As usual, use the comments to this post to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Month: February 2020 Page 1 of 3
Great wealth is great power. If you have money, many people will do what you want them to do. This should be uncontroversial: Most of us have spent our lives doing tasks we wouldn’t do unless someone was giving us money.
Well, that and being scared of losing everything and dying on the street.
Great wealth is a matter of law. Property rights beyond, “What I can carry” are not natural. They require force and a series of professional classes–from accountants to cops–to maintain. Property rights, then, are actually a drag on the economy; they come with a cost. They doubtless have some benefits, but whatever those may be, they are not pure benefit. Whether any particular set of property rights is a net benefit is unclear; it might be the economy would do better with less.
Property rights are justified because they are supposed to lead to better outcomes. So are wealth and income differentials. If someone is earning more, they supposedly do more good in the economy.
The Wall Street bankers who crashed the world economy say “Hi!” and remind you that if they don’t get bonuses bigger than the rest of the country’s raises, they may not keep working.
So, let’s simplify this.
If you have a lot of money, say $64 billion, the question is “Are you doing more good with that money than would be done by simply splitting it up and giving it to everyone else in society.”
Or, better yet, what if you took that income and equalized it among all citizens?
Seems like the cost of having an overclass is rather high, isn’t it? Are they producing enough human welfare (any net human welfare?) to justify all that income they are taking?
When, of course, they actually crashed the economy in 2008 and when economic performance has been inversely proportionate to the amount we’ve taxed them?
Anyway, is having this elite worth $50K a year to you?
Hope you’re getting your money’s worth.
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I haven’t written about this because others have been dealing with it well and pandemics aren’t something I know a great deal about.
It does look, now, like the Coronavirus stands a good chance of turning into a pandemic, and I think we should discuss preparation a bit.
Our world produces most goods in a highly fragile, just-in-time production chain. There may be multiple inputs to a finished good, but the parts are made in a very few places. Most countries do not produce everything they need, there are not many sources of key goods and warehouses do not keep large inventories; production tends to run just ahead of need. This is efficient, but it also means that any serious disruption to production can produce shortages almost immediately.
China is a lynchpin producer of a great number of goods, including medicines. Korea, which is starting to get hit, produces many goods as well. It’s hard to say who exactly produces what unless you’re an expert, for example, after Puerto Rico got hit by a hurricane the US experienced shortages of IV bags. Who knew that the primary IV bag supplier for the US was in Puerto Rico?
So in most cases I don’t think it’s worth spending a lot of time tracking specific dependencies, especially if you’re dealing with a complex chain with many inputs–hit it in one place and you can take out the entire production.
Because fighting a pandemic is mostly about isolating people, production hits are inevitable: You can’t let people go to work.
So, if there are things you need, stock up now so you can shelter in place for a couple months if you have to.
In particular, I want to emphasize looking at your health needs. Many, many drugs are made in China. If you are on something you need to stay alive, or you are on something with ugly withdrawal symptoms, like most SSRIs, drugs which affect GABA, etc, etc., go see your doctor and convince him to give you an extra prescription or two (2) months’ supply – then go fill it.
Yeah, I know this is hard, because doctors can be stubborn and stupid, and I know it may be hard for financial reasons, but if you can, do it.
I can’t guarantee you’ll need it, of course. I can guarantee that if you need it and you don’t have it, you’ll regret it.
Remember that the United States, among developed nations, is going to be uniquely shitty at public health because a lot of people won’t go to hospitals and so on because of money issues.
As for the rest: Wash your hands, don’t touch your face, etc. Remember that this is a particularly difficult bug: It’s too small for masks to work well, it doesn’t show symptoms for 5-24 days (reports differ), it lives on surfaces for days, etc. It is a fast mutating bug, and the theory is that that’s good, because it is more likely to mutate to be LESS dangerous over time–but that also means you may catch it more than once.
This bug is likely to highlight both the stupidity of and the weaknesses in how we’ve ordered production through the world. Anything that is important, any reasonably large nation should produce for itself–if can manage it at all. “Efficiency” gains or profit gains are not worth catastrophic failure vulnerability, or the political choice weakness which comes from dependence (not to mention how globalization has been deliberately used to crush labor).
Anyway, check your meds and make sure you’re not going to be undergoing involuntary withdrawal from something you need, or something with horrific withdrawal symptoms.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Bernie Sanders
Will Sanders be the Democratic nominee for President?
Probably.
Barring something very unexpected, he’ll have the most delegates. His polling in the big super Tuesday states is ahead of all the other candidates. Right now, all Bloomberg is doing is harming the other “centrist” candidates; he’s actually helping Sanders.
