on a floating exchange rate is full employment, and secondarily (but important for economic justice, if this is what we desire) fair distribution (i.e., euthanize the rentiers).

Out-cucking the Radical Academics

The dude doing the reaction vdo also made some remark about how activist or “radical” academics often do work that gets egregiously co-opted by finance capital. You know the Thomas Franks story — right-wing fake-populists co-opt the language of true leftipol populists. That sort of thing, on larger scales.

The right-wingers are even far superior at using leftist populist memes and language. They cloak it in the Slitherin veil of prosperity gospel shyte, and the like. Pretty disgusting. (“Youz get what youz dezoyves!”)

Felt I had to stick up for the shitty science profession which amorally allows finance capital to run all over the tech fruits of science,

@3:50 it is far more acute a problem in science, my field. Finance capital will seek to make a buck off workers by any means possible, and high tech advances under the systemic forces prevailing only accelerate that fleecing of the working class, and increase evisceration of the precariat. The USA is the most prosperous nation on Earth, and also one of the the most unequal, so has some of the worst austerity atrocities, and this is by no fault of the employed as individuals.
      You have to understand the source of unemployment. It is not the private sector. It is the government, the State creates all unemployment by design, it’s called fiscal austerity: they never issue enough currency to meet the non-government sectors needs to pay taxes and satisfy net savings desires, the result is mal-distribution, the top One Percent can pay taxes and save, the bottom 90 Percent cannot possibly, by simple accounting identity, they go into bank debt in order to pay taxes and live paycheck to paycheck.

Scientists are typically far better cucks and enablers of capital pigs than radical academics.

Although, you know… you have to hand it to Hudson for being the dumbest person alive who ever wrote about Superimperialism. If you or I had discovered the basics of superimperialism would we have been working for the Neocons at the Hudson Institute? ((Hudson is no dummy, but is one of the few who wrote about Superimperialism. So he is simultaneously one of the smartest and one of the dumbest to have written on Superimperialism.))

I know, I know, Michael tells us he was an infiltrator. Ok dude.

To be fair, he has spoken up on all this, so he has become an infiltrator I guess. It is just a very weird trajectory. First enable the Necons, along with Reagan, Cheney and Rumsfeld, then tell folks how you did that, and that you were all along fighting against injustice?

Health is Not Healthcare

I grabbed the bit about the USA being simultaneously the greatest and the worst on Earth from Dr Stephen Bezruchka (author of “Inequality Kills Us All”), and his interview on Real Progressives here . Check it out, it is good.

If you have good health then you do not need healthcare. A good cognitive dissonance talking point to keep in mind.

OK, but how does one gain good health? Do we not need a good public healthcare system? Bezruchka argues, “No!”

Or rather, yes we do desire a good healthcare system, but the best healthcare system is one with the fewest people needing it. How does that happen?

Bezruchka explains that politics is the first health provider, not the healthcare stuff (hospitals and the like). If we have decent politics, proper democracy, equality, full non-bs employment, economic justice, then the demands upon the healthcare system reduce dramatically, and people are generally far healthier, just form good politics.

Those who say, “Oh, well that’s all well and good, but out politics is stuffed, so there is no hope!” are neoliberal enablers, and should be sent to Gulag comrade.