QED

[ahinton]

Isn't the problem here rather more widespread and common than such a distinction can realistically reveal? To my mind, it has a far greater proportion of its origins in the desire of some people to spread and promote opinion and to ensure as far as possible that such opinion becomes "received", i.e the accepted and acceptable norm and this this applies both to current and possible future capitalist stances and anit-capitalist ones alike? There's always someone trying to persuade someone else that their ideas and viewpoints are incontrovertible facts and I do not see that any changes that may occur in future to capitalist or anti-capitalist thinking and practice will be free from that.

An additional (and broadly unrelated but equally notable) problem with the promotion and practical application of market capitalism is that far too many of its promoters and practitioners seem unwilling to recognise and/or incapable of recognising that it does not, cannot and should not be expected to govern every aspect of life to the point at which nothing is any lonber considered to have any value unless it has monetary value.

Whilst I do consider that it might just be possible eventually to break the mould of the latter, the prevalence of human foibles will almost certainly continue indefinitely to conspire against that of the former.

[ahinton]

Meanwhile the elephant emergent ocupies the whole room.

...while the capitalist speculator rides roughshod over the law (if not the elephant itself) by removing and selling its ivory on the black market...

[Serial_Apologist]

...while the capitalist speculator rides roughshod over the law (if not the elephant itself) by removing and selling its ivory on the black market...

Whether or not you are extending my metaphor, ahinton, I agree!

It seems to me to mostly boil down to a matter of opportunities rather than properties, whether emergent or innate. A system whose means of wealth creation and exchange are based as presently they are will favour a predator/prey imbalance. By the time the preyed upon have been exterminated, or "naturally de-selected", leaving no food source for the predator, it will all be too late. The banker bandits in the Grauniad article will have swept us all over the Gadarene cliff. There are other ways of running human affairs prioritising co-operation and inclusion, I am quite sure, having witnessed them in operation at the micropolitical (in relative terms). The red-blooded accuser of Daily Mail bent will say it would all encourage laziness and inefficiency. Partially realised, in practicable terms it does and would - especially when the key players in economic fortues can just up and move elsewhere where people are less organised because less enabled to be, and get-now culture de-motivates - but unless we can create a new mindset - or rather, generalize in role model terms (hate that term!) the Google-type bosses who aren't in it for themselves and feel elevated more by what they can contribute than want to take - we're on a hiding to nothing.

Post-post thought: there are also those who will argue that Bill Gates's philanthropy emerged from the motivation of having worked to gain his wealth in the first place. I would strongly disagree.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

lies damn lies and rich bar stewards

[ahinton]

lies damn lies and rich bar stewards

An interesting article, if loosely researched and all too willing to expose its bias. What so many people lose sight of - even now several senior MPs and ministers are known to be considerably wealthier in both asset and income terms than most of us - is that we've voted to put those MPs in office and entrusted them with deciding who amongst them shall be given ministerial posts. When those other than in government make pronoucements about what's going on in the British economy (be they industrialists, lobby groups or whoever else), no one has voted any of them into positions where they can directly influence what will happen, but a considerable proportion of them will have been voted into their positions by shareholders and interested parties with their own individual agendas. Spinmanship and conmanship abound, of course - it's a growth industry, for those who think that growth will get us out of the current mess - but they'll surely do so whoever is in what position and regardless of who helps to put them there? It used to be said that if you tell sufficient lies often enough, some people will believe them to be the truth, but now that we're well into the internet age and communication is not only far easier and faster but also vastly more voluminous, it's become more the case that if you tell sufficient lies often enough, the truth will become swamped under them and few will know (and some of them will no longer care) what the truth might be anyway, by which time and means the value of veracity will have collapsed rather as that of the euro is reckoned by some will collapse.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

lies damn lies and academic whores

it is not a growth industry ahinton it has been around a long time .... recall the tobacco lobby? the pharma? the finance? .... my hope is that it is a mature industry with tired processes and people and that the Occupy mind is overturning it and always asking who pays

[ahinton]

it is not a growth industry ahinton it has been around a long time .... recall the tobacco lobby? the pharma? the finance?

Of course I do - and I did not say that it hasn't been around for a long time - indeed, you are correct to note that it has been around for a long time - but it's still a growth industry, not least because it's easier for it to be one nowadays than once it was when the bulk of what we had in Britain to depend upon were newspapers, BBC radio and local hearsay.

... my hope is that it is a mature industry with tired processes and people and that the Occupy mind is overturning it and always asking who pays

My fear is that it is an industry that, the greater it gets, the more out of control it becomes but, in so being, it will nevertheless continue to feed on itself and develop; the "Occupy mind" is all very well as some kind of leavening influence but it's unlikely to become widely regarded as anything much more than the manifestation of yet another lobby group with its own alternative sets of agendas and susceptibilities to the creation of its own brands of spinmanship and conmanship. All that this is likely to achieve in the long run is to make even more people accept the existence of, but at the same time broadly distrust, much of what they're being told by anyone of any persuasion, on the grounds that you could never find the truth anyway and that, even if you could, you'd be so unaccustomed to encountering it that you'd be unsure as to what to do with it.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

well as our great caution and thinker ahinton would have us think ... it is not as simple as that .... this piece is unsympathetic but compelling nonetheless ... my question is where is the forum in our farmyard where such great issues could be discussed and resolved dispassionately and without the benefit of the cockpit rhetoric of PM's Questions and parliamentary debate ... that old lady does not serve us so well in such times

[ahinton]

well as our great caution and thinker ahinton would have us think ... it is not as simple as that .... this piece is unsympathetic but compelling nonetheless ... my question is where is the forum in our farmyard where such great issues could be discussed and resolved dispassionately and without the benefit of the cockpit rhetoric of PM's Questions and parliamentary debate ... that old lady does not serve us so well in such times

An interesting piece and but one which, for all the apparent surface attractions of Krugmanomics, is quite correct in calling most of the ideas into question at least in terms of the likely outcome of their practical application in UK and EU. Krugman seems to be trying to make a name for himself modelling a proto-Keynesian torso dressed in an ill-fitting Friedmanesque suit which, as far as it goes, has a certain quaintly amusing interest about it but is hardly deserving of any likelihood that it might ultimately manifest itself in real terms as any kind of Messianic call to arms.

One way in which I have sought to advocate that Britain tries to make at least some effort to address the current problem, at least in part, is not so much to cut taxes as to reduce their burden by shedding as many of the overbearing complexities of its tax régime as possible and, as part of such an exercise, abolish employers' NI, which is nothing more nor less than a tax on the very jobs that are now so desperately needed. Doing this would, of course, mean not only that the massiveand unwieldy cost of tax inspection and collection would be drastically reduced at a stroke but that a large number of current HMRC / DWP employees would get the chop, the former of which would be a welcome result but the latter of which will obviously not look good for the nation's economy; it would, however, mean that more employers could afford to employ more people (including at least some of those redundant civil servants), thereby increasing tax revenues for the Treasury because all those new employees would be paying more tax. It's only one small measure in the wider scheme of things, of course, but it would be a wise and profitable one which, were it also successfully to set an example for certain other EU nations (perhaps most notably France), it could have some significant beneficial impact on the health of the European economy in general.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

more on the Krugman thesis:

“You’re totally missing the point of what it means to be in a depression. We are in a depression where there are vast numbers of workers idle, who want to work, there’s vast amounts of potential capital which is going nowhere, because there’s no demand, so, at this point in time, the private and the public sector are not competing for resources, there are these unemployed resources and the point is to put them to work.

“Now, give me a recovery in the UK or in the US and I will become a fiscal hawk, I will be very happy to talk about finding ways to economise on government spending, finding ways to raise more revenue, which I think at least in the US has to be part of the solution, but not now, not under these conditions…

“We have survey evidence from the United States about what it is that is holding private businesses back, and overwhelmingly, the answer is lack of sales, there just is not enough demand, constraints on capital are not an issue, they would like to have more skilled workers, but no more so than usual, issues about financing are a small issue, concerns about future government regulations, well they always complain about that but no more than usual, what has changed is there’s no demand, there isn’t a market there, and that’s what these austerity policies are making worse, they are actually inhibiting the private sector as well as the private…

“Every one of those success stories turns out to involve, either, a situation where interest rates were quite high to start with so you can bring them down, or a situation where you have a large currency devaluation, which is not going to work now because you have to have some prosperous economy to devalue against, and there’s nobody out there right now. Estonia? No, it just doesn’t fit the story at all.”