The risk is that Sanders doesn’t have enough delegates to win the first ballot, and that delegates from other candidates would then combine with super-delegates (put in place precisely to make sure a Bernie doesn’t happen) and give the nomination to someone else. Warren, Buttigieg, or Bloomberg. (Biden is too clearly senile, and I think insiders get that.)
If this happens, Trump will then win re-election, which is a win to Bloomberg, who got into the contest to defeat Sanders, not Trump.
But be clear that it might also be a win for Democratic insiders. If Sanders wins the nomination and the election, insiders will be replaced over time; they will lose their power over the party.
For Democratic party insiders, then, a Bernie win in the election may be worse for them, personally, than a Trump win. As long as they control the party, they will eventually get back into power, and will be fine financially.
If the current Democratic establishment loses power to progressives, well, their lives aren’t so good, are they?
And for many Democratic insiders, their own comfort and power will trump beating Trump. Oh, they’ll say, and many will believe, that they are acting from principle, but the base motivation will be fear of loss of power, money, and livelihood.
From now until the election, the greatest danger will not be Trump, or Republicans, it will be Democratic insiders who stand to lose much more under Sanders than under Trump.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus
Strategic Political Economy
The Oligarch Stage of the American Disease: Bloomberg Edition
[Ian Welsh, February 18, 2020]
The thing about Trump was always that he was a symptom of a disease. It’s hard to say exactly when the disease started, but serious symptoms started showing up after the elections of Reagan and Thatcher. Rates of wage increases collapsed, stock markets and other asset prices rose much faster than inflation, regulations were gutted, people were thrown in jail at a ferocious rate and unions were smashed.
Inequality took off, and over time multiple billionaires were created. They used their money to buy politicians, and thru politicians to buy policy. Tax rates on corporations and rich people and estates and so on were slashed to the bone. Subsidies for the rich were increased, while subsidies for the poor and middle class were, in relative terms, cut.
The Federal Reserve (all of whose governors are political appointees), acted aggressively to keep wage increases at or under inflation, and targeted inflation rather than job growth. Good working class and many middle class jobs were off-shored and outsourced….
So the oligarchs, aided by the huge concentration of companies into oligopolies, have come to have or control vast amounts of wealth. They got money defined as free speech, and now that the political class has proven incapable of handling a left wing populist, an oligarch is stepping directly in because his class’s lackeys, like Biden and Buttigieg and indeed most of the field, are incompetent.
“Frederick Douglass Railed Against Economic Inequality”
[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 2-21-20]
Douglass: “The Spartan lawgiver who discouraged the accumulation of wealth, because of its tendency to impair the liberties of his country, was fully justified in the extreme measures he adopted, by the universal experience of nations, and the fate of his own country; the fall of Spartan liberties dating from the introduction of wealth and consequent luxury of her citizens. His aim to exterminate wealth and refinement entirely, was, perhaps, not wise; it is not wealth of itself that produces the dreaded effects, but its accumulation in the hands of a few — creating an aristocracy of wealth, ready to be the tool of an aggressive tyranny, or to become aggressive upon its own account. With an increase of wealth comes an increase of selfishness, devotion to private affairs, and a contempt of public — unless politics can be made to minister to the all absorbing selfishness of the individual.”
Federal judges call emergency meeting to address ‘deepening crisis’ in the justice system
Mark Sumner, February 18, 2020 [Daily Kos]
Mark Sumner, February 18, 2020 [Daily Kos]
Early numbers coming in indicate that Bernie is crushing the field. This is what he needs to keep doing, so the DNC et al. can’t steal the nomination at the convention.
As usual, feel free to use the comments to this post to discuss topics unrelated to recent articles.
Bernie Sanders
One of the most tiresomely stupid features of American discourse is all the fools screaming “communism, socialism, communism, USSR!”
Bernie Sanders is not a communist. He is not going to destroy capitalism.
In fact, the Marxists I follow often hate him, the way they hated FDR, because Sanders’ actual goal is to save capitalism from its own flaws–or if you want to go Marxist, from its internal contradictions. Capitalism concentrates capital, and when it does that too much, it is subject to crises. The last really big one was the Great Depression.
FDR saved capitalism. The alternatives, the people who lost, like the actual communists, know that and have never forgiven him–just like oligarchs have never forgiven him for breaking their predecessors’ power for two generations.
Yes, Sanders will regulate, and he’ll bring more of the economy under government control or management, and he’ll tax and break up conglomerates, and none of that will destroy capitalism. It will, in fact, make capitalism healthier.
All Sanders wants to do is give Americans the 50s economy back, with universal healthcare and less sexism, racism, pollution, and imperialism.
Bernie isn’t anything even close to a radical, and it takes a massively degraded and stupid discourse to pretend he is.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.