Corporate Socialism and Hollowing of America

Posted on January 19, 2016 by admin

Most people understand and assume that government income redistribution, where higher incomes are taxed and transferred to those with lower incomes, is a way of achieving greater income equality. But few people are aware of the extent of corporate socialism which is defined here as the transfer of capital, by government to corporations.

In the heat of the GFC, corporate socialism was blatant as there was no need to hide the fact that financial corporations needed to be saved by the government’s injecting trillions of dollars into them to maintain liquidity and solvency of the financial system. The income inequality created by corporate socialism was equally blatant, making billionaires of executives such as Lloyd Blankfein (in July 2015), CEO of Goldman Sachs, a bank which was central to the fraudulent dealings of subprime mortgage derivatives triggering the GFC.

Continue reading →

Posted in Economics | 1 Comment

Creeping American Socialism

Posted on January 17, 2016 by admin

The previous post discussed the influence of pluralism in economic policy. As an historical summary of the cognitive dissonance, it suffices to observe the policy circus: the free-market capitalism in the early twentieth century was blamed for the Great Depression; it gave way to Keynesian socialism after the Second World War (WW2) then back to deregulated market capitalism and monetarism since the stagflation of 1970s; and more recently back to renewed Keynesian government intervention since the global financial crisis (GFC) which started in 2008. With each circuit of theoretical favoritism, the structure of the US economy evolved with mutating blends of policy pluralism, but generally with increasing socialism.

Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Finance, Regulation | Leave a comment

Pluralism of Cognitive Dissonance

Posted on January 13, 2016 by admin

Pluralism is the enemy of science. At any given time, science deals only with a single most correct theory in any particular domain, not with multiple incorrect theories. There is a huge difference between evaluating many new ideas and the uncritical tolerance of many inconsistent ideas, which is what economic pluralism really is. Economists usually criticize each other privately and avoid open confrontation in public, giving a misleading impression of the unity of economics. The global financial crisis (GFC) has been seen (e.g. Economist, 2009) as a failure of the dismal science of economics, because mainstream economics is assumed to be science, with all its mathematical models and statistical analyses.

Continue reading →

Posted in Econoclasm, Economics, Science | 7 Comments

Capitalism and Economic Growth

Posted on September 22, 2015 by admin

The global financial crisis (GFC) has been blamed on the failure of capitalism, with the 2011 Occupy protests declaring, “capitalism isn’t working” (Hussey, 2014). What is capitalism which has failed?

Economists appear reluctant to define explicitly key economic terms such as capitalism. For example, whole books on capitalism (e.g. Marx, 1890; Baumol et al., 2007; Kaletsky, 2010; Piketty, 2014) have been written without giving explicit definitions from the start of their lengthy discourses. One has to guess what they mean. Indeed they call many different ideas “capitalism”, for example, as Kaletsky (2010, p.3) asserts:

…capitalism is not a static set of institutions, but an evolutionary system that reinvents and reinvigorates itself through crises…

Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Methodology, Science | 7 Comments

Keynesian Fallacy and Collapse

Posted on August 9, 2015 by admin

One of the first posts of this blog describes the potential for a Keynesian economic collapse due to persistent policy application, over decades, of the Keynesian fallacy. The fallacy originated from simple mathematical errors in Keynes’ General Theory which have never been corrected. Instead, they have been perpetuated in basic economic textbooks and form the foundation of government macroeconomic policy.

It is now so important to point out this fallacy that it is worthwhile repeating the argument and its refutation as simply and clearly as possible. On page 115 of the General Theory, Keynes (1936) wrote (suppressing inessential subscript symbols):

For \Delta Y=\Delta C+\Delta I, where \Delta C and \Delta I are the increments of consumption and investment; so that we can write \Delta Y=k\Delta I, where 1-\frac{1}{k} is equal to the marginal propensity to consume.

Let us call k the investment multiplier. It tells us that, when there is an increment of aggregate investment, income will increase by an amount which is k times the increment of investment.

Continue reading →

Posted in Econoclasm, Economics | 8 Comments