A piece of work is Professor Walter E. Williams of George Mason University. Back in February, I flagged a column by Williams in which the nimble prof performed the lump-of-labor fallacy shuck and jive. One of the venues for that rendition of Will Automation Kill Our Jobs was David (“Trump is 100% right”) Horowitz’s FrontPage Mag. […]

I don’t want to pretend that this explains everything. But it is “another brick in the wall,” so to speak, if not the keystone. In January 2015, Senator Jeff Sessions produced an “Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority,” written by his communications director, Stephen Miller. Miller’s analysis in the handbook is just the sort […]

“Deeply Disturbing” It’s not a crime if you brag about it on T.V. In fact, it’s hardly worth mentioning. What is this about? “We don’t know the answer, but we hope the inspector general will find out.”

The Wage[s]-Lump Doctrine — still dogma after all these years “The wage-fund doctrine was the quintessential product of what Marx termed vulgar political economy; a dogma concealing real economic relations, on the one hand, and justifying them, on the other. It was a transparent effort to disarm the working-class movement, and an attempt (largely successful) […]

I don’t believe in intellectual property… I don’t believe in compound interest… Nobody believes in the lump-of-labor fallacy. Mr. Nadella is engaging in a game of projection and disavowal that is as old as capitalism. He is affirming the reality of an event that only happens in the imagination — the production of something out […]

Gorz: “The Right to an Income and the Right to Work,” part one From “Orientations and Proposals — The Reduction of Working Time: Issues and Policies” of Andre Gorz’s Critique of Economic Reason (1989) translated by Gillian Handyside and Chris Turner. I am posting the section on “The Right to an Income and the Right to Work” […]

“The basic idea is that the government can’t run out of money. It creates money just by spending.” — Stephanie Kelton This is true. Government cannot run out of its own money. But what is money? It is a token or pledge that can be redeemed for something of value. If government creates much more […]

Class war? What class war? Stephanie Kelton Has The Biggest Idea In Washington  “Everybody wants a piece of Kelton these days because a simple, radical idea she has been workshopping her entire career is the next big thing in Democratic Party politics. She calls it the job guarantee… “ “Once an outsider, her radical economic thinking won […]

The current mania for “job guarantee” policies is making the Sandwichman anxious. I’ve been on the full employment beat for over 20 years so I think I have a pretty good grasp of the terrain. First principle is that there are no panaceas. My favorite policy option — reduction of working time — is not […]

Passivity is a key term in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle: 12. The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained […]