ANTINORA CONTRA INTUITION
"As I discuss here, there is nothing good for society about people saving money. If people could save something useful, like the environment, [ed: or energy in a useful/efficient form] then they would be doing a social good. But saving numbers on a computer screen does nothing."My only quibble is that that "nothing" being done might actually be a the creation of a deflationary economic tailspin. One where the folk are desperate for currency and the leverage the (((( bankers )))) have over the people increases every quarter. Although Ari eventually gets around to explaining this (it's the point of his blog in fact) I just thought I should be clear about it. In fact, to be crystal I'll repeat myself: capital is imaginary and we can imagine it any way we like. We used to imagine capital as towering Gothic cathedrals—mutli–generational public works projects that exemplified perfectly the meaning of the word 'employment'. While we are at it, I should mention that the distribution of the surplus is completely up to us too. Personally, I prefer not to sacrifice reality to the god of illusion on an altar of stupidity but you're free to bow down to whichever Dildolech you prefer. That's none of my business.
ALL PRESENT CONSUMPTION – INCLUDING RETIREMENT SPENDING – COMES OUT OF CURRENT PRODUCTION
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| Mad MS PAINT Skillz |
It's like some sort of alchemist's magic where the dissolving bond of kinship imparts energy to BOOMER HOLDINGS in T. Rowe Price. Capital—as we currently imagine it—is the enzyme that metabolizes our culture, our religion, our spirits, and our family bonds in the interest of usurious interest slavery, bond repayment, debt service, etc. Gotta feed the BEAST.
As the proportion of savings (i.e. mortgages, liens, retirement plans, money out of circulation, interest–bearing instruments, exponentiating financial wizardry, etc. ) increases relative to wages—and increases in value against the available units of exchange because of this—the piece of the economic pie that belongs to those working hard in the present shrinks. The PROLETARIAT™ end up fighting over less and less every year.
"An economic system must divide up the production of the economy between the people who live in it. Therefore, assuming that the amount produced remains the same, the politician above is arguing that ((((* savers deserve more of it than workers *))))
So, put another way, what the politician above is actually saying is this:
""People who work hard in the future and do the right thing do not deserve to receive a fair proportion of what they produce because they should give most of it to savers who worked hard in the past.""
In policy terms this means that savings are always protected. If banks go bust, savers are protected by the taxpayer and workers must pay. If there is a trade off between inflation and growth, inflation is kept low.
The economy is crying out now for more money and more inflation. But printing money is seen as an attack on savers and therefore is not even considered as an option (I do not count quantitative easing as genuinely printing money as it is just a temporary swap for existing debt).
Savers have been given this primary position in the economy. ***They must get their money no matter whether or not the workers are reasonably able to pay them***. [ed: GANGSTER YO] It can be seen in the Eurozone crisis. It can be seen in the economic stagnation in the UK and other Western economies.
So the incentives are completely misaligned. Instead of having an economy where hard work and productive investment is rewarded, we now have a rentier capitalist economy where low risk and rent–seeking are rewarded. This is not capitalism as it was supposed to work.
THERE'S NINE BODIES GENIUS! WHAT WERE YOU GONNA DO?! LAUGH THE LAST THREE TO DEATH?! RIDDLE ME THIS: IF "HARD WORK" WERE REALLY REWARDED WHY AREN'T WAGES THE LARGEST PIECE OF THE ECONOMIC PIE?! Yes Virginia. It's all a scam and the aforementioned Dildodech.
Now, this is not to say that the unborn owe nothing to their ancestors, but that the claims the generations hold on each other must be balanced. Even an increase in the volume of debts—which represents an increase in the intensity of our obligations to each other—can be acceptable policy as long as the stock of debt remains serviceable. As Micheal Hudson says, "Debts that can't be paid, won't be."
The issue for the economy is the sum of the direction of those economic obligations—i.e. the flow of debt between stocks. Unserviceable future liabilities aren't liable to be serviced.
If flows are imbalanced, then stocks will be imbalanced, and the river of productivity will drain into the ocean of parasitic seigniorage. (That's me. Go ahead and quote that spun gold freely!)DJA
References:
1) Andricopoulos, Ari "The Supremacy of Savings in Our Economic System" - http://www.notesonthenextbust.com/2015/05/the-supremacy-of-savings-in-our.html
2) Andricopoulos, Ari "The Government Must Run Deficits Even in Good Times" - http://www.notesonthenextbust.com/2015/06/the-government-must-run-deficits-even.html
3) Hudson, Michael "Debts That Can't Be Paid, Won't Be" - http://michael-hudson.com/2012/04/debts-that-cant-be-paid-wont-be/
4) Andricopoulos, Ari "Simple but Helpful Model of the Economy. Part 1: Stocks" - http://www.notesonthenextbust.com/2015/04/model-of-economy-using-stocks-and-flows.html
5) Andricopoulos, Ari "Simple but Helpful Model of the Economy. Part 2: Flows" - http://www.notesonthenextbust.com/2015/04/a-simple-but-helpful-model-of-economy.html
Why are savers and workers opposed in your analysis? Can't these be the same people? That is, unless you have a special definition of savers. This analysis opposes the notion that problems with distribution are entirely questions of the scarcity of purchasing power to the idea that, instead, the culprit is a misalignment of production to demand, due to market distortions from forces that do not respond to market signals. This makes the monetary theory outlined here a flavor of social credit, or Fascist monetary theory. And if so, it should be directly stated and attributed.
