ALB
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The Tartan Reformists are clearly showering promises about in a bid to win next year’s elections. Next they’ll be promising free broadband for all. And of course “after independence” money will grow on trees. Pull the other one.
No, it’s just a camouflaged way of “set aside” or the notorious taking of land out of agricultural production to limit production and maintain prices. It gets less criticism if it is presented as a way to preserve nature. In fact it tends to get praise. I think the European Union thought of this first.
That bevy of economists are right about a well-established state like the UK never being likely to go bankrupt in the sense of being unable to meet its debt obligations as it can always raise the money one way or another.
However, they have their own unfounded illusions. They seem to be neo-Keynesians who think that a government can spend its way out of a crisis, even if on infrastructure projects rather than on boosting popular consumption:
“Covid-19. Modelling suggests that public debt as a proportion of GDP could actually fall were the government to embark upon a major investment package boosting jobs and growth, a position similar to that of the IMF in its flagship publication (pp 18-19) on the issue. This is in line with standard macroeconomic literature which stresses the beneficial effects of countercyclical government spending during crises.”
Modelling and standard macroeconomic literature might suggest this but past experience doesn’t. When it was last tried in the 1970s it led to stagflation. If tried again, since they seem to have inflation under control, it is likely to lead to a temporary boost that will peter out and a return to stagnation. But this won’t last since there is no such thing as a permanent slump.
The capitalist economy will eventually recover but of its own accord not thanks to government spending. When it happens the government will of course claim the credit. They always do for an expansion.
I don’t think the formal change of name to a Republic made any difference whatsoever. It was just window dressing. You could argue more plausibly that Ireland didn’t become “independent” ( of Britain) until 1978 when parity between the Irish pound and British pound was broken. But this only meant a transfer of dependence from British to German capitalism (which some Irish Republicans had wanted in both world wars).
And of course the interdependent world capitalist system means that no state can be completely independent ( as the UK is about to (re)learn the hard way after 31 December). Scotland will be in an even worse position is workers there are conned into believing that an “independent” Scotland will bring them any benefit.
As I said on another thread. I got my £100 winter fuel allowance the other day. Also, YMS refers in the MMT thread to the economic crisis that the Labour government faced in 1968. One of the measures taken to deal with this was to end free milk for secondary school children (Margaret Thatcher Milk Snatcher merely extended this to primary school children over 7 a couple of years later; a subsequent Labour government abolished it altogether in 1977).
These reforms come and go. They might help the SNP win next May’s Scottish Parliament elections, but an independent and unsubsidised Scottish government will have difficulty sustaining them.
Remember that one of the first things the independent Irish government did in 1921 was to reduce civil service pensions. That reminds me, we need to do an article on the centenary of Irish independence and the establishment of the Protestant statelet in the north in March next year.
Yes, inequality still exists. You were born in a castle while I was born in a workhouse.
This is quite good, bringing out a criticism of MMT that we haven’t mentioned — that it couldn’t work in most countries because of the international monetary context, probably only in the US and even there it wouldn’t be as expected.
They bring out that money arises out of commodity exchange and is not simply made by the state (a view MMTers adhere to) and that this places limits to what the state can do in the monetary field (without making things worse, that is).
However, though they get the Marxist theory of money right there is a suggestion that there might be some sort of “Marxist monetary policy”; which is absurd since Marx wasn’t concerned with policies to be implemented under capitalism and in fact wanted to see a society in which money had become redundant.
That this may be their view comes out from the authors seeming to think that “monetary sovereignty” could still be possible in other countries if accompanied by other measures ( of a state capitalist nature) , even though they set out the huge problems involving in trying to do this.
One of the authors, Costas Lapavistas, was a prominent Lexiteer in the UK.
Congratulations twc. Your knowledge of ornithology has allowed us to identify what sort of bird we have sighted:
Free or subsidised school meals used to exist but was whittled down over the years. So this is a demand to restore a reform. And of course everybody has heard of Margaret Thatcher Milk Snatcher — a bit unfair on her actually as it was a Labour government that started whittling away this reform in 1968 and which completed it in 1977.
Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels, Marx’s fellow pioneer historical materialist and scientific socialist.
It looks as if there has been some manipulation of the data in the Oxford vaccine. This won’t be the fault of the dedicated researchers or the public-spirited volunteers but someone higher up, such as a non-scientists more concerned with beating the competition or getting a bigger slice of the market. It’s capitalism’s reverse Midas touch again — everything it touches turns to shit.
Anyway, the shareholders are being punished. According to the Financial Times in an article headed “Doubts raised over AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine data”:
“Markets have taken notice. London-listed shares in AstraZeneca have lost more than 6 per cent since the announcement. By comparison, since trial results from their vaccine were released earlier this month, showing an effectiveness of 90 per cent, shares in Pfizer and BioNTech have gained 6 per cent and 14 per cent respectively; Moderna is up 11 per cent since its vaccine trial data came out, on top of big gains in the run-up to publication.
One early critic this week, Geoffrey Porges, an analyst at SVB Leerink, said he thought it was unlikely the AstraZeneca jab would get approval in the US after the company “tried to embellish their results” by highlighting higher efficacy in a “relatively small subset of subjects in the study”. John LaMattina, a former president of Pfizer’s global research and development unit, wrote on Twitter that it was “hard to believe” US regulators would issue an emergency-use authorisation for a “vaccine whose optimal dose has only been given to 2,300 people”. Much of the confusion stems from Oxford and AstraZeneca not being fully forthcoming on the reason for the two different dosing regimens — which changed unexpectedly as trials progressed.”
