(Part 2) Best economic policy & development books according to redditors
We found 1,064 Reddit comments discussing the best economic policy & development books. We ranked the 297 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
This is a good read for anyone that’s interested, “A Generation of Sociopaths - How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America”.
Amazon Link
My problem is that Saudi Arabia has "legally" beheaded 26 individuals since August 4th, 2014! With friends like that... FFS
Edit: The Shock Doctrine was excellent. Her new book looks very promising, as well: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
> [Liberal Intellectuals] have rarely been sycophants to people in power.
I doubt Chris Hedges would agree.
>The failure of our capitalist democracy was collective. It was bred by ignorance, indifference, racism, bigotry and the seduction of mass propaganda. It was bred by elites, especially in the press, the courts and academia, who chose careerism over moral and intellectual courage. Our rights as citizens were taken from us one by one. There was hardly a word of protest.
>Where were the lawyers, judges, law professors and law school deans who should have ferociously defended our rights to privacy, due process and habeas corpus? Why didn’t they challenge Barack Obama’s signing into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act? Section 1021 overturns the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited the military from acting as a domestic police force. The section also permits the military to carry out extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers [...]
>And where were all the economists pointing out the absurdity of the neoliberal ideology that told us that human society should be governed by the dictates of the market—that is, until the market collapsed in an orgy of fraud and corruption and needed the government to bail it out? Why did the political scientists chase after “value-free” data, carry out quantitative projects and seek an unachievable scientific clarity? Why didn’t they and others warn us about the dire consequences of eroding democratic institutions? Why did they stand mute as money replaced the vote and lobbyists authored our laws? Where were they when constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and associations were criminalized? Why didn’t they protest when dissidents, even those who broke no laws, were stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process? Why did they continue to speak and write as if the fiction of our democracy was real? Why didn’t they illuminate our constitutional crisis? Why did those in academia commit intellectual treason? They traded their intellectual integrity and autonomy for tenure, publishing contracts, lecture fees, research grants and coveted deanships or college presidencies.
[...]
>The desiccation of our liberal institutions ensured the demise of our capitalist democracy. History has amply demonstrated what was to come next. The rot and political paralysis vomited up a con artist as president along with an array of half-wits, criminals and racist ideologues. They will manufacture scapegoats as their gross ineptitude and unachievable promises are exposed. They will fan the flames of white supremacy and racial and religious bigotry. They will use all the tools of legal and physical control handed to them by our system of “inverted totalitarianism” to crush even the most tepid forms of dissent.
>The last constraints will be removed by a crisis. The crisis will be used to create a climate of fear. The pretense of democracy will end.
>“A fascism of the future—an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis—need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols,” Robert Paxton writes in “The Anatomy of Fascism.” “Some future movement that would ‘give up free institutions’ in order to perform the same functions of mass mobilization for the reunification, purification, and regeneration of some troubled group would undoubtedly call itself something else and draw on fresh symbols. That would not make it any less dangerous.”
Hedges is the crankiest pundit in America, and is a little too much for me to take on a regular basis, but no one has ripped into the intellectual left like he has, he was preaching brimstone at university officials at least 10 years before this current wave of culture silliness started. I also think he's dead-on when discussing future fascist movements. Spoiler: they won't call themselves Nazis.
Anyway, "Death of the Liberal Class" is definitely worth the read, IMO, and lays out his philosophy pretty clearly and succinctly. His regular columns at Truth-dig get a bit repetitive but direct, and a nice primer to his work is the Joe Sacco illustrated work, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt". I think if someone wants to get serious as a leftist activist, Hedges' work is required reading. I have no idea what his work might mean to my right-leaning friends and would be curious to hear.
Great post OP! I haven't seen the video in question (sorry) but as an anarchist I do feel confident in giving some of my views. First off, there are no right answers to these questions. Even within the same school of anarco-socialism, you'll likely get different answers to these questions from different people (ask 10 anarcho-socialists and you'll get 11 different answers) and in my view, that's a strength, not a weakness. However because I haven't seen the video, I don't know how much of what I'm about to say is addressed by it. I'm sorry!
I personally don't believe that lazy workers are as much a problem as you believe they will be and I base this on my personal experience. I have visited anarco-communes and also "temporary utopias" like climate camps and anti-globalization convergences. And, no, they were by no means perfect. In anarchist households dishes often don't get done to the extent that it's kind of a running joke. But there are lots of reasons for that. Houses aren't designed with communal living in mind. Under capitalism most of us suffer from depression and anxiety and it's hard to be motivated with that kind of thing when you're worried about your next deadline at your unfulfilling job or paying the bills by the end of the month. A more collectivist society could do things like ensuring no one ever has to do menial jobs alone (even by the simple provision of bigger sinks and bigger kitchens--ever notice how classically houses in western society were designed for use by a single-occupancy gendered labour force; my kitchen is barely twice the size of my wardrobe, but the living room, where the man of the house was expected to spend his off-labour time, is huge). And ultimately I would expect that anarchist societies would not only have a good working understanding of the sexism of gendered labour (most menial jobs are traditionally performed by women) but also be more lenient around all labour. Like maybe you can skip the washing up for that day if it's your period or if you're nursing, both of which are labour neglected by capitalism, just to choose a stereotypical and thought-provoking example. Going back to my own experiences, there were plenty of problems with places like the convergences and anarchist camps, but they never actually suffered from not having clean toilets because people understood that cleaning them was as important an activity as any other type of labour which needed to be undertaken. Ultimately, I agree with the point raised by the WNDWU (youtube link--above): "So you're asking me, who will do the dishes when the revolution comes? Well I do my own dishes now and I'll do my own dishes then. Funny that it's always the ones who don't, who ask that fucking question."
There are a lot of different thoughts about how economics can work in anarchist societies at large-scale. Most likely there would be several different economic models, possibly even within the municipal area, but certainly within different ones. In the future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes a system where small consumptive goods are created in situ, then optionally exchanged as gifts with traders. Underlying this, potassium is used as an exchange of hard currency and reserve, regulating the flow of resources throughout for the production of goods the solar system. Meanwhile, Ursula Le Guin envisaged a society organised by collectives (syndicals) where work was undertaken out of a sense of duty. Less speculatively, David Graeber has done a lot of good work documenting the use of gift economies throughout human history and it's hard to believe there's nothing there, given the overwelming preponderance and importance of gift economies to advanced human societies so far.
But I myself am not an advocate of gift economies. Michael Albert and co. have done a lot of writing on how non-gift participatory or democratic economies could be run and I highly recommend checking out his work. Albert's work is pretty much the closest to what I would like to see myself, I think and he also talks a lot about the psychological benefits of job rotation, e.g. a system where doctors also clean toilets. There is also a form of anarchism known as mutualism in which productive work is carried out by coops instead of companies or conglomerates owned by shareholders or an owner or owners. A coop can be structured along purely democratic grounds, where every decision requires a consensus meeting from relevant workers, through the whole gamut to a system with middle managers and bosses basically being like a company except that the workers form and control the board instead of vice versa. After producing goods, they are exchanged through a free-market mechanism as under capitalism. I myself am not a mutualist but really even mutualism would be a huge step forward compared to what we have under the current system, where productive labour is essentially organized by unaccountable and undemocratic corporate oligarchies.
The invention thing is quite interesting, I think. Just as in an anarchist society you might get several economic systems, so today we actually have several economic models under capitalism as well. One which I am quite familiar with as a software engineer is the open-source model of software development. Last year I invented a new and pioneering method for installing Wordpress websites using a fairly obscure collection of deployment software. The mechanism I invented is so niche that even I struggle to develop the enthusiasm to explain its benefits even to people within the same field but I was excited enough to develop it that I spent three months of my free-time doing that, and now that it is done I am still pleased with the effort even though no one uses it. So basically I invented something and released it for free which was the very definition of a project for which I receive no thanks: no economic compensation, no fame within my professional circles, etc. And yet I was still happy to create and distribute it for free, even allowing others to modify it if they found it useful. So I think that when you are very invested in a particular problem field it's actually very easy to develop the enthusiasm to figure out an invention for a better way of doing something, even if you know you'll receive nothing for it but the personal satisfaction of having simplified a particular problem. And of course in an anarchist society you could expect that most techniques and methods are open-source, and able to be modified and improved upon for free by any interested party. Receiving fame among one's professional peer group, being invited to prestigious conferences within your field to talk about your invention, maybe even being interviewed by the news media--these are all extremely good motivations for creating something, arguably a lot stronger than money actually. (Considering most invention these days is IP-protected and ultimately owned by corporations, I'm kind of surprised the myth of the solo inventor made rich by his own success succeeds actually.) And this happens a lot in software. The most common operating system software globally across all devices? By far, Linux. Windows only leads in the desktop, and that only because of entrenched capitalist user lock-in paradigms.
Beyond the usual stuff regarding Belt and Road, this is a strategic move by China on multiple accounts.
First, I highly recommend reading AI Superpower by Lee Kaifu. Look past the conspiratorial-esque title and focus on the main points that Lee makes:
The article touched on the fact that India's vast population skews younger and are also more likely to make the technological leap onto mobile-first. With China being the leader in IoT (internet of things), opening a way for Indian users to provide Chinese tech giants with more data will only further cement China's position as a leader in the coming AI economy.
I've been reading and enjoying Kai-Fu Lee's punchy new book on AI and geopolitics, AI Superpowers. In essence, the book claims that China is likely to rapidly overtake the US in AI technology in the next decade.
In short, the author claims that tech-dominance in the machine learning age is a function of (1) access to lots of good data, (2) an aggressive and smart entrepreneurial class, (3) brilliant researchers, and (4), political will. It's hard to deny that - pending a new Manhattan project for AI - China owns the US in (1) and (4). China and the US are close on (2), but Lee points to China's more cutthroat markets as giving it an edge. Finally, while the US dominates in (3) for now, Lee claims that the recent advances of ML as laid down by Hinton et al. will take decades to implement, meaning that the field belongs to tinkerers rather than geniuses (for now).
I've not finished yet, but my only qualm is that the US might have political stability in its favour, for now. For all the problems America faces, they at least have a track record of muddling through relevantly similar scenarios, whereas we've yet to see what happens in China in the wake of, e.g., major growth slowdowns.
Anyway, highly recommended to all, and interested in case anyone is reading along and has thoughts. The most astonishing fact presented so far to my mind was this: "In terms of funding, Google dwarfs even its own government: US federal funding for math and and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google's own R&D budget."
This is an objective book about US federal income taxes. Very informative and gives you both arguments in favor and against it and other proposals. Would recommend for undergraduate econ major taking a class on taxes.
Wow Mom, you said I would never have any use for this university degree in Socialist Economics and Political Economy, now here is my chance to shine :)
OK, given that mainstream economics is primarily a neoclassical game these days (with some liberals since the recession trying to revive Keynesian ideas) lets take a look at some good critical view points. The following is a list of books that come from a perspective of socialists living in the modern west. These are not commies from the USSR, but mostly anticapitalist thinkers and academics who think the system we have is unfair and ought to entail more economic democracy.
Robin Hahnel's ABCs of Political Economy is a nice primer to introduce fundamental economic concepts. Although the book goes over the basics it definitely covers the ideas from a critical leftist perspective. The guy also developed his own system for a post capitalist democratic economy, so he is an intellectual heavy weight.
If you would like to look more at international issues, Michael Yates's Naming the System is another great book. It takes a look at the economics of so-called globalization and explains some of the ways that richer countries use the idea of "free trade" as a mechanism of control through institutions such as the IMF, and World Bank, and also treaties like NAFTA.
Another great book, better than either of the previous, is Michael Perelman's Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology. Perelman, a econ professor and lifelong economist, makes the case that economics is definitely not a science and uses real world economic systems (notably the railroad business) to argue that most capitalist economic theory is useless in practice. Of all the books on this list, this would be my highest recommendation to an average joe/jane who knows a little about econ and wants to check out a heterodox point of view.
One last one that I will mention is Murphy and Nagle's The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice. To so many friends I have recommended this book, but no one ever wants to read a modern philosophical piece on public finance and taxation. I may be a nerd but I was not the guy in college who read every assigned book cover to cover, but this one I couldn't stop. Murphy and Nagel examine theories of how we ought to tax people and how people view taxes. Then they take it a step further by questioning the idea of taxes in a modern state and take a particularly critical view to the idea of a "pre-tax income."
Again, these are all Left sided, outside the mainstream, books. If you'd like something quicker read Albert Einstein's Why Socialism? Full Text included! Also Paul Sweezy's essay Why Stagnation? does a great job explaining why capitalism tends toward stagnating, why it has had such periods of growth in spite of this tenancy, and how the economy and capitalists have tried to overcome this. I reread each of these essays every year on my birthday.
If you are still reading this thank you. I really loved studying economics from a critical perspective and feel that, in-spite of my ability to change the system, my life has been enriched by learning.
This WAS true.
Sadly our current Parliament is heading in that "us versus them" direction.
Also we're "market liberals" not "socialists."
Welfare states come in all shapes and sizes. Canada is modestly "socialist" compared to the modestly socialist nordic states.
A good read is Gosta Esping Andersen's "Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism" which puts Canada (and the US) in the "market liberalism" area of welfare provision.
Seriously, seminal work
>... should be considered?
This is a normative question. In normative questions the values of some actor(s) determines the answer.
In the case of public policy this means that all manners of people values could have an impact on the policies goals. For example, policymakers (such as legislators) all often have competing visions about what the goal of a policy should be. Bureaucrats often have their own opinions about what the goals should be. Constituents might have all sorts of other competing opinions. The target population may have other opinions. What this means is that in order for policy to pass it usually has to have a certain amount of ambiguity baked in, so as to satisfy the competing values of all the different groups/actors.
Deborah Stone's book Policy Paradox is principally about the role of ambiguity in public policy and in establishing policy goals. Policy Paradox is mandatory reading for any student of Public Policy. She demonstrates how vague (ambiguous) goals are often necessary in order to achieve the votes of all the possible veto actors (committee chairs, speakers, majority leaders, median voters, Presidents, etc...). In short, many actors make it difficult to reconcile what the policy should do. And, often times not all goals can be achieved simultaneously ; Some goals are mutually exclusive to a point. This can make it difficult to determine whether a policy is actually a success or a failure.
Policy Paradox builds on some of the decision making work of Cohen, March, and Olsen who described how ambiguity of goals plays a role in decision making in "organization anarchies" such as governments and universities. Cohen and March also developed the theory of bounded-rationality and discussed the importance of ambiguity in individual decision making as well.
Implementation by Pressman and Wildavsky additionally touches how important it is that the goals of a policy have "buy in" amongst the bureaucrats responsible for implementing the policy. Essentially, if the goals are to outside the organizational culture of the bureaucracy responsible for running the program, the bureaucrats may just not implement the policy fully (or at all).
Anecdotally, I've spoken, in the course of researching legislative oversight, with policy makers who have been personally (and professionally) frustrated when they voted into creation a new policy program and appropriated money to a bureaucracy to implement that program. And then had the bureaucracy simply not implement the program in the slightest because it was simply to far afield from the goals/mission of the bureaucrats.
This is much less of a problem outside of public policy. In "Design Thinking" the only person whose values matter to the "designer" is the clients. The designer merely designs to the clients singular values. This is why "design thinking" approaches are not generally a good approach for policy analysts or policy makers.
If you're looking for a guide on how to perform a policy analysis, I suggest you read Bardach's Eightfold Path to Policy Analysis. It's essentially the standard.
I just got Ron Paul's book "A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship" in the mail the other day. It's a collection of foreign policy speeches he made in the House over the years with updated commentary. Can't wait to read it.
Side note: You can see the book displayed to the left of RP in the reddit.com Interviews Ron Paul video.
Well, aiming for world (or even national) revolution comes with the obvious downside that failure is really expensive in terms of human well-being, so the pragmatic approach would seem to be to design a system to try voluntarily on a virtual, city- or state-wide scale and only scale up once the system operates at a stable and satisfactory level.
But tbh, anything regarding organization of work and resource distribution that goes beyond workers councils would be interesting. The most hands-on approach to the subject I've found is Michael Albert's Parecon, and it still comes across as quite optimistic to me.
Many libertarians support a return to some form of the gold standard or legalizing crypot-currency. That does not appear to be Johnson or Weld's position though, so that should calm your fears. That would take a large consensus of the federal government to change.
As far as finding an economist to suggest it would be a good idea, there are entire schools of economic thought that support the gold standard. Here's a book by James Rickards that discusses the gold standard in a relatively readable format (not an economics textbook).
https://smile.amazon.com/New-Case-Gold-James-Rickards/dp/1101980761?sa-no-redirect=1
>Because since they receive all these amazing perks by paying such a high tax rate, then wouldn’t it be logical to say that they could achieve perfection if they paid 100% in taxes.
That doesn't follow logic? The logic is that higher input (at a manageable % of income) + higher output (at a manageable % of GDP) = more productive society; not that 100% input = more productive society. I understand where it's possible to get confused, but it does take a bit of a leap to take it to the absolute extreme there.
It could be good for you to read Esping-Anderson's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Clasen's Comparative Social Policy and Pierson's The Welfare State Reader, if you're confused about some of the logic behind Social Democratic states.
BUT WAIT, THERES MORE!
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691129428
Why would countries buy more gold then? Each country is regularly increasing their gold vaults. When currencies fail, gold will decide your worth. Gold is much more than hedging against inflation, especially in a country like India.
Read this book. It's really good.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Case-Gold-James-Rickards/dp/1101980761/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=gold+book&qid=1570213655&sr=8-2
I'm going to try to summarize the research, provide you some links, and avoid giving an opinion, since that's what you asked for (and frankly, this is a very difficult question that I'm not sure that we know the answer, despite what might be a growing consensus that the answer is "high marginal tax rates don't affect growth that much"). One thing that I will point out is that there's too much attention paid to marginal tax rates in the news, and not other aspects of the tax system like deductions, investment tax credits, loss carry-forwards and carry-backs, foreign tax credits, etc. Those things have the potential to have just as much an effect on growth as marginal tax rates, but marginal tax rates are easier to understand. They're all ways of changing tax liabilities based on behavior by tweaking what counts as income rather than tweaking tax rates.
For a public audience, I think everyone should read Taxing Ourselves. It's been a while since I read it, but they're surely a discussion of taxes and growth.
So are there papers that address marginal tax rates and growth directly? A causal effect like this is a very difficult question to answer convincingly, because when it comes to changes in GDP, we don't have good counterfactuals. If you just want to see tax rates against GDP growth directly, I'm sure you can find that information via Google, but it's correlation not causation. Who knows what would have happened if taxes had not changed in 1986, or whether things in 1986 were so different from things now that studying responses to TRA86 are totally useless for 2012? Who knows if studying tax changes in all OECD countries really tells us much about tax and growth in general? The only paper I know of on this question is Romer & Romer. It was later published in the AER. There's a story behind this paper that I'm having trouble remembering; I think there's a growing strain of thought for why its methodology is misleading. Someone fill me in if they know more about this. There might be more papers like this in the macro literature (please someone reply if there are), but the data are pretty limited on this front.
Now, another way to approach this is to realize that, in order for taxes to affect growth, they have to affect behavior. If everyone did the exact same thing they did with a low marginal tax rate, then you'd just be shifting output from the "C" or "I" column to the "G" column. So how could taxes affect behavior? They could cause less investment, especially new investment, or they could cause people to work less, or consume less etc. Taxes would have to have strong effects on these things in order to affect growth. So here's the evidence I know of on that stuff. A lot of the attention is on the rich here, since they're the ones most affected by the top marginal tax rates on income, corporations, and capital gains (remember that these are all different tax rates, and might have differing effects on behavior/growth).
Does Atlas Shrug? The Economics of Taxing the Rich This edited volume is absolutely the best collection on this topic. If you read the articles, and then the peer-reviewed articles cited most often in them, then you'll know everything the economists know.
Diamond & Saez Have a great paper summarizing the evidence that's most relevant for income tax policy.
Saez, Slemrod, and Giertz summarize the evidence on a new-ish approach to answering these questions involving the Elasticity of Taxable income.
Read the articles, and pay attention to what's cited in the articles, and you'll be off to a good start.
>You continue to go on about your single rebuttal, that ignores the half a dozen other quotes from Krugman the OP cited.
The things I've said above do rebut all of those other points about interest rate cuts. Interest rate cuts themselves are not the main cause of bubbles, no matter how much you want to believe it.
>Your self-absorbed approach to intellectual debate is exactly the attitude that is so wrong with modern intellectual discourse
Look in the mirror. You Austrian idiots think that you are smarter than everyone else.
>why a fucking idiot like Krugman is still listened to after repeatedly calling for low interest rates to create a boom in housing
lol. Do you really think Krugman had any influence over Greenspan? Remember, Greenspan comes from a libertarian ideology background (so I guess the main lesson here is don't put such people in positions of power, right?). Also, as has been said a million times now: Krugman was predicting Greenspan's actions based on what Greenspan was likely thinking. You are dishonest if you say otherwise at this point because the evidence is irrefutable.
>I stated that Keynesians are fucking reckless and stupid for not realizing that artificial booms created by low interest rates inevitably lead to bubbles and crashes.
You still are ignoring the numerous other times in which low interest rates didn't lead to a crash. I guess evidence only counts if it supports your case, right?
>highly specific prediction explaining what sector of the economy was experiencing a bubble, what sub-sector of that sector, and for what reasons.
Ron Paul said nothing about credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, corruption from the rating agencies, overleveraging from the big banks in the shadow banking system, liar loans, and the psychology of bubbles (e.g. the house flipping shows). As for the GSEs, they existed for half a century without causing an implosion in the housing market. Paul's explanation is simply wrong.
https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Our-World-Age-Aggression/dp/0963233661
All the answers can be found in Mary Ruward's book.
Here is an excerpt from Mary that answer's your question directly.
http://www.ruwart.com/poverty.lpn.wpd.html
Fiction:
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is a great start (good critique of anarchist philosophy).
The Red Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson actually cites Mondragon and discusses cooperative economics in detail.
After The Deluge (of Critical Mass fame) by Chris Carlsson is a novel about a post-capitalist San Francisco.
Non-fiction:
After Capitalism by Seymor Melman.
America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperovitz.
Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism by Richard Wolff.
Capitalism's Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown by Richard Wolff.
After Capitalism by David Schweickart.
Against Capitalism by David Schweickart.
Capitalism or Worker Control by David Schweickart
Putting Democracy to Work by Frank T Adams.
Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard.
Humanizing the Economy: Co-operatives in the Age of Capital by John Restakis.
Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution by Marjorie Kelly.
For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America by John Curl.
As I hear, outside the US, "libertarianism" retains its historical meaning as the anti-statist wing of socialism. Libertarian socialism.
(The political term "libertarianism" was coined in the 1850's by an anarcho-communist, in order to get around a French ban on anarchist writings. In the 1950's, the term was appropriated by US right-wingers, in response to the Progressive movement's appropriation of "liberal.")
Economics is important, but with a big caveat: it's a social "science," easily affected by politics. (Along the lines of Feynman's warnings.) This holds true for Marxism as well, not just neoclassical econ. The best introduction to econ I personally know was actually written by a libertarian socialist, Robin Hahnel. He makes clear that econ is a flexible science, despite claims to the contrary. When he discusses "laws," like "law of supply and demand," he takes care to put them in scare-quotes.
The Law by Frederic Bastiat (awesome, short, soooo many quotable quotes)
Healing Our World by Dr. Mary Ruwart (old version available free)
Haven't read any of his books (have listened to many lectures and radio show), but something by Harry Browne should do quite nicely. I've heard great things about Why Government Doesn't Work
Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity - John Stossel (do check out his excellent Fox Business show "Stossel" on hulu.com, and look for his old 20/20 specials on libertarianism - they're fantastic)
good economists: Peter Schiff, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Walter Block
You might be better off waiting til you get more comfortable with libertarianism, but G. Edward Griffin's Creature From Jekyll Island is a must read. It's more about the monetary system and the Federal Reserve than libertarianism in general though.
I haven't read anything that makes a good argument against libertarianism, but can recommend a guy who makes a seemingly good argument against capitalism and for socialism - Michael Parenti. I haven't read any of his pro-socialist books (but have one on foreign policy called The Terrorist Trap which is quite good and very short. Libertarians and socialists tend to agree on not inviting war and not waging war). But I have listened to his pro-socialist lectures - they're well delivered and impassioned and a person who didn't know any better would easily be tempted. They're worth listening to to use his arguments and twist them to actually make the case FOR libertarianism. He'll use some faulty facts/data that leftists typically do such as "Hoover was an ardent free-market advocate and we can blame him and capitalism for causing the Great Depression" (we can blame him for the depression all right (prolonging it, to be specific), not b/c he was a capitalist but b/c he really started all the policies that FDR continued when he got into office)
Your mixing up the FairTax with a Steve Forbes & Dick Armies flat tax.
The flat tax is usually a flat income tax for individuals and businesses. No deductions. A plain and simple rate that depending on the individual, says it should be set between 13 and 18%. 15% is the number I heard the most.
The FairTax is a consumption good on goods and services; a sales tax. It's 23%. In this scenario, the poor and middle class don't pay a higher percentage of taxes. Someone posted a couple weeks ago a graph, and it showed that the rich pays the same percentage of their income on several different areas. The difference was in savings. Where the poor save very little of their income and the rich save a higher amount. This is because the rich end up spending more on luxury goods such as lobster, Mercedes, and huge houses. Also, under the FairTax, used goods aren't taxed, so the poor and middle class can purchase used cars and houses and get further ahead. The FairTax also replaces death, gift, capital gains, corporate, and property taxes at the federal level. Imagine the growth that will occur with the US goes from number 1 highest business taxes at 35% to the lowest of 0%. The poor are also completely untaxed up to the poverty level.
Anyways, there is no perfect tax system since taxation philosophically is no different than theft. I do however favor the simplicity of the FairTax and love how it ends social engineering via the elimination of tax deductions.
Amazon shows you can get a used copy of the Fair Tax book for a penny plus shipping. Give it a read and bring it up more in discussion here at r/libertarian.
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by Shiller and Akerloff
Predictably Irrational by Daniel Ariely
One Economics, Many Recipes By Dani Rodrik
Each book encourages readers to think differently about economics than the standard policy models dictate. The first two focus on the role of human psychology in economic decision making, while Rodrik's work is one of the preeminent works on second-best development economics, which looks to find policy solutions that are specific to the social, political and economic context in which they will be implemented.
This one will cover all the bases:
Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems
This is why get out and vote campaigns are actually harmful. It convinces uneducated voters to go out and essentially vote randomly, bringing down the overall quality of the public discourse.
Bryan Caplan lays this argument out nicely in his book The myth of the rational voter
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Days-Destruction-Revolt-Chris-Hedges/dp/1568588240
That is the same family o logic the con tax scam is part of. Theoretical incentive does not neccessarily equal real life incentives especialy in as an abstracted and reductionist economical model that those two base their logic on.
The first article is by the man who quite literally wrote the primary text book on Modern Monetary Theory, L Randall Wray. https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Money-Theory-Macroeconomics-Sovereign/dp/0230368891 He's one of the most important theorists behind MMT. So, the point is that QE =/= MMT. You have a good weekend too.
Dear llordlloyd,
I am not an expert in taxation, but there is theory of optimal taxation called Ramsay taxation that to minimize tax distortion and inefficiencies, the tax rate has to be *inversely proportional" with its elasticity. The idea here is that higher tax rate lowers incentive to work. But if a person's effort on a particular occupation is inelastic, a high tax rate is efficient because it only reduces work effort by a small amount, while an occupation in which its work effort is sensitive to a higher tax rate, then a smaller tax rate should be implemented because you don't want to drastically reduce the amount of work effort.
I wish I could tell you more about taxation but Joel Slemrod's Taxing Ourselves is a good layman's book on the subject of taxation.
So then I would ask what would be correct. Using you examples.
I didn't want to get into this but what the hell.
Personally I believe in a national sales tax. It is based on consumption. Currently, basing a tax on income is counter-intuitive. You are punishing the very thing that drives our economy and the welfare of the nation. For more on this, read http://www.amazon.com/FairTax-Book-Neal-Boortz/dp/0060875410
There's a section in the FairTax book that talks about how companies tailor their business plans around corporate tax breaks, then lobby for more tax breaks. The complexity of the tax code gives Washington lobbyists a huge amount of power, which is how they make their living.
The end result is, companies that succeed are not those offering the best service to the consumer, but those who achieve the best alignment between the type of business they do and the structure of the tax law. Higher corporate taxes will not change this. Every time you add complexity to the tax laws, the corporate lobbyists will be back, making sure the exceptions suit them.
I believe the answer is a SIMPLE tax code.
> I think some economic debates could benefit from tabooing “money” in favor of “energy.”
Remind's me of JM Greer's Wealth of Nature, along with other fringey theorists and peak-oil people. Modernity is built on cheap energy; what happens when energy isn't so cheap? Economies are too abstracted to keep going.
His book is a good read
https://www.amazon.com/AI-Superpowers-China-Silicon-Valley-ebook/dp/B0795DNWCF
You might be interested in the books of Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine and her latest This Changes Everything
James Rickards makes a pretty good case for going back to the gold standard in The New Case For Gold
> And at the end of the day, you really, really don't want deflationary spirals
You need to make a distinction between deflation that's caused by inflationary monetary policies (where falling prices are caused by a bad economy) and normal deflation due to reduced monetary supply. Banks and mainstream economists hate deflation because it encourages savings and penalizes the holding of debt.
It's not a defense of conservatism, but Liberals should read Healing our world in an age of aggression by Mary Ruwart.
Free ebook here
This book changed my life, and view of politics. I was raised by card carrying members of the US Socialist Party.
Honestly, I just had lunch and I dont have enough blood in my brain to have a coherent deep political argument. But the idea is that voting is just more of a process where uninformed people elect a 4 year dictator. And they are not uninformed because they choose to, they are uninformed because its impossible to know about every little detail of what is happening. You should learn about public choice theory or read "The myth of the rational voter" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies/dp/0691129428). Youll realize that a lot of the problems we have now is because we live in a democracy.
Governing The Firm
Cooperatives and Local Development
Humanizing the Economy
The Cooperative Workplace
The above books are useful if you are looking for a wide range of opinions and solid information on cooperatives. Some of them are more of "yay, cooperatives!" Whereas others are more academic discourses on cooperatives and their challenges.
Hope this is helpful.
Some good starting points
https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Nature-Economics-Survival-Mattered/dp/0865716730/
https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Economic-History-Geerat-Vermeij/dp/069112793X/
https://www.amazon.com/Energy-Civilization-History-MIT-Press/dp/0262035774/
https://www.amazon.com/Overshoot-Ecological-Basis-Revolutionary-Change/dp/0252009886/
https://www.amazon.com/Environment-Power-Society-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0231128878/
https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X/
http://bpeconomics.org/
https://biophyseco.org/
I think what has not helped the cause is that, in the 70's...scientists were saying that global cooling was a danger. In the 80's... it was the hole in the ozone layer. In the 90's...it became global warming. Then it became climate change...now it's "climate disruption."
There were dire predictions made that have not come to fruition.
Most of us, I think, are in favor of exploring all energy options. We don't agree with the government funneling money to alt energy companies that end up going bankrupt.
We are not in favor of people arguing that the capitalist system needs to be dismantled and all the wealth needs to be taken from people who have it.
http://www.amazon.com/This-Changes-Everything-Capitalism-Climate/dp/1451697384
We don't understand why the USA, which is working to become more Earth friendly, is the focus of the hatred when other nations are pumping way more pollution into the world.
I guess, in short, I don't like it that science has gotten into bed with politics.
Also ... some in the green movement seem to be incredibly cruel. There's been talking about criminalizing "deniers."
When you decide that [this](http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=zR73mcZW7B4) is an effective case for your cause...you might have some issues.
As a former socialist, I recommend "Healing our World: In a Age of Aggression" by Dr. Mary Ruwart.
Check out the book Taxing Ourselves.
Why is everyone suggesting watching Cosmos and the like? I think the problem is right here.
>"She’s been having regular break downs because she can’t find a job despite being bi-lingual and graduating magna cum laude. She feels like she has no structure in her life at the moment and that scares her to death."
She doesn't need to watch videos about "the beauty of nature". She needs to find something that can act as a source of meaning in her life, because it sounds like she feels useless at the moment. Get involved with charity work or political activism. Positively changing the quality of life for a family or a community will make it clear that our actions have significance right now.
Edit: Once again plugging Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, The Life You Can Save, Hopes and Prospects, and The ABC's of Political Economy
Not an article, but most tax economists (that I know) would suggest you read Taxing Ourselves by Slemrod and Bakija
edit: to hedge
I just bought a book about cooperatives. I haven't read it yet, but it's got good reviews on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Humanizing-Economy-Co-operatives-Age-Capital/dp/086571651X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409343161&sr=8-1&keywords=cooperatives
You could always speak with an attorney who specializes in business law. Tell them your intentions and ask them for a report on any legal possibilities available in your area.
If you do not like the current system there are plenty of alternatives out there being pushed. Start looking into alternative tax systems.
I support the Fairtax because it moves the power directly to the citizens of the United States. Of course that is not the only benefit.
Do your homework. I suggest reading the book and perhaps the follow up book.
Just remember the people who wrote the book are obviously for this system so keep that in mind. It is hard to read anything without it having a bias towards one thing or another. Use your own discretion for information you find that is pro-fairtax and anti-fairtax.
Sorry to hijack BUT... Enough (not a lot) of the comments here made feel that a lot of people could use a nice primer on taxes (esp the income tax)
I recommend reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/Taxing-Ourselves-4th-Edition-Citizens/dp/0262693631
It is a very good book that merely seeks to inform the reader about taxes never taking a stand by condoning or condemning. It was published in 2008 and the statistics reflect that BUT the underlying analysis is still relevant AND it is easy to attain up to date statistics.
Funniest thing about the book is the opening quote:
Albert Einstein, "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
> Ask yourself this, which is more insane; my proposed abolition of the price system, or a world where people expend real, physical effort on a massive scale to optimize imaginary and meaningless arbitrage?
Your proposed abolition of the price system. By the longest shot I can imagine.
The problem is that you don't see the essential nature of price systems and arbitrage. The problem is that you've concluded that they're either arbitrary or meaningless.
If you want to turn a critical eye toward your own beliefs / arguments, I'd recommend some literature like - https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Real-People-Introduction-Austrian/dp/1479220809
I'm not saying the above is gospel, I'm just saying that you have a lot of beliefs that you don't seem to have challenged / balanced with the available counter-arguments.
> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0795DNWCF/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
It so rare to find someone on reddit who is open to at least learning about a new idea. :)
If you want to learn more you can check out the FairTax.org website. There was also a book and a follow-up book written about it. Finally, you can check out the actual text of the proposed House bill.
Is the plan perfect? Nope, but there are no perfect plans when people are involved. I just think its better what we have right now and its the best idea I've seen to replace the current system.
I always like the way Sam put it in his book review of “The Theft of a Decade”
> ...As a voting and policy-making bloc, the Baby Boomer generation rearranged national economic priorities to benefit their generation, starting in the 1980s under Reagan and accelerating into the 1990s once Clinton, the first Boomer president, took office. As economic policies favored consumption over investment, short-term returns favored need-it-now Boomer priorities over invest-in-our-future Millennial needs - the same needs the Boomers had several decades prior and had benefited from under the policies of their forebears. This much is true, and the author is absolutely onto something in terms of why productivity has stagnated and why young adults today face far worse long-term economic prospects than their parents' generation did.
He is also right in that it is essentially a repeat argument of Canon Giibneys “A Generation of Sociopaths”
If you want to get the basics in an easily readable and fun way, I highly recommend How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes by Peter Schiff
If you had limited time and wanted it to be a fun leisure read, that's the one. It's a great intro and great to loan out to your friends who haven't been exposed to these ideas, but have an open mind.
Other great books are referenced here to help to give you a more technical understanding. I personally like Economics for Real People
Finally, consider listening to the Tom Woods Show Podcast. Commute sized interviews with experts in different areas. I learn a ton listening to this.
First that comes to mind is The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.
I remember reading this book when it came out in 2005 and it really pushed me over the edge from the anti-capitalist, hard left perspective that I'd been attached to for many years. It was particularly important because it argued directly against Adbusters and their Culture Jamming practices that I thought were potentially, if not actually effective.
The way they described the cyclical nature of counter culture growth and co-option by mainstream commercial culture was something that I had noticed in the background of my mind but had never seen laid out so clearly.
I had also just finished reading Kalle Lassn's Culture Jam and Micheal Albert's Parecon prior to this. Those two books by people I really respected were so badly thought out and so obviously written without critical input that I was already starting to move away from their ideas anyway. The Rebel Sell was the catalyst that let me see how pointless and silly some of that stuff was and let me completely break away.
>It really isn't - I've read the Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy several times, and I think it's a pretty fair reading of what he says. If there is a more substantial resource out there, let me know - but it's certainly glossed over in the 7DIF.
I feel like Mosler's piece is politics, not economics. To the extent MMT has a foundational text, it's Wray's.
>As far as the central topic of discussion, isn't MMT pretty firmly on the "raise taxes" solution for inflation?
Yes, this is orthodox MMT. It's not the only answer, but it is the default answer, and one that will work reliably.
> Do you have links to the debate you're referencing?
It's pretty central to most literature on MMT.
This is a pretty readable piece to use as a starting point.
Parecon: Life After Capitalism
The first one:
https://www.amazon.com/Fair-Tax-Book-Saying-Goodbye/dp/0060875496/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1473266161&sr=8-1&keywords=the+fair+tax+book+neal+boortz
The Second:
https://www.amazon.com/FairTax-Answering-Critics-Neal-Boortz/dp/0061540463/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1473266161&sr=8-2&keywords=the+fair+tax+book+neal+boortz
I disagree. I rather enjoyed the book, and I should probably pick up the sequel.
>Unlike real sciences, leading academic economists disagree wildly about almost everything, from the details to the foundations of what correct economic policy os.
This isn't really, strictly, true. Nearly every modern economic school of thought, for example, acknowledges that free markets allocate resources in a way that maximizes economic efficiency. What you are thinking of is the difference between normative and positive economics, what ought to be vs. what is. People, economists included, often disagree on what our goals should be and thus are likely to espouse different policies. Keynesian economists believe the market distortions are an acceptable sacrifice for the short term gains of stimulus spending, while Monetarists are not.
Here's an interesting (whether you agree with it or not) take on the topic. And here's a lecture by the author.
Not really. One vote never matters, so they know they have little incentive to bother spending much time figuring out the right answer. Even worse, when bad policies pass, they effect everyone, so voting for bad policy never affects anyone's relative status, so the feedback loop between bad votes and suffering for them is extremely weak.
Here is a good book about political economy. The author is self-described libertarian socialist.
Hi Nath,
I'll reply to your points but will link through to places where we've already discussed some of these points.
Primarily we're discussing things on our nascent forum:
http://aep.freeforums.net/
and on our Facebook Group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/520023444868205/
Tim and I are also doing a weekly podcast which is posted on YouTube and iTunes and in an XML feed:
http://www.australianemploymentparty.org/podcast.xml
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt3B5PX86GE_IXgZtar8xXw
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/lets-get-fiscal/id1126315509?mt=2
This will give you a good feel for where everything is going in addition to the content on the website.
"I reckon MMT is like a cult sometimes. :)"
Yes it can feel that way.
"What exactly is the proposal for the specifics of the jobs - what is the nature of these jobs that couldn't be better done by automation or robots?"
The nature of jobs will change over time specifically because of automation, but in terms of work that could be done this year, there is a lot. The level of automation that will make human labour and thinking obsolete is, in my opinion, 1000s of years in the future but even if it's 50 years away that's still 50 years of work that needs to be done in the meantime.
I'm doing some posts in the forum today about specifics of a Job Guarantee but Tim and I have also discuss this in the following episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNi_4--KG9g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPn8T9MI9sc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlLa4jixzoc
"Are we going to guarantee people professional jobs"
The jobs are fit to the skills of the people, not the other way around. So if there are people with professional skills who want to put those skills to use they can certainly be incorporated into a JG programme.
"and professional salaries?
No the wage is a socially inclusive minimum wage, same for all workers in the JG.
This is not to be confused with public works spending and other government projects such as R&D which is just normal government employment.
"Or is it going to be unskilled stuff like picking up garbage/planting trees: something that if we automate it, can happen 24/7 and with no need for lunch/sleep/sickdays and not have people doing menial tasks for their dole."
Some jobs might be things like landcare or community beautification/restoration. If work is automated, then we find something else for JG employees to do.
The description of this as being "menial tasks for their dole" is inaccurate: the majority of unemployment people want to work, and a JG job can be a place to learn skills that will improve prospects of private sector employment.
The common characterisation of JG jobs as "menial tasks" is usually the result of a lack of imagination and research.
Here's an example: markets and festivals employ a very diverse range of skills from administrative, design, marketing to artists and performers, production crews etc. Think something like the Melbourne Comedy Festival. This provides public benefit, is enjoyable to work on, can expand and contract counter cyclically.
That's one example, obviously that one solution doesn't solve all unmployment but you can see the types of attributes we're looking for in work that can be done.
One of the main features of a job guarantee is that it's administrated locally and funded federally so it's up to the community (including those who are unemployed) to figure out specifically what needs to be done. The government will provide support for local administrators, this has been designed in a lot of detail by CoFFEE and we'll be working with that as our academic policy basis.
"I think a basic income is a far better model than job guarantee"
Basic income is just welfare so we can just call it that.
A universal basic income is a terrible idea. Just search "UBI vs JG" to see all the reasons why.
Having better welfare systems is not mutually exclusive to having a Job Guarantee, but it is certain that welfare doesn't solve unemployment, and in particular doesn't solve the problem of youth unemployment which is worst amongst 15 - 19 year old school leavers who are unemployed at a rate of 64%. They should be able to get work under a job guarantee that will prepare them for private sector employment. If we just give them money, how does that improve the prospects of our society to produce anything meaningful.
"And the old MMT government printing money to solve all problems"
All government spending is money creation. I have done some basic explainers here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOV_u-RWSCY&list=PLT4Jth7jJj8Z9FyAycR_WWuVmiP2Ou0gm
But even if you look at our current regulatory framework, you can see that government spending is money creation: the government issues bonds in order to deficit spend. Where do the bonds come from?
They're "debt", same as reserves are. In fact, bonds and money are virtually the same thing; bonds are basically "reserves on which we pay interest".
"I believe Pauline Hanson was in favour of that and she's in the system again."
So?
"In the real world of doing this you get inflation"
We always have a little bit of inflation (because it's much better than deflation) but a job guarantee maintains price stability.
"Just because austerity and neoliberalism is bullshit, doesn't make MMT right or better"
MMT is 100% right. You can disagree with the policy outcomes and have a progressive, conservative or regressive approach on top of MMT, but it is certainly the most complete description of how monetary systems work.
"In terms of austerity: Inflation impacts on the poorest too - so print too much money = eroding what little the poor have + increasing their costs."
