Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Capitalism prevails

I’m reading Homelands: A personal history of Europe by Timothy Garton Ash. The book is organized by decades, and the decade of 1980-89 was a historically significant one for Central Europe. By the end of the decade, the “communist” dictatorships in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia had collapsed. Real history resists simplification, but to […]

Our relationship of work, technology and life

I stumbled upon this article riding home yesterday. It is a pod cast called: On the Media. I catch it at times on my local NPR. Some very intriguing discussions are presented. This one is very timely considering the great dropout in the work force. Or, “resignation” as it is being called. It caught my […]

Explaining Class Warfare

  Last month one hundred and fourteen thousand unemployed moochers…suddenly yank the government teat out of their mouths, get off the couch for forty hours a week? Why?     I say follow the money; cause I found out, that right around the time those people got those jobs…they started getting paid!   And just […]

It is in the interests of bankers and landlords to masquerade as capitalists

An comment worth noting on an  interesting post Where Are You in the Economic Strata? by Barry Ritholtz is the following (hat tip Mike K.): In my opinion, aspirational voting is the consequence of a rationaldedication to ethics based upon false assumptions of what is ethical.As I see it, there are two forms of income. The first […]

More on Markets and Neoliberalism from Crooked Timber

Actual markets in the American economy are extremely rare and unusual beasts. An economics of markets ought to be regarded as generally useful as a biology of cephalopods, amid the living world of bones and shells. But, somehow the idealized, metaphoric market is substituted as an analytic mask, laid across a vast variety of economic […]

Discussion at Crooked Timber on ‘what are markets’

Well, sort of on markets.There is an interesting conversation going on at Crooked Timber our public debate in the econosphere and political rhetoric . Henry posts on the use of arguments over the term neo-liberalism and finishes with: For what it’s worth, I think that the open information agenda, and the political inequality agenda have a […]

"Business Leaders of Today are Not Capitalists"

Via Mark Thoma comes this thinking on the nature of our economic system and by John Kay at the Financial Times in Business Leaders of Today are Not Capitalists. John Kay says that the term “capitalism” is misleading in modern economies: ..So the business leaders of today are not capitalists in the sense in which […]

The Class war summed up in quotes

By Daniel Becker I just want to lay out the debate going on in our economy right now. There are 4 debaters. President Obama/Geithner et al, President Obama 2008, the rich (or capitalist, those who make their money from money) and the rest of us. From President Obama’s 60 Minute interview: PRESIDENT OBAMA:…And it turns […]

"Ben Tre Logic" Redux: History Repeats Itself

Forty years ago, in 1968, an American major after the battle of Ben Tre in Viet Nam was quoted by Peter Arnett as having declared, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Now, we have the contemporary version, from U.S. President George Walker Bush: “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market […]