That Wolf thinks this is not ideological, or that "to preserve as much liberty as possible, while recognising that the minimum state was unacceptable to a democratic society" is not a moral position, is just ridiculous. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I don't think we've ever seen an Overton window zip past that fast. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
For instance, he - like Sam Brittan - has for some time been approving of Land Value Taxation,which is not actually grounded in the conventional anthropocentric economic assumption that ONLY individuals can be "productive". As opposed to Capital - of which Land has been classified as a sub-set to obfuscate things even more conveniently.
If you deny that Land has a "Value" (ie is "productive") then you are heading off the possibility of a tax on the privilege of exclusive ownership of this Commons, which is what Land Value Tax actually is. In fact even Milton Friedman regarded it as the least worst tax.
I digress.
It does look like there is a major shift in assumptions going on, and not just by Wolf. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
It's nice that people are at least talking about a change, kind of, more or less, but Keynesianism isn't necessarily a 21st century kind of an answer.
And so far we haven't seen much of a move to practical Keynesianism anyway - more the usual corporate welfare, leveraged by guile, panic, and threats of extortion.
more the usual corporate welfare, leveraged by guile, panic, and threats of extortion.
If you haven't read it yet, I strenously recomend the long article in todays Salon de News on the bungled American handling of the financial crisis, primarily because they didn't try to handle it as much as just protect the crass class interests of their backers. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Not just.