So we shouldn't implement a universal basic income. A JG is the best way to decide how much the government should deficit spend in order to maintain aggregate demand at a suitable level without destabilising prices, and at the same time increasing the real capital resources available to the society.
"So I don't really see a job guarantee being a forward thinking policy"
That's because you don't really understand it. I'd recommend reading this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Money-Theory-Macroeconomics-Sovereign/dp/0230368891
and following along the discussions on our forum.
"much as its proponents want to believe it's "progressive""
I don't really think in terms of "what's progressive" but it's certainly a good idea.
"Sounds more like a conservative wet dream"
No, but UBI is.
"(it is a work for the dole scheme"
No, it's not. WFTD is a private sector wage subsidy for a poverty wage. A JG is very different from that.
"Abbott's "Green army" is an example of an MMT compliant concept)"
All concepts in economics are "MMT compliant" because MMT describes how money and economics works.
Abbott's Green Army is a terribly designed and implemented proposal created by a monstrous moron.
"and seems to have somehow ignoring that automation is an inevitable thing for the last several decades"
Everyone always says that at all times in history ever. Just because you can't imagine jobs that will exist when trucks are driven autonomously doesn't mean they won't exist.
We are 1000's of years from Star Trek. In the meantime (and especially in the very near term) there is lots of work that needs to be done.
"It's clinging to the idea that there is actually enough meaningful jobs to give everyone after all the progress via technology"
There are. You just have to stop thinking that the only thing unemployed people are fit to do is pick up garbage.
"- if that was the case then automation/technology and science would need to down tools."
No, we never advocate artificially constraining productivity in order to create jobs.
We do, however, acknolwedge that if the spoils of automation are shared evenly then we should all be working less! Just not zero.
Thanks for the recommendation. Also, I've heard that Naomi Klein's new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate is good.
Again, [A Foreign Policy of Freedom] (http://www.amazon.com/Foreign-Policy-Freedom-Commerce-Friendship/dp/0912453001) will go a long way.
EDIT - I understand you to be asking, what ought we do about the current threat of ISIL rampaging through our interests over there. To me it is evident that the US is unable to solve any problems in Iraq, let alone restore and maintain a peaceful, stable government. So any solution must come from the people who live there. How odd...
Any idea about this book? https://www.amazon.com/New-Case-Gold-James-Rickards/dp/1101980761
Aside from your (incorrect) presumption about my voting habits (as though information about me could correctly tell you about the whole system) I'm replying to suggest you get a copy of Implementation by Pressman and Wildavsky
You have no idea how bad the boomer generation is. Read this book and you will be utterly disgusted. A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America https://www.amazon.com/dp/031639579X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_jnJVAbJW0K8AG
Implementation. literally. You'll run into politics for days when talking about implementation.
Here's a great book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Implementation-Expectations-Washington-Programs-Foundation/dp/0520053311
Archives for the links in comments:
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> Your attempt at an ad hominem attack on my bravery is duly noted.
My comment regarding your willingness to consider presented evidence isn't part of my argument for the FairTax. It was an observation on your unwillingness to participate in good-faith conversation by availing yourself of presented information.
> As I mentioned elsewhere, with this 'prebate' we'd still have conservatives arguing what costs are basic, and what are not.
No, it's spelled out in the plan. I haven't read the newer critic rebuttal book yet.
> In the end, the fair tax would hurt the poor more than the rich.
I presented evidence that it wouldn't; where's your evidence? Regardless, I will concede this: it's hard to imagine a new, more equitable, tax program that wouldn't tax lower-income people more.
Also from Walter Williams:
> Aside from the fairness issue, 47 percent of taxpayers having no federal income tax liability is dangerous for our nation. These people become natural constituents for big-spending, budget-wrecking, debt-creating politicians. After all, if you have no income tax liability, what do you care about either raising or lowering taxes? That might explain why the so-called Bush tax cuts were not more popular. If you’re not paying income taxes, why should you be happy about an income tax cut? Instead, you might view tax cuts as a threat to various handout programs that nearly 50 percent of Americans enjoy.
At the VA, the fiscal year and the bidding process overlap such that almost always, three months of spending are lost. Furthermore, unable to buy in bulk, as they must clear each purchase, they end up expending costs on that paperwork AND lose bulk discounts.
It's been shown the PMCs cost more than not private:
http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2012/11/dod-contractors-cost-nearly-3-times-more-than-dod-civilians.html
Contracting is not a panacea for efficiency:
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/11/5_biggest_myths_about_federal_contractors/
In fact, 'waste' is itself almost entirely determined by local institutional factors & competing interest groups:
https://www.amazon.com/Bureaucracy-Government-Agencies-Basic-Classics/dp/0465007856
https://www.amazon.com/Implementation-Expectations-Washington-Programs-Foundation/dp/0520053311/ref=pd_sim_14_57?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0520053311&pd_rd_r=A295HS12WJQ12NHY8YVX&pd_rd_w=ro3GA&pd_rd_wg=fTj0o&psc=1&refRID=A295HS12WJQ12NHY8YVX
Finally, I have issues with the particular costs incurred (contracting to a Tech company).
https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Sociopaths-Boomers-Betrayed-America/dp/031639579X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542130665&sr=8-1&keywords=a+generation+of+sociopaths+how+the+baby+boomers+betrayed+america
> yeah but what if i spent years coming up with my elegant solution. i bring it to market. and you copy it in a matter of days and compete with me. you saying that's okay?
I'm saying that's business. Besides, most peoples' inventions aren't really uniquely revolutionary. Look at the telephone, the steam engine, the television - all were being worked on by multiple people at the same time; they were more the natural progression of human advancement than one man's innovation. Besides, you can still reap more benefits from your technology by being the first to market, if you know what you're doing. That's nothing to sneeze at.
> i agree, government shouldn't be considered the oracle (especially these days). however, if 'we' could somehow keep special interests (polarizing interest away from everyone at large) out of it, i'd think there could be useful legislation.
Everyone is a special interest. Politicians are special interests. One of the problems with government is indeed the governors - human beings. There is no way to prevent that kind of corruption, because it's inevitable. Read Federalist No. 10; even the US founding fathers knew about the problem of "factions" two centuries ago and could do nothing to prevent it.
> it's not so much the government as an institution, it's the people allowed to harness it for their own selfish purposes.
People will always harness government for their own selfish purposes. That's part of why it is government as an institution - giving any one group of people that much power over any other group, no matter how many checks you try to impose, is dangerous. It's asking for abuse. At least if there were a market for protection services, there would be competition and accountability. As Bryan Caplan has astutely pointed out, Democracy is a commons, not a market, and it has all of the inherent problems of thereof.
> Your first point is woefully absurd to the point of idiocy. All of those people have been ruthlessly scrutinized and strawmanned. There are too many respectable people who talk highly of those men to believe that they actually hung out with Nazis.
This isn't an actual argument; I'm not sure if it's a logical fallacy or just a statement of nothing, but in any case, the Ron Paul letters thing is very well documented.
>The Mises institute is an economics think tank not a political one. But what I’m talking about is what would a good state look like rather than a bad state. That’s a metric we are using not some mental gymnastics to justify a state. A good state acts more like the free market than a bad state does. To just say “Public libraries are illegitimate.” That’s fine, but they still exist as they do and I am still interested in how they conduct themselves.
The problem here is that you approach it in a way which fundamentally legitimizes the claim of the State. "I don't really think you own this property legitimately, but I certainly support your right to act like you do so" is extraordinarily weak sauce. Additionally, it ignores the extent to which the State is responsible for generating the problems you seek state governance to resolve. Criminality, for example, is largely the result of State policies, both insofar as most crimes are not property crimes and therefore not crimes but rather justifications for the expansive use of state violence on marginalized populations, and also in that state policy creates economic winners and losers which, in turn, increase the propensity of those losers to turn to criminality to sustain themselves. As long as the State exists, the things that justify the State's power will exist, because the State is largely responsible for generating them. Not entirely, but largely.
>Moving on, you are forced to interact with people when your wealth is violently appropriated to pay for the subsidization of people through the programs I presented before.
Okay, but far, far, far more of my wealth is violently appropriated to pay for programs which benefit white American citizens; and far, far, far more of my wealth is appropriated to pay for the salaries of the violent thugs who enforce those laws. And again, the easier solution is that we simply stop violently appropriating people's wealth, not that we reduce immigrant communities because they might increase the absolute amount of wealth violently appropriated. And furthermore, increased immigration, while possibly increasing absolute welfare costs, almost certainly reduces relative welfare costs, both in that immigrants disproportionately do not benefit from the welfare state (particularly illegals who very typically aren't able to benefit from it at all but are still subject to taxation) and in that, by paying taxes, they increase the size of the pie from which the government violently appropriates its funds.
>The one third of second wave immigrants went home because they didn’t like it in America and went back home for whatever reason. That doesn’t happen anymore due to subsidies and artificially granted due to the policies of the USCIS.
So the success of an immigration system is judged by the amount of people who don't stay here? That doesn't seem like a relevant metric at all; furthermore, the gap between the United States and the rest of the world in quality of life is much larger now than it was during earlier waves of immigration. Even if you're from a relatively developed country, like the U.K. or France, the standard of living for someone falling at the same point of the income distribution is typically going to be significantly higher in the United States. When there aren't exogenous political factors which compel immigration, like an ongoing civil war or something like that, economic factors tend to be the most important factor driving immigration. If you're better off in America than anywhere else, there's no reason to leave. That speaks to the relative success of the American model, compared to other countries, in generating wealth and standard of living. It doesn't speak to failures within our immigration system.
>We already have an agreement on the welfare state, so please tell me how someone sponsoring their elderly grandparent to live in the United States and receive American social security without having paid into it reduces my tax burden?
>But you will just say “but that’s rare.” But that doesn’t matter, it’s a principle not a statistical matter.
Well, it's not rare. It doesn't happen. You only qualify for social security if you accumulate a certain number of 'social security credits' through payroll taxation. Generally, unless you've worked for about a decade in the U.S., you can't qualify, though there are some exceptions in cases where the U.S. has an agreement with a foreign country to allow it (this is almost entirely limited to developed countries like France, Italy, and Japan, and doesn't really benefit immigrants from developing countries). Ditto Medicare.
Our welfare state isn't designed with any form of universality in mind; it's one of the key axes of distinction which separate us from the Nordic and continental models (e.g. Germany and France). The book is going to be somewhat dated now in terms of the policies described since it was written a while ago, but consider reading Gosta Esping-Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (link).
>You entirely ignored my whole story about my friend who can’t be a good capitalist, but I guess that makes it easier to smear myself and The Mises people as racists.
I'm trying to keep this relatively contained in terms of length since I don't want to start hitting the upper bounds of Reddit's character limits in posts.
>But my main point being here is that I agree 100% that modern American immigration is a horrible government program. My proof being that my friend is being denied despite the fact he could produce horrendous wealth for the country, whereas people who are reliant on the state for a whole ton of stuff are being subsidized and let in. If there was a free market immigration system, this would be totally backwards.
Except, that isn't true. Depending on how we define high vs. low-skilled immigrants in terms of labor market position, we get different stats, but in no circumstances do low-skilled immigrants outnumber skilled immigrants. If we compare by type of visa, the US issued 197,129 H-1B visas to "skilled" immigrants vs. 83,600 H-2B visas for "unskilled" laborers source 1 source 2. It evens out a bit when you consider the 134,368 H-2A visas for seasonal migrant farm labor, but these are typically temporary seasonal jobs granted to nonresident aliens who typically can only stay for about ten months. In terms of new prospective Americans, we let in nearly two times the number of skilled immigrants compared to unskilled immigrants.
It's closer when we consider by education, though; 55% of immigrants have high school education or better.
>Like I said the fact that school budgets are higher, have worse results, and that my taxes are raised is not insignificantly based on the fact that there needs to be so much superfluous stuff related to public education that there wouldn’t be in a free market system.
But immigrants aren't a burden on the American education system, in net. Or at least, I've yet to see any actual evidence they are. I mean, insofar as I'm sure property ownership is less common in immigrant communities compared to native communities, they may be relatively less likely to be directly responsible for property tax payments which fund American schools; the thing is, that's built into their rent (unless their landlord is an idiot) so I don't even buy that argument.
>Oh by the way, you have to be naturalized to vote, and pray tell do naturalized people tend to vote for more freedom, less spending, and less regulation?? I think we both know the answer to that.
This is a terrible argument, though, since we can draw all sorts of arbitrary demographic lines to point out that lots of people tend to vote for less freedom, more government, and more regulation. And in fact, I'd argue that there isn't a single demographic that doesn't, on average, do precisely that. When fewer than 2% of Americans routinely vote for the Libertarian Party (the only political movement in the United States that can claim to be in favor of more freedom, less government, and less regulation), literally everyone's a villain.
Though, for what it's worth, the only evidence I've seen suggests that immigrants tend to be very similar to natives, increasingly so over time (i.e. second-generation Americans from immigrant families are more like natives in terms of political opinion than first-generation Americans). See here and here.
Plus, if ideology is really a concern, why not just screen for ideology? We don't let anyone in if you don't express a belief in individual property rights. I'd be willing to accept that, as long as we start kicking people out on that basis, too, including citizens, and particularly citizens, since they can and do vote for more government and less freedom.
>But just out of curiosity, if every single dollar of social spending were shut down tomorrow and whoever was allowed to leave or come to the US was just totally free after that, would you be happy with the outcome?
In re: this specific discussion, yes. More generally, as long as the government exists, I won't be.
"Days of destruction, days of revolt" is a graphic report that tells multiple narratives of modern day america, coal country is one. It's an excellent, albeit really depressing series of essays.
https://www.amazon.com/Days-Destruction-Revolt-Chris-Hedges/dp/1568588240
Chris Hedges
has a book about the nation's "sacrifice zones." I haven't had a chance to read it but the guy seems to have a good head on his shoulders.
> ... why not focus on a robust and transparent regulatory state rather than against capitalism itself...
This thread isn't made for an economics discussion so I don't want to go too far into it here.
Capitalism in any of its incarnations can't exist without a State. De facto, de jure, it doesn't make a difference. State's themselves are power centers. The only thing that imposes constraints on them is either outside force, or their own populations.
> America will always be essentially capitalistic.
That's just categorically incorrect. Capitalism's been challenged here all the time. Many hybrid socialist models were developed here early in our economic development. The socialist principle that the workers should own the means of production was an official slogan of the Republican Party at one point in our history. The AFL-CIO, socialist and communist parties in the US are the reasons we have an 8 hour work day, occupational health codes and so many workplace protections that persist to the present day. All taken for granted now by people who think history began on the day they were born.
History is full of examples, (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here). And that's just a place to begin.
John Curl's Humanizing the Economy is solid, and the beginning and final chapters get into some interesting theoretical territory.
Pretty much anything by Brett Fairbairn, but this essay is a good place to start.
Though he passed on a few years ago, I believe Ian MacPherson was one of the 20th century's greatest scholars of cooperativism. Start with this collection of essays that he curated.
Finally, if you're interested in credit unions, here's a list of book reviews I wrote while in grad school.
https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Sociopaths-Boomers-Betrayed-America/dp/031639579X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521147183&sr=8-1&keywords=a+generation+of+sociopaths&dpID=519TsNPyxXL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch
I think it's a great book. I dunno I haven't read too much of it yet, but basically the entire ethos of baby boomers as a generation, is to fuck over younger generations for the enrichment of themselves.
It's the only book that basically blames an entire generation for our country's failures in recent times.
Like Baby boomers, they get social security. I'm not going to get social security, because we have racked up so much debt due to debt financed tax cuts, that those programs will be impossible to fund by the time I'm their age. I believe down the road, the biggest federal expense won't be the military budget, Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. It will be servicing our national debt. And the majority of that debt will be attributable to Baby boomers running our country.
FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics. Just published back in Feb. The older one appears out of print now.
Yes. I think the flat tax is a great plan. It eliminates all of the loopholes and thousands of pages of tax codes.
The book Fair Tax lays out exactly how the plan would work. I would suggest reading it if anyone is interested in just how screwed up the US tax code is and how much money is wasted dealing with taxes.
Well said. I couldn't agree more. Have you read, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, by Bryan Caplan?
>http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691129428
Wait, is animal spirits an offensive term?
I'm the one being strawmanned here, he wrote an entire post painting me as an anarchist because I said the government should play a limited role in the economy, and then he ad hom'd me with the "you guys won a twofer". 9 upvotes, 0 downvotes.
You then strawman me and claim that I pretended my side was perfect, when I said I "tend to favor," which implies impartiality. I recognize the flaws of a completely free market.
Reddit is very intolerant and biased against conservativism. Even if I state plain facts that challenge the dogma I will be censored, as if downvotes are to punish dissent.
Shiller's a pretty smart guy - I recommend his work "Animal Spirits" for a general idea of the complicated and irrational nature of market forces.
http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Spirits-Psychology-Economy-Capitalism/dp/0691142335
Apart from being a citizen in what is called a social democracy, I do have some knowledge on the term, however in effect limited mostly to theories regarding the Nordic model and how welfare capitalism is done in the Nordic countries. So not as much theory on social democracy in itself as a concept, but rather more empirically perhaps, on how social democracies incorporates these notions into welfare and work policies.
With that said, I believe looking into the Nordic model will give you some good insights into what exactly it is that social democracy entails, and it will surely give you some additional "meat to the bone" after reading the wiki article.
