/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

I'm afraid we don't live in your head, OP. You're going to have to elaborate more on what you're even talking about if you want a serious discussion.

>>484882
If you don't know the individual in the picture you don't know enough about modern economics to comment here. Simple as idiot test.

quick do a Google Lens search so you pretend to know

>>484883
The people on this website (as well as all of 4chan?) ARE economic idiots. Try creating a fbi.gov room for this site and their whole personality is lmao weed bro.

>>484883
>modern economics
You mean the pseudoscientific discipline of comprising autistic mathematicians and "schools of thought" with models full of reality-detached assumptions that can't predict anything? Why is your school of thought better than any other school of thought?

>>484886
The OP picture is a former trader who birthed an autistic school, he barely cares about the mathy stuff and just spends all his time making Milton Friedman fans look like complete idiots.

>>484886
You have to know more than economics 101 to claim that there mere minimum knowledge of economics suffices. If only for the reason that economics 101 in America is where all the reactionary shit is. I think this is what OP is trying to say partially.

>>484888
Yea I guess. But it's also not any particular school I'm referencing. Even Dean Baker, who opposes the "school" of the OP picture is still far to the left of half this board on modern economic issues. Hell, even Paul Krugman is, and he's been right-wing most of his career. But at least he advocated for a trillion dollar economic plan to avoid a recession in 2009 when half this board would have been like "no let's go on sound money instead, the federal reserve did this" or whatever else nonsense.

>>484881
Friedman wanted UBI because he wanted to privatize social security. If you plug Friedman's UBI scheme into the accounting identities of contemporary capitalism, it would unravel the financial system in about a week.

But you might be able to modify UBI to make it work, at least for a while. If you introduce a wealth-cap, as in a maximum level of wealth. You can make UBI work. Where basically everything above the wealth-cap level gets diverted to the UBI. That prevents the financial unraveling.

About hording gold, it depends what you want to get out of it. If you want to speculate with metal commodities, that works just fine. If you are looking for ways to avoid using the banking system, gold probably isn't the best way for that.

>>484882
This is Mosler and he's a MMTler as in Modern Monetary Theory.

For the record I asked ogre the same OP question and the responses ranged from "I dunno communism lmao" and "well Friedman made some good points", just proving my point about Friedman worship knowing no bounds. That dude is evil as all hell and Mosler is extremely based for rejecting all of it.

It's true that MMT is basically capitalist economics and a series of small communal economies would be better than modern economics, but you can't just force communism to happen like J6 rioters without resource transfer first.

>>484892
even Marx basically advocated for a social democratic market state before full communism but that doesn't stop people from acting like moronic j6 rioters thinking violence solves everything (it doesn't)

What's wrong with UBI?

>>484894
>>484891

What he said, it was first pushed to inflate away welfare to a pittance.

Same guy who proposed it wanted to end housing vouchers to what would amount today do an allowance money after inflation.

Yang's solution to housing is somehow even more retarded than Milton Friedmans. He just proposes throwing unwanteds in mental hospitals like some communist countries.

>>484889
>half this board would have been like "no let's go on sound money instead, the federal reserve did this" or whatever else nonsense.
You sure have a some strange straw men residing in your head.

>>484892
>MMT is basically capitalist economics
It's just an empirical description of how money functions. People always seem to ascribe some kind of prescription from MMT but it doesn't actually make one.

>>484899
no, I've read enough of this forum and it is littered with 'sound money' types

>>484900
>People always seem to ascribe some kind of prescription from MMT but it doesn't actually make one.

Probably because the entire theory is gauged toward promoting universal wageslavery. The "descriptive economists" in it who "hate ideologues" sometimes spend over half their lectures advocating "MMT-centric" policy, which always amounts to a jobs program for "hard working sober Americans".

A jobs program is fine, but it is such an obsessive focus with MMT that one cannot simply swallow it whole and expect to not get prescriptions for policy

All that said, MMT is extremely useful for debunking austerity types, and the most useful I have found.

>>484901
sus

>>484891
>>484881
>>484894
>>484895
Friedman didn't invent UBI.
The only reason Friedman even comes up in the broader discussion of UBI at all is that he provides a right-wing argument for it, which means liberals can then frame it as bipartisan. That's it. It's not his original idea, and it never was. Utopian socialists, SocDems, Henry George, and Thomas Paine all had the idea of a guaranteed income well before Friedman.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with UBI. That doesn't mean implementation of UBI can't be done poorly, it just means that an implementation which isn't done poorly would be beneficial.

>>484909
A guaranteed income is not always the same as a universal basic income or a negative tax.

>>484911
UBI is used to refer to all models of universal basic income, with more specific niche terms being used to specify the economic context for UBI.
Georgists use Citizens' Dividend, but that's mostly only used to denote that the basic income exists in the context of a Georgist tax model.
The "negative income tax" thing is specifically Friedman's terminology, UBI, afaik, isn't. "Basic income" comes from G. D. H. Cole. It's not a Friedmanoid invention, never was.

The funny thing about Social Security is that the government never pays out more than it receives. It's very miserly considering what living expenses are.

Then consider rent takes up half of your fixed income, and that's with rent controls. This is a society designed to kill people, not a "mode of production". That is the prime value now - how quickly it can liquidate humans. It is strange to me that any of you think the past 50 years are the behavior of a country that wants people to live or wants any stability. This produced the exact opposite - perpetual insecurity.

Anyway the arguments for a basic income are irrelevant when the dominant mores of the society are "kill, kill, kill". If you wanted to provide security, you wouldn't abstract it away. Land and the necessities of life would be set aside, rationally distributed, and this would be far less of a burden than what is done now. That is sort of what happened. No one in their right mind would cut food stamps because it's an agricultural subsidy. Only Satanic Germanic fags would.

You know no one is really getting paid for those stamps, but it's a service provided and expected. It would be possible to rationalize all of this instead of the forced starvation death march that is being imposed, because some Satanic Austrians want to tell you it is impossible to add two and two.

So severe is the damage - deliberate, wholly unnecessary damage for the sake of the eugenic creed and nothing else - that it would not be fixed without screeching. Literally everything done in the United States is wrong, wrong, wrong. Basic shit. It went on for too long, to feed classes and interests who did nothing but pure theft and bragged that they would torture and kill anyone who opposed them. Now we're supposed to "respect" any part of this monstrosity.

Sadly the only way it would end now is reinstating slavery, and that's what they've wanted all along. We would just accept that humanity is a Satanic race, a failed race, and slavery is its natural condition. They don't know anything else, and it's too much for these fucking Satanics to comprehend a free society.

Otherwise, the resource inflows and outflows are a trivial problem to solve in any era. The only question is, when have humans ever done something so basic as feed those who need food? If that happened, the human race ends then and there, and it would be a good thing. We would disavow any talk of a "human race" as a politically organizing principle, and then see that humans are wholly irredeemable. We would then quietly distribute the food, no longer having anything to say to each other, and we would preach hatred for the human race and human spirit. A grim, lonely world would be far better than this "happy" coexistence where this had to become a political matter. It never did, and never should have been allowed to go on this long.

The good news, if you call it that, is that history has made clear that a grim, miserable class of bureaucrats have to distribute the goods for humanity, because these fucking retarded Satanics can't understand "don't steal our shit" or the consequences of forced starvation that could be trivially abrogated. They get on a moral high horse about something so basic, yet never give any indication why we should do this. Everyone works at the bare minimum, so the motivation of the whip of deprivation isn't what their ideology needs it to be.

>>484886
Yeah don't economists unironically believe in picrel, when the only data they get from the market is price?

>>484900
>MMT
>It's just an empirical description of how money functions.
MMT is certainly better than most so called economic theories, however if you want to be scientific about your definitions then:
money is the ability to command labor power,
it's not the ability to controle the state, even if there is some overlap.

>>484902
>>484909
I think the rational kernel in UBI and similar proposals is ensuring a base level of purchasing power for everybody. Maybe we should focus on something that measures purchasing power. I don't know maybe we could start with a formula that factors in cost of housing, clothing, food, health-services, infrastructure services, amenities, transportation, compute/information, and so on.

>>484917
The supply/demand "curves" are pure cargo cult economics. There is a concept of supply and demand, but it has nothing to do with "natural forces" in an imagined environment with infinite firms fulfilling "me wantee". The classical understanding is that suppliers meet demand and chase after those dollars, and seek to meet that demand more efficiently than competitors, with the overall goal of controlling the supply with monopoly pricing. If you're smart, that's how you do business. You don't pre-emptively say you're there to be a swell guy in a fair fight. You corner the fucking market, and you do it in a way that your rivals can't possibly match. That's what the robber barons did, and a lot of Kraut cope comes from sucking at capitalism and eating shit from these upstart Yankees who are owning so much shit once they figured out oil.

Crises of overproduction - too much supply - rarely ever are the prime cause of crisis. Overproduction is no longer a serious crisis since production and consumption have been geared to each other since the 1920s. The one time there was a glut of surplus, unsellable product, it was the Great Depression and that was a planned demolition if you study history at all and know what that was. While overproduction does mean workers are out of work and forced to scrape, capitalists aren't chasing productivity mindlessly. Every product a capitalist creates, he would make to meet some demand, not a vague promise that his product will sell because it's just that good. Capitalists, if you understand their motives, loathe producing anything. It's why as soon as the oil men have their monopoly and claimed the really good land, Rockefeller doesn't want any new oil wells to disrupt his well-planned monopoly, and so he takes every step he can to constrain the supply and demand for oil. This is what led to the 1990s austerity policies "for the planet". The goal isn't "mindless profit" - he's way past that when he owns the bank and can vote himself free money. It is control over people and ultimately control over land, and the movement of people on that land. That has dominated every decision of the ruling elite since 1989, leading to what we're seeing today. They will put you in the pod, and you will eat the bugs.

The real problem for Marx and his people is that there is a very real possibility the interests he represents will get fucked if capital continues, and that's why he set about fomenting what he did - so that the interests aligned with him could hold a knife at everyone's throats, while offering to the rich that they'll get the poors off their back, we promise. Little did they know what they deals they would make to keep this alliance and the empire intact… all of them. All of them are fools who have been granted untrammeled power, and dare us to call them fools ever again after what they did to us. What a filthy, Satanic race. Ugh.

At its core, the capitalist arrangement has a goal of monopoly built into it. No one in classical political economy seriously doubted this was the goal. The question was how this monopoly could create optimal conditions for its perpetuation, and all of the goods that such an empire would require, like guns and artillery and industrial tools. Capitalism wasn't about some imagined "steady state" that was perfect and totally the best system ever. That's always been Germanic retardation.

Any good opium dealer - and Adam Smith was in with those opium dealers - knows that you want to corner the market and get everyone hooked on the shit. You'd have to be greedy and needing that fix to be cajoled as much as we are now.

>>484922
>At its core, the capitalist arrangement has a goal of monopoly built into it.
Monopoly capitalism truly is the retarded stage of capitalism

Pharmaceutical porkies are trying to create a monopoly on high blood-sugar compensation medicine that requires perpetual treatments.

Chinese scientists have developed a one-time treatment that cures this ailment for good. Monopoly pharma porkies will try to ban the import because they want patients to remain in dependency. Who ever figures out how to replicate that cure gets to take down that particular monopoly.

I don't know where i'm going with this exactly. I guess it's possible to figure out how to defeat monopolies. Maybe that's part of the process of advancing past this economic stage.

>>484912
yea but a UBI is dumb for the same reasons that Friedmanoid negative tax stuff is.

It assumes people want to use money if they no longer have to work for it at all, which is dumb.

>>484929
A UBI is basically an economic atom bomb. It'd destroy the existing government and whatever is next powerful would replace it, whether some new government with a new currency or whatever.

It doesn't make any practical sense. If destroying the state is the goal, an actual alternative would need to be put into place

>>484928
The point of denying the cure isn't an ulterior motive. Denying the cure, making the people suffer, is the point. There is a minimum that societies require to main intact, but beyond that, rulers do not want the people to be happy or content.

Insulin can't be patented (yet), and there is no reason why it is so expensive. It can be produced so cheaply that it would cost more to put a price tag on it. So you have the treatment known for decades, but there is a force that says it must be denied because "those people aren't supposed to live". That's why I keep going on about the centrality of eugenics, because every time you try to deny it, you just prove how fickle you are about anything changing.

If societies were interested in something productive or useful, they would be very different creatures. Very likely, given human history and their conduct, humans would have little reason to speak to each other. They would quietly carry on, out of some sense that we did not need to live in shit. But, some things, they've gone on for so long that humans don't know anything else. They really don't. The simplest way to solve the problem, and this has been borne out time and time again, is that there are no people to suffer. That will be the ultimate solution - that humanity will quit living, starting with ceasing reproduction and then losing any desire to continue living around these people. You'd have to be crazy to want to coexist with these monsters. But, some will persist in living, and arrive at the same conclusion. Humans are a failed race, primarily because they chose to be this way and weren't allowed to choose otherwise. To do otherwise would be to repudiate the entire human project, and certain people can't stand that. They'll torture us to ensure that "history is corrected". That is the final word. We have had countless decisions where this could have been averted, but that is too much for certain people. Denial of the centrality of eugenics is one reason why we're doomed to this. If we did, we would question whether humans should go on, and if forced collective self-termination were not the correct course of action. But, I believe in the end, a small number of humanity, seeing that this is hopeless, will endure after the exhaustion of having been made to do this, conclude that it was failed, and seek nothing more than preventing the same cycle from continuing in the way it has. There simply wouldn't be many people, and those people would view life as a temporary malady. We could live effectively forever if we wanted to, but they will find the future worth living is not with other humans. All of this would be seen as a temporary condition.

If you wanted to end monopolies, it would start with circumventing their actions. When you're dependent on their laws and their institutions, and refuse to acknowledge anything outside of them, you're just making the situation worse for everyone.

All of that said, I don't see any of these legends about capitalism continuing. It was insane that it went on this long, when since 1970 the ruling elite have shouted "DIE DIE DIE" at full blast and we're supposed to believe this is totally normal and not an insane race that must be exterminated to restore some decency to the world. Yet, to even say that is beyond the pale, while this insane cult keeps pressing and immediately the "opposition" makes excuses for their enemy. What sort of faggotry is that?

>>484941
>If you wanted to end monopolies, it would start with circumventing their actions.
As far as the cure for that high blood-sugar ailment is concerned, it already happened. The pharma monopolies couldn't prevent Chinese scientists from inventing this, so they got circumvented. I mean if it's half as good as the early results are suggesting, it'll get used by pretty much everyone who's afflicted no matter what the monopolists do.

>>484894
UBI in a capitalist system will just make them raise prices to compensate. If they know they can exploit people harder then they will, like how they used COVID as an excuse to jack up prices.

>>484951
That is true, but that could be counteracted by price controls. If there were enough people who depended on UBI, the politics would likely change and price-controls would happen to some extend.

I don't know if that development would be desirable, and my point is that there's always a counter tendency.

>>484952
The idea people are natural entrepreneurs who love using money and starting small businesses just b because they are given free money is retarded.

The state forcing people to work is the only reason people are even using USD.

>>484959
>The idea people are natural entrepreneurs who love using money
I guess you're not wrong. Monetary thinking definitely does not come natural to most people, it has to be drilled into people. The least unnatural form of accounting might be counting labor-time and material resources.

But i do think that there is something like an entrepreneurial spirit, but in a more general sense of trying to organize groups of people to build something. There is extreme ideological distortion going on of course. And in some sense, neo-liberal talk about entrepreneurs is double-speak, because what their system does is deeply demoralizing to what they have identified as the entrepreneurial subject.

>The state forcing people to work is the only reason people are even using USD.
The state and taxation plays a role by forcing everybody to use the same money, but MMT makes claims that go much further than that.

Marx makes three statements about money
1. it's the universal commodity
2. it's controle over labor-time
3. it's a veil that obfuscates the real social relations

Maybe we could simplify the differences between Marx and MMT thusly:
Marx : Money is time
MMT : Money is power