What are your plans for capitalism?

Mixed economy, where government taxes and regulates economic rent and other unearned increments.
Government should never plan economy and allocate capital, just regulate.

Plans for Capitalism?

1. Global minimum living allowance, set at 75% of the maximum of the local (state-level) median income and the global median income.

2. Global tax system to pay for it, with attendent global governance.

3. Global free movement of people. Suddenly a whole host of problems the rich billion more or less ignore will become very important.

4. Strong media controls to prevent out-and-out manipulation of the body politic.

Of course, working out how to stop that utopia being subverted and corrupted is left as an exercise for the reader. That's the nature of utopias.

Abolish it...

In the context of the economic crisis, of course emphasis should have been not on the persons guilty but the structural reasons that those persons got in the position of becoming guilty -- e.g. the necessity of curbing the profitability of financial casinoing, breaking up large banks and companies, punitive taxes on the rich. And all what has been emphasized on ET about stagnant median wages and reduced social mobility, the relationship of markets and regulation, fields of the economy where markets don't work and so on.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Interestingly, the dominant ideology pretends that we have a market economy without capital or capitalists (the late JK Galbraith observed in his final years that the term capitalism itself had fallen into disuse among the serious people). The whole point of Neo Classical Economics has been to obscure the role of capital, to the point that standard economic theory doesn't have a workable model of capital development, credit creation, the intertemporal effects of debt...

So, my plan for capitalism would begin with recognising it for what it is. Then we can figure out what to do about it.

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

There may be hundreds of protest movements against global capitalism but there is no alternative proposal.

I'll repeat part of a thread here:

Migeru:

I have most hope for some sort of "green left" paradigm. But the Green Left we have doesn't seem to have a coherent alternative in place yet. And a lot of the rhetorical/ideological baggage from the 60's and 70's grates me the wrong way.

A swedish kind of death:

I think we will probably have to write the coherent alternative here.

Like I do not have enough to do.

Migeru:

LOL

Well, get cracking!

I still suspect that for a coherent alternative to emerge we would have to write it.

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

• Voting in elections: local, national, supranational (e.g. EP)
  
• Activism 1. Giving time / money to organizations who may have a more direct influence on the political sphere by their size and/or channels of communication.
  
• Activism 2. Withdrawing purchase for commercial products and services. i.e influencing corporate decision-making.
  
• Activism 3: influencing media debates, supporting investigative journalism, fact checking and dissemination
  
• Local activism: influencing the people that you meet socially and at work
  
• Personal activism: Controlling how you act each day. AKA altruism.

The real vulnerability of AC is identical to its core value: money. Reduce the amount of money that AC gets and you weaken its power to act. Thus if you want to affect the political decision-making component, attack the wallets of the corporates and their media subset.

So I restate what I have proposed before: that the most powerful weapon available against AC is Withdrawal of Purchase. (as well as supportive purchase). This has never been a very effective tool of democracy in the past, but it is becoming so. The Intertubez offer the possibility for thousands if not millions of people to come together and withdraw purchase (or threaten to do so) en masse. Ultimately we are all shareholders in AC, and we should exercise our shareholder rights.

You can't be me, I'm taken

What are your plans for capitalism?

I have no plan for capitalism: I see it evolving into a new networked open form driven by the pervasive spread of direct instantaneous 'Peer to Peer' connection. In this emerging form of open capitalism, intermediaries are unnecessary and will be bypassed.

Shareholders in obsolescent (early seventeenth century and even earlier - turbo-charged by the more recent addition of limited liability) Joint Stock Companies are unnecessary intermediaries.

Banks as credit intermediaries are also obsolescent.

I see a new form of 'Open' capitalism:  a market economy operating Not for Loss and emerging simply because, and to the extent that, 'it works'.

It's not a plan - just an analysis - possibly Utopian, certainly optimistic.

Modern conservatives engage in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.Galbraith

What are your plans for capitalism?

Define "capitalism."

If "capitalism" means simply "people can own stuff," then it encompasses such a wide range of possible social configurations that it is compatible with almost any kind of economic model.

If "capitalism" means "individuals can own productive assets," then it is probably possible to manage it in a way that gives acceptable results.

If "capitalism" means "what's good for Wall Street is good for America," then shoot it in the back of the head and dump it in a ditch. Then go back to Adenauer's, FDR's and Anker Jørgensen's economic policy and take it from there.

- Jake

"Terraforming your own planet to make it uninhabitable hardly counts as epic win." - ThatBritGuy

I was about to post a diary to initiate this exact discussion.

Thanks afew!

:-)


No one could have predicted

What ideas should be making their way forward (and aren't) in the context of the economic crisis?

"Credit bubble models of the business cycle" is my own term for discussions which can be found in the writings of Veblen (in particular The Theory of Business Enterprise, 1904) and Minsky (Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, 1986). Interestingly, Minsky doesn't mention Veblen at all in his book.

A credit bubble model of the economic cycle would be totally consistent with Fisher's _debt deflation model of recession and depression. The flip side is the idea that debt inflation fuels the growth phase of the business cycle.

See also this comment of mine from May 2009, in response to Vladimir's question

So what's the alternative paradigm?

From the 1970's we have seen an updated version of the paradigm that reigned before Keynes wrote his tract. Monetarist macroeconomics has failed just as spectacularly as pre-Keynesian economics did.

The question is whether it suffices to relearn Keynesianism or a totally new paradigm is necessary. I don't know the answer. At the risk of repeating myself I'll quote Krugman:

The answer, I think, is that we're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn't the fact that they were primitive -- the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed.

And that's what seems to have happened to macroeconomics in much of the economics profession. The knowledge that S=I doesn't imply the Treasury view -- the general understanding that macroeconomics is more than supply and demand plus the quantity equation -- somehow got lost in much of the profession. I'm tempted to go on and say something about being overrun by barbarians in the grip of an obscurantist faith, but I guess I won't. Oh wait, I guess I just did.

Just yesterday, he wrote

I guess the point is that you can be a bad writer and a great economist. And I really am gravitating toward a Keynes-Fisher-Minsky view of macro, although of the three I'd much rather read Keynes.

"A Keynes-Fisher-Minsky view of macro" would involve, I guess: a focus on aggregate demand (with the attendant countercyclical fiscal policy), an understanding of debt deflation (requiring tighter control of credit at the policy level), and of the fact that bubbles are a systemic feature of unregulated markets (requiring regulation of capital flows). Oh, and throw out Monetarism.

I think the most serious program of development of Minsky's ideas is currently Steve Keen's (ARGeezer's diary).

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

I don't believe my leftist friends who say this is a wonderful opportunity for the Left. That's the tragedy of the Left. There may be hundreds of protest movements against global capitalism but there is no alternative proposal. A majority of the leftists today want global capitalism with a human face.

So, the left will not make gains in this crisis and the post-crisis will be worse. A coherent and credible left alternative needs to be put in place for the next crisis, which may follow in relatively short order given that the right will come reinforced out of the current crisis.

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma