After the Great Recession, there has remained a historically high duration in unemployment. Even seven years past the event, the U.S. still suffers from long periods of unemployment. Ideas surrounding the solution to this problem remain scarce. The Fed’s interest rate is still at a near historical low. Economists see little positive effect in lowering…
Eric Morath of the Wall Street Journal notes that this post-Great Recession period is the slowest, least effective recovery in modern economic history.[1] “In terms of average annual growth,” he writes, “the pace of this expansion has been by far the weakest of any since 1949.”[2] The Economic Policy Institute agrees with his assessment, as…
How is finance killing the economy? Credit is a powerful tool of capitalism. It can be used to stimulate economic growth, or it can be used to deter capital investment by shifting money creation into the Finance, Insurance, Real Estate (FIRE) sector. The latter will inevitably cause the economic system to go into crisis.
Very soon I’m going to put out a book which attempts to explain Marxist economics in as simple a way as possible. This book I’m going to offer for free as an ebook, only requiring payment to obtain a physical copy. I’d like to share a portion of it now to answer a question that…
A good deal of the bourgeoisie, left and right, have begun talking about protectionism again. Most well known is of course Donald Trump who has been invoking images of 1950’s America when the father could support his whole family on a single income.[1] This has also begun to appear in Australia with the Labour Party.[2]…
As published in Critique, based on a presentation given at the China Academy of Sciences, School of Marxist Studies in Beijing in November 2009, and at the Left Forum in New York City, March 20, 2010. Classical economists developed the labor theory of value to isolate economic rent, which they defined as the excess of…
Introduction We’ve often heard the phrase “that’s not real capitalism” used as a denial for all the undemocratic, horrible, inhuman things capitalism does. Anytime capitalism does something horrible the excuse is made that a “real” free market wouldn’t have done it. This is usually accompanied by all manner of false claims about how the government…
As manufacturing has left the urban center and pretty much everywhere else, the lack of jobs is creating a severe gap in value generation. This leads to lower incomes for First World working and middle class people which translate to a lack of taxable income. This lack of tax revenue is causing many cities infrastructure…
It’s wonderful to see a mainstream economics man like Paul Krugman come across a Marxist criticism by accident. I’m not surprised its Krugman who does it, he seems to be a hell of a lot more honest than just about anyone out there in the media. I found this statement in his book End This…
There is something that those who lend money have learned over the years. If you physically punish someone who owes you an outstanding loan, you severely restrict their ability to pay it back. This is why certain measures in society were done away with like poorhouses and debtors prisons. (Interestingly the mafia never came to…
