Good one. I am surrounded by "libertarians" and I find myself in a constant struggle to understand their perspective which seems at once libertine and also oddly repressive. Yes, to legalizing all and sundry but with a tacit acceptance, even fawning over, already existing wealth and power. This essay highlights some important points that shed real light. There are very few really working markets, you do not become extremely wealthy via labor or brilliance, and the far left understands markets better than the libertarians who generally argue for them.
Michael Hudson does a good job of talking about traditional liberalism and how poorly it is reflected in the current "capitalist" economy. My worry is that no matter how well regulated market driven economies seem to create monopolies with all that entails. I think we would need to move to a primarily non-market system to avoid this. https://michael-hudson.com/2016/03/the-inversion-of-classical-economics/
Yes, in fact Hudson's work was a major inspiration for this article (which I actually wrote a while back)
It's interesting that people like Adam Smith and Karl Marx are usually considered by the general public as diametrically opposed and polar opposites (almost like God and the Devil). But, as Hudson points out, all of the so-called "Classical" economists of this period (which included Marx) were interested in the same basic question: how do you structure an economy where productive work is rewarded but making money solely through controlling essential resources (rent seeking) is curtailed? Of course, Marx was writing a hundred years later than Smith.
That's part of the discourse that seems to have just, poof, disappeared. No one, not even most of the left, seems worried about structuring the economy to avoid rents. Sure you have some people opposed to markets or what have you but not a lot of serious detailed argument about the shaping of economic forces. The elite institutions like the Fed do that work day in and day out but they do so without much outside interest or comment and they do it for their own purposes rather than the common good, well, other than perhaps stability.
Good one. I am surrounded by "libertarians" and I find myself in a constant struggle to understand their perspective which seems at once libertine and also oddly repressive. Yes, to legalizing all and sundry but with a tacit acceptance, even fawning over, already existing wealth and power. This essay highlights some important points that shed real light. There are very few really working markets, you do not become extremely wealthy via labor or brilliance, and the far left understands markets better than the libertarians who generally argue for them.
Michael Hudson does a good job of talking about traditional liberalism and how poorly it is reflected in the current "capitalist" economy. My worry is that no matter how well regulated market driven economies seem to create monopolies with all that entails. I think we would need to move to a primarily non-market system to avoid this. https://michael-hudson.com/2016/03/the-inversion-of-classical-economics/
Yes, in fact Hudson's work was a major inspiration for this article (which I actually wrote a while back)
It's interesting that people like Adam Smith and Karl Marx are usually considered by the general public as diametrically opposed and polar opposites (almost like God and the Devil). But, as Hudson points out, all of the so-called "Classical" economists of this period (which included Marx) were interested in the same basic question: how do you structure an economy where productive work is rewarded but making money solely through controlling essential resources (rent seeking) is curtailed? Of course, Marx was writing a hundred years later than Smith.
That's part of the discourse that seems to have just, poof, disappeared. No one, not even most of the left, seems worried about structuring the economy to avoid rents. Sure you have some people opposed to markets or what have you but not a lot of serious detailed argument about the shaping of economic forces. The elite institutions like the Fed do that work day in and day out but they do so without much outside interest or comment and they do it for their own purposes rather than the common good, well, other than perhaps stability.