Comment on Edward Harrison/Tom Hickey on ‘Hippie punching the MMT crowd’
Blog-Reference
Tom Hickey summarizes: “This is key to neoliberalism, which is a political theory based on economics that seeks both to enable rent extraction and to justify rent-seeking behavior, since economic rent is the primary way that capitalism transfers wealth from the productive classes to the ownership class that produces nothing of real value.”
Tom Hickey correctly observes that neoliberalism “is a political theory based on economics”. He forgets to mention that the underlying economic theory is provably false, i.e. materially/formally inconsistent. So neoliberalism never has been anything else than political agenda pushing in the cloak of science. The problem with neoliberalism is not so much that it is a fraud but that it abuses and corrupts science. To this day, economics is not a science because economists are too stupid/corrupt for science.#1, #2
Tom Hickey is wrong by maintaining that “economic rent is the primary way that capitalism transfers wealth from the productive classes to the ownership class”. First of all, he does not know what profit/rent is.#3 Accordingly, he does not realize that MMT actually promotes the biggest transfer of financial wealth in all of history.
The macroeconomic Profit Law implicates for the relationship between the business sector and the government sector Public Deficit = Private Profit. So, roughly speaking, the Oligarchy’s financial wealth and public debt grow in lockstep. In the final analysis, the Oligarchy’s financial wealth is roughly equal to accumulated Public Debt with WeThePeople as ultimate bag holders (currently $22 trillion).
So, what Tom Hickey accuses neoliberalism of is exactly what MMTers are doing on an even larger scale. The whole MMT vs Neoliberalism debate is a bad joke of stupid/corrupt economists at the expense of WeThePeople.#4
Egmont Kakarot-Handtke
#1 Macroeconomics: Economists are too stupid for science
#2 Still beyond the reach of economists: The Holy Grail of Science
#3 When Ricardo Saw Profit, He Called It Rent: On the Vice of Parochial Realism
#4 For the big picture see cross-references Political Economics/Stupidity/Corruption