A good start, I believe, is Gøsta Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (there are abridged versions available in various scholarly databases). I can also produce some key concepts from the book worth mentioning, if you like.
Perhaps if you could formulate more precicely what it is you're most interested in regarding social democracy, I could provide you with some more litterature or insights?
your State sales tax is a fully flat tax - nobody thinks State sales taxes are unfair.
How about answering my question? Is it not fair enough that 10% of the population pays 70% of the personal income taxes collected ??? If not, do you think it should be 75%? 85%? 95%? why?
If you really want to educate yourself, read "Taxing Ourselves":
http://www.amazon.com/Taxing-Ourselves-4th-Edition-Citizens/dp/0262693631/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335350735&sr=8-1
These two books started a philosophical shift in my life.
Also, Healing Our World by Dr. Mary J. Ruwart. It made my realize how wrong I was in my previous
The only reason your company can exist is because of an enormous amount of market manipulation by the government, the exact market manipulation you and Gary Johnson are against. I promise you, without it, you would be out of a job. Technologies like solar, wind, and hydrogen fuel cells suffer from massive start-up costs and would never be able to compete with fossil fuels which benefit form massive economies of scale. The free market got us into this mess because the free market, while it is good for lots of things, is terrible at discounting for the future costs of pollution, a lot of the problem being that it's so damn hard to know what those costs will be. The free market is why Lake Erie died. The free market is why Centralia, PA is completely uninhabitable. The free market is why people's water all over Pennsylvania is now flammable. The free market is why the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico is now crippled and will be for decades.
I have a Masters of Economics, my focus was Environmental Econ, and I'm working on my PhD in Envi Econ now. This is my life. I eat, breathe, and sleep environmental economics.
Here's some good reading on the subject:
Public Policies for Environmental Protection, Portney and Stavins (2000)
The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered, Greer (2011)
Environmental Policy: New Directions for the Twenty-first Century, Vig and Craft (2009)
The Environmental Case: Translating Values Into Policy, Layzer (2011)
And a couple blogs that I like:
env-econ.net
greeneconomics.blogspot.com
My point was that there are plenty of people who are thinking about what we'd transition to. For instance Gar Alperovitz's Pluralist Commonwealth, or the transition towns movement, or the various organisations, peer reviewed journals, and books researching and promoting co-operatives. And there are thousands more authors, thinkers, activists, and professionals doing the same thing. Brand's strength is in highlighting the problems and sharing that with a wide audience. In his book he does tackle what would come next (in broad strokes) but that's not his role. For that try A. Sen, Andrew Jackson, and Proudhon etc.; lessons learned from the Paris Commune and the Spanish Revolution (and Greece now); and experiences of people today setting up credit unions, co-ops, non-profits, and open-source enterprises.
edit: Also its not true that capitalism has been here for all of time. Charles Eisenstein discusses evidence for the gift society (start from "Let us begin by better understanding the dynamics of the gift...") in early civilisations. And capitalism didn't really start until after the beginning of the industrial revolution when people had large amount of capital not tied to land. People were still exploited obviously. The point is the system changed, so can change again!
China is not a [welfare capitalist state] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_capitalism#Welfare_capitalism_in_the_United_States) it would be more accurately described as authoritarian capitalism. Welfare capitalism refers to states that intervene in the economy, to varying degrees, to provide social welfare for citizens. While outdated, [The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism] (http://www.amazon.com/Three-Worlds-Welfare-Capitalism/dp/0691028575) breaks them down to three forms; social democratic, corporatist and liberal.
There really is no such thing as "conservative" economic theory - it's just economics. After 300 years of economic research, it's pretty clear that free market capitalism outperforms any kind of mixed economy or socialism.
For a good, easy-to-read introduction, I suggest you buy Economics for Real People or you can read it for free online here.
Don't try to "subvert her without her knowing", be forthright with your intentions.
If she likes to read or is willing to read, possibly suggest a "book swap" or just recommend her a book about libertarianism. For someone who might be coming from a more liberal or progressive persuasion, I would recommend Healing Our World by Mary Ruwart.
Healing Our World - Paperback Available from Amazon.com
Healing Our World - E-book
Healing Our World - Free Audiobook
yes, since the purchase of stock is a purchase of a company, you would pay your taxes at the pruchase time of the stock. but, after making you returns, there is no taxes due. you would only pay taxes on the money from your investment when you went and spent it again. check this book out (http://www.amazon.com/FairTax-Book-Neal-Boortz/dp/0060875410). Also there is a ton of 1%ers like Steve Forbes that support this taxation and it gets shut down by congress each time, because they know the real implications of what would happen (they couldnt by pass taxation anymore).
In the same vein:
The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered
The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age
Also, half of the stuff on /r/collapse.
Edit: These books talk explicitly about the "stored sunlight" concept. That's why I posted them as being relevant.
> Also ridding yourself of simple black and white solutions. Such as believing greed, malevolence and stupidity just disappearing when everyone is given a fair share.
Capitalism is a system which encourages greed and exploitation down to its core. Contemporary leftists are campaigning against the standard of living divide between sweat-shop conditions and top-1% wealth. If anyone thinks that the existence of these two dichotomies, as stark as the differences are, are in any way ethical, then their beliefs are absurd. We're not fighting against ending greed and malevolence - just economic and social justice and equality.
> Nothing about capitalism defies the sustainability of the environment.
https://www.amazon.de/This-Changes-Everything-Capitalism-Climate/dp/1451697384
Mountaintop-removal mining programs, fishing industries, carbon pollution, auto-industries, unsustainable corporate agriculture brought to you by Tyson and Monsanto - you name it. Capitalism and the culture of consumption is going to destroy swaths of the planet within the century, and pro-establishment politicians are entirely ignoring it.
We could say it's a Generation of Sociopaths.
A GENERATION OF SOCIOPATHS
How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bruce-cannon-gibney/a-generation-of-sociopaths/9780316395809/
or
https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Sociopaths-Boomers-Betrayed-America/dp/031639579X/
If you want your mind to be melted further, read Chris Hedges book, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt" where he intimately describes many of the cities of America as sacrifice zones: the exploitation of the land and resources for the sake of profit. It's not just Detroit you should be frightened up, it's also places like Pine Ridge where the Native Americans are consuming 13,000 cans of beer a day because employment is non existent and conditions on reservation are untenable. Or the decrepit and ravaged streets of Camden, New Jersey which has some of the highest unemployment numbers in the entire nation. Or the coal miners of West Virginia where once the beauty of the Blue Ridge mountains resemble more like landscapes on Mars. Not to mention the poor souls who had to go deep into the earth to extract this coal developed black lung disease, as they call it, yet they saw little to none of those profits from the corporations.
The overall narrative is Capitalism run amok. It's greed on a scale that is become biblical in nature. The willingness to profit over human life for the self interests of elite few who see nothing but growth and quarterly reports. If there's anything you should take away from my simple rant is this: We are only seen as commodities, similar to how to cattle are traded for consumerism. It's sick and revolting to witness, yet we embrace it in our daily lives as ubiquitously as we elect the same politicians each election cycle.
Welcome to the plutocracy mi amigo.
What I know I learned from this book although I don't need a book to see how utterly disconnected you are from reality.
It strikes me as no surprise you don't understand my comment. You've blown up your ego so much that you fail to see you statistically irrelevant you are to the broader picture of life and people on the reservation. And this is after someone thanked you for being an outlier.
It is downright insulting to read the thinly-veiled neoliberal nonsense you just spouted as if the systemic problems on the reservations can be solved by a free market. The free market is the exact reason reservations are the way they are.
Fact is you got very lucky. You probably also worked your ass off. I don't discount your hard work just like I don't discount your incredible luck.
Instead of reflecting on that, instead of considering it for what it is and trying to understand the experiences of other people...you spout some bullshit about lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps and how you don't need or want a handout in a situation where, again, you are statistically irrelevant.
But hey, you did it all yourself! In fact you never had a parent or a teacher or a mentor or a friend or an acquaintance or stranger offer you anything that might better your situation. No one gave you guidance or direction or a book to read or some text to study or shape the habits you use today.
It was all you.
Capitalism.
If you say, "well hey now, all the technology you're enjoying? Yeah, capitalism buddy ... or Hey, all the benefits of modern culture? Yeah, capitalism" you completely miss the point.
The profit-motive is completely unsustainable as Naomi Klein just laid out in her new book
Exactly. You need someone well-read in political theory.
Ron Paul for example has written and published a number of books, mostly on monetary policy and foreign policy:
A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship
Pillars of Prosperity
The Case for Gold
Gold, Peace, and Prosperity
End the Fed
Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom
He provides READING LISTS to his political opponents, like Rudy Giuliani:
Educating Rudy: The Ron Paul reading list
MMT: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0230368891