ReplyDeleteIn this system that abjures the setting aside of accumulated purchasing power for future exigency and need, what will ensure that 1) The young will fulfill their obligations to the old (because in reality they very often don't) and 2) that the less productive (the young and the old) will not be deprioritized, as with present day liberalism/neoliberalism/socialism?
Isn't the solution more likely to be in a realignment of the economic values of a majority of people away from associative social-economic agglomeration and massive-scale planned production toward organic, local-scaled production arising out of family units, equipped by advancing technology toward the goal of less reliance on the money economy, and on money itself, such that purchasing no longer serves the needs of producers for the consumer economy, but instead the economy of family sufficiency and independence?
If your enemy is consumerism, then perhaps your weapon of choice is not really infinite purchasing power. I agree that too much money is tied up in non-productive, Rentier assets. My solution is to wreck that economy by willful non-spending, or spending only for productive capacity, and not for the whims of corporate "producers" at the center of the Rentier economy, whose need of ever-inflating paper assets do not serve the greater good.
To kill consumerist economies, and allow their organic replacement, maybe the shortest path is socially conscious non-participation.
I look forward to your thoughts.
I'm all for insulating the largest portion of daily life from the vicissitudes of the market as we can. I'm also all for decoupling as much of human life as possible from the financial system as we are able to. I suppose only paucity of vision would prevent us from dismantling it completely. However, I don't see the entire system as a completely unqualified negative and would salvage some aspects of it. This process of scavenging the stronghold would require circumspection as society transitioned and the system was relegated to its new position of reduced functioning.
DeleteWorkers and savers are opposed here only as ideological shorthand representing the two broadest classes of people that I can shoehorn into categories. There is often overlap. However, even the assets of "wokers" locked up in "savings" via pension funds are dwarfed by the "savings" of the unproductive and parasitic subtrahend on the real economy. I'm just equating workers with wages for simplicity's sake.
Obviously we stop short of Douglass here since we aren't advocating directly for a dividend although we are in the ballpark with our very own A+B theorem. However, it's just there as a heuristic. The point is to encourage folks to see money as a distorting influence on production and distribution so, in this sense, it is fascist in so far as it isn't neoclassical.
I'm going to spend the day *trying* to think about what you're saying and write a lengthy response where I address your solution to the problem.
Thanks for your comments. The clarifications really helped. One of the forces that's advancing individualism is our diminished notion of accountability and responsibility. Not every construal of 'family' is helpful or healthy. There are many issues with the so-called nuclear family that could only be addressed by widespread adoption of a different social understanding of family. Ad different consensus. In the past, the church used to promulgate these truths. But the church has been influenced by the cultural distortions of money and consumerism, and is no longer to be counted on as a repository of immemoraial social truth, which it adopted and adapted from pagan inheritance, rather than inventing from whole cloth.
ReplyDeleteAny sort of individualism is to some extent parasitic, as it foists the cost of social responsibility onto "society" at large in the form of involuntary contribution to social welfare. At least in the bad old days one had neighbors, one had a church, one had an array of social institutions that helped with the enforcement of correct attitudes to social responsibility. Amour propre is is not always a bad thing, nor are the social uses of shame. Traditional economy relies on these subtle but powerful guides to behavior. Take divorce, a very harmful liberty. Divorce was still considered shameful long after it was legal. It was only with the decline of shame itself that divorce became common, ordinary. Now it's almost considered a boon. We have terms like "starter marriage" to convince people that divorce is "not the end of the world." It needs to be said here that divorce is initiated by the female in nearly 75% of cases. Feminism, promulgated in the universities and in the media (movies and TV) has brought this about. If you think about it, under the old way of things, it was the woman who suffered disproportionately from divorce, and this is quite salutary, since, as we have seen, if they do not, they will initiate divorce far more often, and for trivial reasons due to their instinctive hypergamy. Thus the family, in many cases, needs to be saved FROM the mother/wife, as well as FOR her. The woman has very low social dignity outside of the family arrangement.
I say all this to provide some view into the dynamics of the family-based economy I propose -based, that is, on the extended family, to which social obligation once, and still should attach, not so much as a matter of law, but as a matter of social propriety. For this to happen, the social prestige and power of the Christian churches must increase dramatically, such that unspoken social consensus, the background of the common law, can once again develop around a religious core, rather than that of the power of the State.
ReplyDeleteUnlike most on the right outside of Fascist circles, I am not one to completely dismiss the salutary role of government, not merely in the way of law and order, but also in the creation of sound conditions for social health through the development of infrastructure, the punishment of crime. But most especially, R&D into productive technologies for economic liberation. One of the great scandals of modern life in the West is the reservation of government developed technologies and methods to itself, and to its corporate clients. This MUST end. The people pay for vast amounts of research and development activity that ultimately ends up in the hands of corporations as patents. There should be no such thing as a government patent that is not in a vital area of national security, and even that should be subject to tribunal.
I would like to think than many of these issues might be solved by return to monarchy, by reduction of the state to its proper functions. But this may be wishful thinking, the power of modernity is in the power of large bureaucracies, public and private, which will inevitably, at times, act against the public interest.
The social credit way is to put a tax on money that is not involved in production. Thus there is no such thing as a passive asset that is immaterial. All money is put to work. But in order for this scheme to work, money must be put to work in a way that rewards productivity past and present, and that preserves the dignity of the old and the very young, which are deprioritized, if not completely discarded in most modern economic systems. If we do not have an economy which permits the intensive investment in child rearing needed by the healthy society, we will falter, and do so disastrously.