News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 43

Congress and the President are still floundering about the gigantic budget that is getting whittled down day by day as the desperation increases, but nobody has any real answer or alternative . . . except the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism and the Economic Democracy Act:

A Better Alternative

      

As we noted in yesterday’s posting, there is a much better alternative to the proposed “Billionaire Tax” or the minimum corporate tax, which would tax corporations whether or not they made any income — another instance of taxing something that doesn’t exist.  It starts to sound as if the game plan for the U.S. economy was drawn up by the Greeks . . . the modern Greeks, not those like Aristotle who knew that economic life centers on being productive and supporting human dignity and sovereignty with equality of opportunity and access to the means.  He just didn’t work it out very well, but at least he had the right idea.

Time for a Tax Reality Check

       The so-called “Billionaire Tax” proposal may be one of the most . . . we’ll say surreal initiatives in history.  How people, whom we credit with at least normal intelligence, can even consider such a thing has us completely baffled.

Protecting You from Me

       In yesterday’s podcast, we did something unusual, at least for us.  We put up two old movie clips from Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), as well as some newsreel footage of the actual verdicts being handed down.  It must be admitted that the fictional depiction gives a clearer understanding of the fundamental issues involved.  Of course, in an actual courtroom, a good judge doesn’t get the kind of scriptwriters that Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster got.

JTW Podcast: Judgment at Nuremberg

         This week we’re doing something a little different for the podcast, presenting two scenbes from a Hollywood film and an actual historical newsreel of the same event.  We hope it serves as a useful reminder that even when there seems to be no way out of an emergency situation, violating the rights of a single person, no matter how much you may hate him or her, is never the answer:

News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 42

A few items this week, but with some profound implications.  We call your particular attention to the GoFundMe campaign for Joe Recinos:

And the Money?

      Yesterday we looked at the recent spate of strikes and strike-threats that have gotten this month renamed “Striketober.”  Of course, we are grateful that no one has yet started calling for a “Strike-a-thon,” but no doubt somebody soon will.

Win the Battle, Lose the War?

       Seemingly out of nowhere, American workers are threatening strikes; October is being labeled “Striketober.”  Largely as the result of the current shortage of workers, labor unions are pushing for increased pay and benefits, shorter hours, improved working conditions, and so on.  The pandemic has put organized labor in the best bargaining position it has had in decades, and public opinion of unions is the highest it’s been since 1965.

The Three Types of Liberal Democracy

       In the previous posting on this subject, we promised (or threatened, depending on your point of view) on the meaning of “liberal democracy.”  It turns out that there are three (at least) different meanings of the term, depending on whether you’re a collectivist, an individualist, or a personalist.

JTW Podcast: The Great Game of Business

For a bit of a change of pace, this week’s podcast features an interview with Jack Stack, who came up with the concept of “The Great Game of Business”:

News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 41

 

What with the politicians fighting and the economists arguing, it might seem to you as if no progress is being made . . . and you’d be right — if by “progress” you mean that the politicians have decided to spend more money they don’t have, and the economists have figured out a way to get some of it . . . oops, we mean, present a socio-economic theory and econometric model demonstrating how essential it is that the politicians spend lots of money and that the economists get some of it.  In the real world, however, progress continues to be made developing, refining and communicating these ideas:

A Short Treatise on Sovereignty

       As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, honest or legitimate money can only be created by backing it with something of value to which the owner has a claim under private property.  Government debt, which backs most of the global money supply today, represents future or anticipated tax collections that may actually never materialize because in a democratic government, taxes are (at least in theory) imposed with the consent of the governed.

Help Joe Walk Again for Economic Justice

Today’s posting is in support of a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to defray the medical expenses of a “Soldier of Justice” who has devoted his life to creating a better world for everyone: Joe Recinos.

Help Joe Walk Again

For more than five decades Joe Recinos has worked tirelessly throughout Central and South America, Africa, and Asia to advance a free market approach to economic justice for every person.

Hijacking Financial Reform

 In the previous posting on this subject, we noted that as the “free land” of the 1862 Homestead Act ran out, the concentration of wealth accelerated.  This, however, is pretty much built in to the assumption that new capital formation can only be financed by cutting consumption below what is produced.

JTW Podcast: Disappearing Jobs

Continuing our series of scare stories about disappearing jobs — and the futility of spending money on “job creation” — we have this little vignette from 2017.  There is, in fact, a seemingly endless supply of these things, and nobody seems to have any answer except redistribution, whether we’re talking Great Resets, Universal Basic Income, or hanging the rich from the nearest lamppost.  Nobody seems to think about the obvious solution:

News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 40

Interestingly, many of the news items — if not all of them — revolve around the issue of money and the fact that few people seem to understand it.  There’s also the problem that people keep putting the cart before the horse and thinking that money creates prosperity instead of the other way around. . . .

The Past Savings Paradox

      As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, the belief that new cap[ital can only be financed by cutting consumption and accumulating money savings leads to some irresolvable paradoxes, such as land being both a factor of production and not a factor at the same time, and that is you cut consumption to accumulate savings to finance new capital, there is insufficient consumer demand to justify new capital investment.

Ricardo’s Detour

      No, we’re not talking about a Cuban band leader or even someone who plays one on television, even if we do love Lucy.  What we’re talking about today is the more-than-a-little-confusing way that the economist David Ricardo explained how to have your cake and eat it, too.

How to Sell Out to China

       For centuries and with increasing regularity in our day, the cry has gone up that instead of taxing ordinary people, the government should stick it to the rich . . . who, after all, by definition are the ones with money.  Whether we’re talking about the Diggers of the seventeenth century, Huey Long’s “Share Our Wealth” program, or the current push in the United States to fund a multiple-trillion dollar budget, it seems that those greedy moneybags ought to pay their fair share.

JTW Podcast: The Rise of the Machines

       No, this is not a posting about The Terminator . . . unless you’re talking about all the jobs that are going to be terminated by advancing technology.  Nor is it useful to try and go the “Small is Beautiful,” New Age economics, Fabian socialism simple life scenario.  Human beings are toolmakers and users, and if you abolish advanced technology, it won’t be long before it makes its way back.

News from the Network, Vol. 14, No. 39

All of the antics on Capitol Hill and Wall Street keep reminding us of just how easily much of the mess could be cleaned up with the Economic Democracy Act.  So, not to beat a live mule: