ALB
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I think you are being even more keen to use Lucian's satire as evidence for Jesus's historical existence than the christians themselves:http://lucianofsamosata.info/wiki/doku.php?id=2013:why-lucians-view-of-the-christians-and-jesus-is-indeterminateLucian (who lived in the 2nd century) only provides evidence of the existence of christians then (which no one denies) and what they were perceived to believe. At that time they would have just been one of a number of similar "saviour" cults (the name Jesus actually means saviour: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_(name).a powerful suggestion that he was just a mythical figure). Another of these, the cult of Adonis, was mentioned by Lucian in his essay "On the Syrian Goddess". Its devotees believed that Adonis died and was resurrected a couple of days later (sound familiar?).. Next you'll be arguing that Adonis was a historical person on the basis of the absence of evidence not being evidence of absence.Incidentally, despite what Redmond says, Lucian should still be read today. He was an "Epicurean". They accepted that the gods existed but said that they had no influence on human affairs. The nearest you could get to atheism in those days. Lucian's satires on the cults and cultists of his day is amusing and still relevant for today.
Since the silly season starts this week no doubt Vin will give us his permission to carry on discussing this.The issue is not whether early christians existed. Of course they did. Nobody denies that. Lucian didn't really accept that Jesus was a historical figure. He says that this is what christians believed. The satirical story in which he mentions this, The Death of Peregrine, is a amusing read. Religious conmen were common at the time and both he and Celsus suggested that the supposed founder of christianity must have been one of them.It's a pity Celsus's book didn't survive (i.e was destroyed by the christians) but, from the juicy extraxcts, it sounds a good read too. I think the Jews of the time also said Jesus was the bastard son of a Roman soldier.Christian doctrine is generally agreed to have been elaborated by Paul (who was a historical person) but even he doesn't seem to have accepted that Jesus was a historical figure; only that he was a good idea.
caz25 wrote:MMT recognizes that neither taxes nor borrowing are the financing methods of government. (…) In fact, taxes, rather than financing the government, are primarily used as a means of enforcing a currency unit of account among the population, since everyone must use the government money to settle their liabilities, aka taxes, with the government. The government is self-financing, which is mainly a function of it having the power in a society. … one of MMT's points is that government spending is not constrained by financial assets, only real production capacity. Why then would fewer tax revenues lead to less government spending? This strikes me as austerity logic and is squarely against what MMT advocates. As long as the government is the issuer of its currency, which is not the case of countries under the Euro, private sector profits are not a contraint on government spending. The government is in no way financed by taxes or borrowing.Whether or not the government needs to resort to taxation and/or borrowing to finance its activities, at the moment this is what governments do. So your last statement is a bit daring.MMT claims that all governments need to do to finance their spending is to simply print the money. Governments can print money at will and could do this to finance their spending, but what would be the consequence? The economy needs money for various things, of which paying taxes is only one. It is also needed for buying and selling transactions and settling debts. In fact if the general price level is to remain stable the amount of money in circulation must be just enough for all these to be carried out. If it's more than this, then the result will be a rise in the general price level, i.e inflation and the depreciation of the currency.So, if the government didn't resort to taxation or borrowing and simply printed the money to finance its spending, this would be extra money over and above what was needed and so there'd be inflation, roaring inflation in fact. What the government would be doing is creating more claims on wealth without any new wealth being created. It's because they don't create any wealth that governments have to get, through taxation and borrowing, the wealth they use from what is or has been produced in the productive sector of economy. MMT inflation would just be another way of doing this, by devaluing the wealth people hold just as much as if they'd been taxed.You should ask yourself why, if it's as simple as you imagine, governments haven't adopted what MMT proposes. It's a proposal to try to reform capitalism so it works for everyone's benefit. But this can't be done. The only thing to do with capitalism is to end it, not try to mend it — and with it render money and monetary theories redundant by directly mobilising resources as resources on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production, with production directly to satisfy people's need and not for sale on a market with a view to profit.
Looks as if they have already began to select possible scapegoats to take the blame off capitalism whose way of working required, in the slump that followed the crash of 2008, that governments cut back on their spending to relieve taxation on profits. Since most local government money comes from central government, this trickled down to local level, with in this case the result we've seen. How about charging capitalism with corporate manslaughter?.
Things are starting to move:https://www.ex-muslim.org.uk/largest-gathering-of-ex-muslims-in-history/
Tim Kilgallon wrote:Josephus (possibly) referenced Jesus, so it's' not completely accurate to say that it is definite that a non-Christian writer never mentioned him as a historical figure.No, he didn't. Except by fanatical christians, this reference is generally accepted as a forgery. Did you read Nicholas Walter's letter where he points our:
Quote:The early Christians were acutely aware of the absence of good evidence for the life and death of Jesus, so they perpetrated what were called “pious frauds” to fill the gap. In the second century Justin and Tertullian referred to official reports by Pontius Pilate, and in the fourth century Eusebius quoted letters between Paul and Seneca. Above all, some time between the early third century and the early fourth century, the famous reference to Jesus was interpolated into Josephus's history of the Jews. This forgery destroys itself, since it makes Josephus, who was a religious Jew, refer to Jesus as if he were the Messiah and a divine being. None of this material is accepted by any serious Christian scholar today.Of course in the end it doesn't matter whether or not Jesus existed. Even if he did, christianity is still a load of crap. After all, Mohammed existed as a historical figure and that doesn't stop islam being a load of crap too.
Tim Kilgallon wrote:ALB wrote:That's assuming that he ever "was" when there's no solid evidence for vthis. Quite the opposite, only forgeries.Absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence, as they say.
True, but the only evidence is stories written down years later and forgeries by christian monks. No non-christian mentions him as a historical figure, only a cult based on a person called "Jesus". Redeemer cults, of which original christianity was one, were common in the Hellenistic world.Here's a review of a book on the subject from 1911:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1910s/1911/no-80-april-1911/did-jesus-ever-liveSee also Nicholas Walter's reply here:http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/jesus-christ-myth-or-reality-1980.html
That's assuming that he ever "was" when there's no solid evidence for vthis. Quite the opposite, only forgeries.
Dan, there's a long running thread on this question, where we record all the incoming evidence against the "thin air" school of banking:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/100-reserve-bankingHave a look at it too.
There are two theories as to how banks can "create" money. One is that of Major Douglas and his fellow currency cranks that they can do so out of nothing by a simple stroke of the pen or these days by a simple keyboard stoke. The other is that they do so out of money they already have or supplied by a central bank like the Bank of England in Britain. But, as DJP has pointed out, this is a question of definition – if you define bank loans as money then by definition that is what banks do. But the real issue issue is still whether they "create" the money they lend "out of thin air" or loan already existing money. As Alan has pointed out, just because we don't think banks have the powers that currency cranks attribute to them doesn't mean that we defend them or are their unwitting agents. We want a society where there'll no banks. Which is far more than the currency cranks want.
Interesting article which points out that these pilot schemes are not testing a "universal basic income" but a reform of the poor law system : in this one (and presumably others) the "free money" is conditional on being unemployed under certain circumstances:
Quote:Kela, the national social-insurance institute, randomly selected 2,000 Finns between 25 and 58 years of age who were already getting some form of unemployment benefits. The subsidies were offered to people who had been unemployed for about one year or more, or who had less than six months of work experience. Participants in the trial would receive €560 (about $645) a month from January 2017 to December 2018, whether or not they came to earn any additional income.The trial size was cut to one-fifth of what had originally been proposed, and is now too small to be scientifically viable. Instead of giving free money to everyone, the experiment is handing out, in effect, a form of unconditional unemployment benefits. In other words, there is nothing universal about this version of universal basic income.Since staying in the tariff-less and friction-less single market is in the overall interest of the British capitalist class, there can only be two explanations for the behaviour of the Tory Breshiteers: either they are using popular prejudice to further their careers and climb further up the greasy pole or they are stupid (or both of course). Business chiefs are beginning to get fed up with them — sometimes their political representatives get out of hand and bugger things up for them. This could be a case in point.
Sympo wrote:Do you think Marx and Engels were socialists during the writing of the manifesto, or did they confuse state capitalism with socialism?Yes they were socialists by then (and had been for 3 or 4 years), no question about that, but they drafted the Communist Manifesto at a time when the material conditions for a world socialist society had not yet completely evolved. So they were prepared to support measures that they thought would hasten this evolution. The material conditions for socialism now exist and have done for a hundred years or more, so the measures they supported to hasten this are not relevant and of historical or academic interest only.
