Shmapitalism

Steve Keen today back to good form debunking mainstream orthodox economics… until…

With Friends Like these Who Needs Capitalists

I try to never miss a chance to critique dopiness, so what I will often do (fair warning) is stop listening when the dopey remark is made and go off on my righteous rants. It is an excuse, ok, a way of generating outrage. I do so for all of physics and macroeconomics and philosophy, probably any other interests I have (Rugby but thank goodness I never listen to rugbytube, the players do all the talking for me).

This is just to say, if you are a ProfKeen Minksyian acolyte, please do not get triggered. I could have similar critiques of Stephanie Kelton, Steve Grumbine, and others. Even Mosler. Probably the only top economist I never find to be cringe is Yeva Nersisyan. That’s “top” in a spiritual sense, obviously there are only a fingerfull of top MMT economists when “top” means “well read” or “in the news.”

The chance to critique dopiness today was after all the extremely good review of Debunking Economics, in this Amsterdam talk Steve starts on his “capitalism is good” speech.

How can I write this without cuss words?

Bloody stupid mate.

That’s technical jargon an Aussie can understand.

What Steve is doing is conceding the principle. We cannot do this!

I’ll explain in a minute, but first, I consider myself a rebel economist too, and Steve is very generous and has his Minsky software available free-libre, and gave me a discount to enrol in his online Skool.com Rebel Economist Forum. So I’m not criticizing him as a person, it was merely the language framing that I objected to. But this is of vital importance.

Steve may be about 80 years old, but he is still capable of learning and evolving. Case in point: he seems to have finally woken up to the concept Elon Musk is not rescuing the planet and is no venture “effective altruist.” You have to wonder though don’t you, about friends of MMT who could not see how disgusting Mr Musk was from the start, we are talking right from PayPal days or perhaps since birth!

Cutting to the chase. What Steve claims is that

“…capitalism gave us diversity of stuff and wonderful things.”

You can stop right there, since that’s dead false. Unless by “we” you mean the Top Ten Percenters.

It is class unconscious garbage. So cretinous.

It is also making the classic mistake in “science” of confusing correlation with causation.

It is also being a dopey Ptolemaicist, which ironically ProfKeen often decries against. Howso? Well, it is because ProfKeen is basing his framing on a wonky and error ridden theoretical study by an economist .

I really need to do a whole essay on that load of bollocks some day.

Kornai’s analysis is dead wrong, not the least because the Soviet model which he uses was nothing even remotely close to socialism. The Soviet was not even very good central planning. Kornai also uses a lot of simplifying assumptions. Isn’t that what ProfKeen warns against! Yes. So dude, mate, you can’t be talking out both sides of your mouth like this, it does not look good, and destroys your credibility, despite all the good you do.

let me even quote from another stupid MMT economist, Michel Hudson, but in this case Hudson is quite right. The USA economy is also central planning, and the central planners are Wall Street and Silicon Valley. That is of course “so-to-speak” not literally. Or you could say, “as-good-as-if”. I think this would converge with Chomsky’s opinion as well. It is being perversely pedantic to insist otherwise.

NewsFlash to all you dopey capitalism boosting MMTer’s: guys, you do not have a free market guys, not in the Adam Smith sense anyhow.

What helped generate product diversity is the economic market. Not capitalism.

• Markets have existed for perhaps over four thousand years, although I’m not the most well-read anthropologist though, so please fact-check me on this! But certainly well before state sponsored organized capitalism.
• Science and technology, but first of all science, is what generated product diversity, not markets. Science exists independent of political economy. For science all you need is a nerd or two. You cannot suppress them. They will work like unwitting slaves for peanuts, because the thrill of discovery is, as Hawking famously observed, “better than orgasm”.
• Scientists are in fact so stupid that many of them believe they’ve proven they are either apes or computations. So they are easy to enslave, you just don’t tell them what their labour time is really worth to humanity. (Otherwise you risk them all becoming non-Zombie MMT Marxists — an infestation the neoliberal must stamp out fast with fascism).

TODO
Finish remarks on markets vs capitalim.
Marx had this confused too.
The revolutionary force is the market, i.e., simple ordinary people, 
not capitalism.
The market is not magical, although human beings are.
The market is nr efficient, nor a perfect pricing mechanism, but markets 
help people do good things for each other. The magic is in the people.

Capitalism is the boss-worker class relation, not “markets”.

Capitalism is not even “the profit motive”. The profit motive also preceded capitalist political economy. What do you think Kings and Emperors were doing? Dispensing charity?

Nor is capitalism monetary economics (M-C-M$\prime$), money has existed for over 6000 years.

I don’t mean to insult people, but Steve Grumbine and the AppliedMMT and Money-on-he-Left guys are all “economists.” Sorry for the term of abuse guys! Yeah, but they are the actually good ones. Like, someone who studies the Seth Lords. Just because you study and know a lot about the Dark Side does not make you a Star Wars world fascist.

Everyone thinks and says dumb things, I sometimes manage three before breakfast. However, there is a world of difference between saying something dumb that has a warmth of compassion behind it and saying something dumb that boosts oppression.

Steve might not see it that way, but many of his comments I find are boosting capitalism. It is not necessary. We achieve amazing advances and innovation without the capitalist mode of production. I’d even argue capitalism is wasteful overhead. A decent workplace manager is a good thing. The critical adjective there being “decent”.

One way to get a decent workplace manager is to have the workers vote for them.

No Conceding

We cannot concede to capitalists. There is no need to placate the Soccer Mom normies in this. Friggin’ everyone knows working for a boss is shitty.

Thus a righteous activist would never say “capitalism has done us wonderful things”. Since that is a lie, said to placate normies and not alienate orthodox economists.

Another NewsFlash: you need to alienate these people, so much that they become the lunatic fringe. If not, they’ll never become good people.

For myself, it is not even about correcting them on monetary economics. It is about not wishing them to be terrible people.

Stephanie Kelton has her own stupid language. Although this one is subtle, and more a vibe. So it’s just a personal peeve I have. She often will start with the barter Story. Then proceed to debunk it.

I always have this gut feeling this is not the way to order a presentation, since it reinforces the Barter Story. You know what I mean — Don’t Think of an Elephant! Instead, I think one should just start with MMT, and not even mention Barter. It is a subtler not conceding the principle, but more aggressive.

You just forge ahead as if the Barter Story never existed.

If someone mentions gold or the barter story to you, just blink like a robot and continue as if they were invisible. They had their chance in history to be heard, and now we can ignore them. There is no ridicule stge needed anymore…. I reckon.

People who ridicule neoclassical economists, which includes myself, are wasting our breathes. (a) they are never going to change their paradigm, (b) normies just don’t care, economists are about as trusted as Nutritional Supplement advertisers and cryptocurrency shills. I don’t know, I could be wrong about this, but increasingly I find myself worried about progressive activists, not professional economists. The Central Crankers are too darn idiot-savant to bother dealing with, like Superstring theorists in physics.

If they all turn out to have been actually correct all along, well I’ll be happy to shoot myself.

It is like my recent listenings from Naomi Oreskes and the IPCC. The IPCC Working group One needs to shut down and declare victory. The effort going forward has to be on mitigation and prevention.

Hopefully MMT will be soon entering this stage as well, though I admit we have a longer way to go. The tragedy of this is that I see it linked to Climate and Ecological catastrophe avoidance without going through Accelerationism meltdown. Without MMT informed policy we will not be getting the good work done. Though I’d be happy to be wrong.