[Serial_Apologist]

The Krugmann thesis is fine as far as it goes. The problem is, that in advocating increasing fiscal spending to get out of the recession, the consequences will merely to be to land us all back int he same situation - becauser the problem is (1) systemic to capitalism; and (2) the same unaccountable business leaders who dispropportionately help themselves will still be in place. The solution could lie in making the state sector permanently predominant over the private, but firstly we have to get rid of the notion that this automatically has to mean a big, unweildy bureaucratic state apparatus. Resourcing the monies needed to maintain a smaller, un-overweening public sector would be made easier by drawing the public into decisionmaking, thereby at one blow actually involving so called "ordinary people" in deciding what they want in the way of not just services, and not just the policing of a cleaner environment, but maybe "even" consumable product that is of use, which has been publicised by ads which tell you about the product, how durable as well as useful it is, rather than creating the illusion that it bestows qualities that make you special according to trend-setting opinion-makers. Just imagine the positive knock-on effect of all this! A smaller state sector - because involving people motivates greater civic responsibility, a greater sense of meaningfulness to activities and therefore less resort to chronic sexual titillation, drugs, alcoholism, escapist "entertainment", less time-wasting, since work directed in first instance to meeting primary needs rather than competitive targetting lead times would be work undertaken with due regard to the environment and with love rather than out of duty, and last but not least, less crime. What a huge weight off everybody's shoulders deciding to run the world in such a way would be, and in implementing it!

[teamsaint]

The Krugmann thesis is fine as far as it goes. The problem is, that in advocating increasing fiscal spending to get out of the recession, the consequences will merely to be to land us all back int he same situation - becauser the problem is (1) systemic to capitalism; and (2) the same unaccountable business leaders who dispropportionately help themselves will still be in place. The solution could lie in making the state sector permanently predominant over the private, but firstly we have to get rid of the notion that this automatically has to mean a big, unweildy bureaucratic state apparatus. Resourcing the monies needed to maintain a smaller, un-overweening public sector would be made easier by drawing the public into decisionmaking, thereby at one blow actually involving so called "ordinary people" in deciding what they want in the way of not just services, and not just the policing of a cleaner environment, but maybe "even" consumable product that is of use, which has been publicised by ads which tell you about the product, how durable as well as useful it is, rather than creating the illusion that it bestows qualities that make you special according to trend-setting opinion-makers. Just imagine the positive knock-on effect of all this! A smaller state sector - because involving people motivates greater civic responsibility, a greater sense of meaningfulness to activities and therefore less resort to chronic sexual titillation, drugs, alcoholism, escapist "entertainment", less time-wasting, since work directed in first instance to meeting primary needs rather than competitive targetting lead times would be work undertaken with due regard to the environment and with love rather than out of duty, and last but not least, less crime. What a huge weight off everybody's shoulders deciding to run the world in such a way would be, and in implementing it!

That was what I was going to say !!Honest .

[Beef Oven]

That was what I was going to say !!Honest .

Me too, so was my wife!

[teamsaint]

Me too, so was my wife!

no you weren't, as it goes !!
But comic effect was worth it

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i disagree S_A i think that Krugman is finely tuned to the notion of Depression as David Harvey understands it and is seeking subtler measures to reignite the connection between idle capital and idle workers ...

yep entropy is endemic in da universe and the milky way and andromeda galaxes will collide systemically and endemically that is what they do .... in the meantime ..... corruption and decay is endemic in social systems that is why we must overthrow them from time to time .... i am with you if you are saying that Krugman is soft pedalling the 'overthrowing' implications of his economics ...