Psedo intellectuals like Piketty should absolutely be denounced. If this sad episode of inflation should teach us anything it is that people who espouse crack pot theories like MMT and such cannot and should not be taken seriously. I would love for an economist to estimate what the current inflation rate would be had Build Back Broke bill passed. Guessing 10%+ and trending upwards. Republicans should be hammering democrats on that. Joe Manchin saved America.
Free Markets/Capitalism is what happens when government does nothing. No intervention.
Free Markets are what people do if government simply provides a court system for enforcing contracts. People will act on their own self interest.
Also, the way you combat these loons is with ridicule. If you read any of the dissidents of the old USSR they all agreed that mockery was the one thing that the Left couldn't deal with effectively.
Yes. The earnestness and passion of the Leftist is easily used against him through mocking. He can't take it. That's why I love Jesse Kelly's show so much. He's REALLY good at it.
The Dems sure have a lot of dense people in their cult. But Jennifer Granholm has got to be among the dumbest. Perhaps dumber than AOC. Absolutely clueless. Thanks for pointing out her idiocy.
To be a high-level professional Democrat, you have to check your common sense at the door. Its the price of admission. Then you have to internalize an ideological paradigm that not only denies reality, but actively works against it. Create your own "truth". Well actually, conform your "truth" to the Party's. This is part of the reason for the Transgender movement. It is the best evidence that the Democrat party has gone full Communist. That and the Purges.
More than we would like to admit, the United States has become a centrally planned economy. The "free market" is a vague anachronism.
So, what we are seeing is the result of this planning.
We have been taught over and over again (at least classical economics students anyway) that central planning fails because a few bureaucrats and politicians with perverse incentives cannot outsmart a free market of millions of people. But over and over again they meddle, they scheme, they plot and they coerce. Every industry.
Then there is the macroeconomic central planner -- the Fed. If ever there is a lesson in Central Planning Failure -- there it is! I remember going back to my locked down business in January 2021. The first thing that was evident was that labor was not coming back, and the ones that did knew they were in demand, and knew they could get more money -- a lot more money. They just weren't willing to work in a public-facing job wearing masks all day for the same money. Not when unemployment and government was literally cajoling them to stay home and get benefits. So the premium increased -- big time, which meant huge wage inflation. I didn't see that ending for a long time, because it didn't feel temporary. That situation -- a year and a half later -- still exists and is worse than ever.
The second thing I saw was the scarcity of product and price increases. And there was no glee in it. We would get letters from suppliers essentially saying, "we're very sorry, but we have to do this", and then hike prices 25%." They were facing the same things. Letter after letter, email after email.
I said at the time to anyone who would listen, this is not transitory, because we in the trenches of small business knew it. Then I turn on the TV and the internet, and all I here is a bunch of Central Planners saying "transitory." Nothing to see here. They were clueless, and I just shook my head. I was ready (hoping) to be wrong, but didn't feel it.
I envisioned them with their government spreadsheets put together by junior bureaucrats and 2 years post college darlings. Then, a simple correlation of "supply chain" and inflation. Oh, that's it!
When you are disconnected from the real economy, you would have no way of knowing what we saw. You would say things like "transitory" because your staff couldn't see it either. They're behind their computers waiting for the latest poll and raw data from an index. These things are good during stable times, but I don't think they can foretell what is happening in the trenches very well. So the Central Planners are behind the ball and fail -- every time.
I hate to say it, but the only ones that I think can see the "real" economy are the bankers and the investment bankers. They see the money, the accounts, and they have their own internals, which are crisp and on the button. The big banks have economics departments that get to use all their data -- from the working electrician's salary direct deposit to his car payment. To the small business accounts and their velocity and sales. I assume they put it all into their own indices and intelligence.
When Jamie Dimon says something, I listen. He's seeing something that perhaps he doesn't want to share the raw data about, but his macro statement is likely based on real, current data.
So here we sit, lessons of Central Planning being relearned again -- ala the 70's. People will get horrified by the Democrats (the Central Planners) and revert to the alternative. Ronald DeSantis (Reagan) will win in 2024 and start deregulating, with the same charm and disarming apropos that Reagan had, perhaps upped a notch. Perhaps some Millennials and Gen Z will convert, after they see happens. Before I studied economics, I was a Bill Clinton democrat because my parents were. Then I started to learn and I went extreme conservative, which is where I am today. I am disgusted by the economics ignorance we see everywhere.
The old saying that, "if you're not a liberal at age 20 you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative at age 40 you have no brain" certainly applies here.
Wow, history is not supposed to repeat, but it sure feels like it does.
Picketty, like Bernie Sanders, is a snakeoil salesman. They really enjoy telling people what they want to hear and make lots of money doing it. One thing I'll quibble with in this article. I somewhat disagree that humans are hard-wired for capitalism. I think of capitalism as that standard state of nature. Like gravity. Like water that fish swim in. The exchange of things of value is just how humans interact in the world. The hard-wiring inherent to humans is that we do whatever we can to manipulate that reality to our advantage. This desire results in things like Ponzi schemes and Modern Monetary Theory, which basically boils down to an academic argument for wealth transfers and enslavement of the masses, as anyone with a modicum of common sense can see (and all Socialists glom onto). But because the desire to manipulate capitalism is the standard of human behavior, it makes a lot of people feel good to hear about getting free money for nothing, so snakeoil salesmen like Piketty and Sanders will always get rich selling their utopian fantasies whether they're wrapped in populist appeals to emotion (Sanders) or materialist academic jargon (Piketty). The result is the same. They get rich, and the middle class gets our pockets picked.
Totally agree with commentary on the current crop of Ds. It's too bad the current R alternative is a hodgepodge of gobbledygook. A reminder: current Rs are for high spending and low taxes. They are for minimizing even legal immigration. And they are protectionists to boot. All lead to low growth and high deficits. There's no free market from them even if they're not as kooky as the left. As always, Mencken was right about the relationship between government and the electorate.
I don't think they are for minimizing legal immigration or even illegal immigration. Their big business donors want something done for the Dreamers, and 14 of them wrote a letter to their Republican Senators and reps today. They want more immigration, but the base will massacre them for it, so they're "undecided." But they are for it, just paralyzed by the base.
There is also a split personality for "protectionism." MAGA, yes, establishment no.
There is a definite bifurcation in the Republican party right now, but it appears that the establishment is weakening (Liz Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, etc.) and MAGA is growing.
"The base." What a great group of clear thinking people. D base gives the country AOC. R base gives the country Marge "Peach Tree Dish" Greene. Illinois R MAGA base giving governor election to Pritzker. What a great time and place.
If "the base" want their Medicare and Social Security paid the US needs more immigration. There's no other way to get the growth required to cover the bills. The most evil thing the Trump admin did was to cut and maim the refugee programs. Now the US does not have the capacity to take Afghan refugees or Ukrainian refugees in large numbers despite the popularity of the idea.
By reducing the argument to strictly economics you fulfill the very reason they don't trust politicians to represent them.
There is a cultural piece here, and Democrats are on record as acknowledging that they don't really have a problem with "Replacement Theory." The elite and the wealthy don't deal with the cultural issues where they live.
When you look around and see dramatic changes in your city or town due to foreign languages or different customs, it can be unnerving. People want stability and don't like rapid change.
I'm not saying that their fears are completely founded. But they worry about cultural decay and different value systems replacing their own. They also worry about wage rates for their own jobs. They have the right to be as concerned about their own position in their home country as you are the economics of your business or "paying the bills" with cheap labor.
I think a lot of people in this strata would be agreeable with "controlled" immigration, with rules and acclimation -- not a free-for-all at the border that is out of control.
It seems like economic issues are going to be the deciding factors to putting the Rs back in power in at least the house. Heaven help us!
The US population today is about 50% higher than the late 1970s. Who's culture got replaced? Who's jobs got stolen?
Today the Latino population in Pilsen complain about gentrification. Who today believes that the Irish and Italian immigration of the early 20th century made the USA worse? The country changes and there's very little culturally other than music that was better in the 1970s than today.
Immigrants actually do assimilate. They do not maintain a consistent ideology based on the pigment of their skin. See the first Republican rep born in Mexico that was just elected in TX. Restricting immigration isn't going to do anything to make living in rural America better.
Psedo intellectuals like Piketty should absolutely be denounced. If this sad episode of inflation should teach us anything it is that people who espouse crack pot theories like MMT and such cannot and should not be taken seriously. I would love for an economist to estimate what the current inflation rate would be had Build Back Broke bill passed. Guessing 10%+ and trending upwards. Republicans should be hammering democrats on that. Joe Manchin saved America.
Free Markets/Capitalism is what happens when government does nothing. No intervention.
Free Markets are what people do if government simply provides a court system for enforcing contracts. People will act on their own self interest.
Also, the way you combat these loons is with ridicule. If you read any of the dissidents of the old USSR they all agreed that mockery was the one thing that the Left couldn't deal with effectively.
Yes. The earnestness and passion of the Leftist is easily used against him through mocking. He can't take it. That's why I love Jesse Kelly's show so much. He's REALLY good at it.
The Dems sure have a lot of dense people in their cult. But Jennifer Granholm has got to be among the dumbest. Perhaps dumber than AOC. Absolutely clueless. Thanks for pointing out her idiocy.
To be a high-level professional Democrat, you have to check your common sense at the door. Its the price of admission. Then you have to internalize an ideological paradigm that not only denies reality, but actively works against it. Create your own "truth". Well actually, conform your "truth" to the Party's. This is part of the reason for the Transgender movement. It is the best evidence that the Democrat party has gone full Communist. That and the Purges.
"I remain steadfast, 320 on the $SPY is where it’s going and then it gets interesting"
Interesting. In traditional Minnesotan that is how we say something is really awful but we want to be nice about it.
hahahaha, must have gotten those genes from my grandfather since he was born, raised, and died in Minnesota.
More than we would like to admit, the United States has become a centrally planned economy. The "free market" is a vague anachronism.
So, what we are seeing is the result of this planning.
We have been taught over and over again (at least classical economics students anyway) that central planning fails because a few bureaucrats and politicians with perverse incentives cannot outsmart a free market of millions of people. But over and over again they meddle, they scheme, they plot and they coerce. Every industry.
Then there is the macroeconomic central planner -- the Fed. If ever there is a lesson in Central Planning Failure -- there it is! I remember going back to my locked down business in January 2021. The first thing that was evident was that labor was not coming back, and the ones that did knew they were in demand, and knew they could get more money -- a lot more money. They just weren't willing to work in a public-facing job wearing masks all day for the same money. Not when unemployment and government was literally cajoling them to stay home and get benefits. So the premium increased -- big time, which meant huge wage inflation. I didn't see that ending for a long time, because it didn't feel temporary. That situation -- a year and a half later -- still exists and is worse than ever.
The second thing I saw was the scarcity of product and price increases. And there was no glee in it. We would get letters from suppliers essentially saying, "we're very sorry, but we have to do this", and then hike prices 25%." They were facing the same things. Letter after letter, email after email.
I said at the time to anyone who would listen, this is not transitory, because we in the trenches of small business knew it. Then I turn on the TV and the internet, and all I here is a bunch of Central Planners saying "transitory." Nothing to see here. They were clueless, and I just shook my head. I was ready (hoping) to be wrong, but didn't feel it.
I envisioned them with their government spreadsheets put together by junior bureaucrats and 2 years post college darlings. Then, a simple correlation of "supply chain" and inflation. Oh, that's it!
When you are disconnected from the real economy, you would have no way of knowing what we saw. You would say things like "transitory" because your staff couldn't see it either. They're behind their computers waiting for the latest poll and raw data from an index. These things are good during stable times, but I don't think they can foretell what is happening in the trenches very well. So the Central Planners are behind the ball and fail -- every time.
I hate to say it, but the only ones that I think can see the "real" economy are the bankers and the investment bankers. They see the money, the accounts, and they have their own internals, which are crisp and on the button. The big banks have economics departments that get to use all their data -- from the working electrician's salary direct deposit to his car payment. To the small business accounts and their velocity and sales. I assume they put it all into their own indices and intelligence.
When Jamie Dimon says something, I listen. He's seeing something that perhaps he doesn't want to share the raw data about, but his macro statement is likely based on real, current data.
So here we sit, lessons of Central Planning being relearned again -- ala the 70's. People will get horrified by the Democrats (the Central Planners) and revert to the alternative. Ronald DeSantis (Reagan) will win in 2024 and start deregulating, with the same charm and disarming apropos that Reagan had, perhaps upped a notch. Perhaps some Millennials and Gen Z will convert, after they see happens. Before I studied economics, I was a Bill Clinton democrat because my parents were. Then I started to learn and I went extreme conservative, which is where I am today. I am disgusted by the economics ignorance we see everywhere.
The old saying that, "if you're not a liberal at age 20 you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative at age 40 you have no brain" certainly applies here.
Wow, history is not supposed to repeat, but it sure feels like it does.
initially, I thought it might transitory. I was wrong. I was chalking it up to supply chains.
Picketty, like Bernie Sanders, is a snakeoil salesman. They really enjoy telling people what they want to hear and make lots of money doing it. One thing I'll quibble with in this article. I somewhat disagree that humans are hard-wired for capitalism. I think of capitalism as that standard state of nature. Like gravity. Like water that fish swim in. The exchange of things of value is just how humans interact in the world. The hard-wiring inherent to humans is that we do whatever we can to manipulate that reality to our advantage. This desire results in things like Ponzi schemes and Modern Monetary Theory, which basically boils down to an academic argument for wealth transfers and enslavement of the masses, as anyone with a modicum of common sense can see (and all Socialists glom onto). But because the desire to manipulate capitalism is the standard of human behavior, it makes a lot of people feel good to hear about getting free money for nothing, so snakeoil salesmen like Piketty and Sanders will always get rich selling their utopian fantasies whether they're wrapped in populist appeals to emotion (Sanders) or materialist academic jargon (Piketty). The result is the same. They get rich, and the middle class gets our pockets picked.
Totally agree with commentary on the current crop of Ds. It's too bad the current R alternative is a hodgepodge of gobbledygook. A reminder: current Rs are for high spending and low taxes. They are for minimizing even legal immigration. And they are protectionists to boot. All lead to low growth and high deficits. There's no free market from them even if they're not as kooky as the left. As always, Mencken was right about the relationship between government and the electorate.
I don't think they are for minimizing legal immigration or even illegal immigration. Their big business donors want something done for the Dreamers, and 14 of them wrote a letter to their Republican Senators and reps today. They want more immigration, but the base will massacre them for it, so they're "undecided." But they are for it, just paralyzed by the base.
There is also a split personality for "protectionism." MAGA, yes, establishment no.
There is a definite bifurcation in the Republican party right now, but it appears that the establishment is weakening (Liz Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, etc.) and MAGA is growing.
"The base." What a great group of clear thinking people. D base gives the country AOC. R base gives the country Marge "Peach Tree Dish" Greene. Illinois R MAGA base giving governor election to Pritzker. What a great time and place.
If "the base" want their Medicare and Social Security paid the US needs more immigration. There's no other way to get the growth required to cover the bills. The most evil thing the Trump admin did was to cut and maim the refugee programs. Now the US does not have the capacity to take Afghan refugees or Ukrainian refugees in large numbers despite the popularity of the idea.
By reducing the argument to strictly economics you fulfill the very reason they don't trust politicians to represent them.
There is a cultural piece here, and Democrats are on record as acknowledging that they don't really have a problem with "Replacement Theory." The elite and the wealthy don't deal with the cultural issues where they live.
When you look around and see dramatic changes in your city or town due to foreign languages or different customs, it can be unnerving. People want stability and don't like rapid change.
I'm not saying that their fears are completely founded. But they worry about cultural decay and different value systems replacing their own. They also worry about wage rates for their own jobs. They have the right to be as concerned about their own position in their home country as you are the economics of your business or "paying the bills" with cheap labor.
I think a lot of people in this strata would be agreeable with "controlled" immigration, with rules and acclimation -- not a free-for-all at the border that is out of control.
Economics is only one part of the problem.
It seems like economic issues are going to be the deciding factors to putting the Rs back in power in at least the house. Heaven help us!
The US population today is about 50% higher than the late 1970s. Who's culture got replaced? Who's jobs got stolen?
Today the Latino population in Pilsen complain about gentrification. Who today believes that the Irish and Italian immigration of the early 20th century made the USA worse? The country changes and there's very little culturally other than music that was better in the 1970s than today.
Immigrants actually do assimilate. They do not maintain a consistent ideology based on the pigment of their skin. See the first Republican rep born in Mexico that was just elected in TX. Restricting immigration isn't going to do anything to make living in rural America better.
Finally, this article is a good one. Once again, the activists on both ends of the political spectrum get so much wrong. A dynamic society is one thing that actually makes America great. https://www.persuasion.community/p/yascha-mounk-america-wont-ever-be