Frank wrote on Nov 23
rd, 2021 at 5:39pm:
You don't have to buy and consume Colacola, you know.
That's because I know, but many people are well-trained little foot-soldiers of the junk consumer society, which exists only to enrich CEOs at the expense of society's well-being.
"Things go better with (this sugar-water junk concoction)"....and they believe it.
Quote:And the Gulags and various re-education camps are seen as 'public gardens' for the greater good.
I am all for the greater public good as long as it's not some monster like Stalin, Mao, Xi or Kim is telling me what it is.
And are you for education in public schools alerting young students of the perils of junk consumerism?
I hear the cries of 'nanny-statism' coming from the profit seeking junk peddlers, even now.
Given the acceptance of the current 'invisible hand' market economy, established in most of the world since the collapse of the USSR, MMT offers a way to balance
public sector outcomes, on behalf of 'common prosperity'; with
private sector outcomes, on behalf of private greed and personal enrichment.
Quote:The market economy pre-dates the collapse of the Soviet Union by about 300 years, at least.
I should have said , "re-established in most of the world", (after the demise of the USSR).
The USSR, with a 'planned economy', was the first attempt to deal with the classical market economy's massive failure to implement the common good, eg, failure which Marx observed in children of working class families forced to work in coal mines instead of receiving an education; and Dickens observed in Britain at the height of Empire, scarred by the disgrace of the poverty in the 'work houses'.
The USSR failed because it failed to take into account the creativity which is driven by
greed and incentive in 'invisible hand' markets, but the job of balancing market outcomes among self-interested individuals, on the one hand, with public well-being on the other (eg no homeless people) remains a work in progress.
Quote:What I like about conservatism is that it gets on with life without needing some 'economic theory of life', like Marxism or MMT.
"Gets on with life" all right, with homeless people cluttering footpaths in Sydney and Melbourne, and Sydney's underground rail stations looking like ME refugee camps at night.
Quote:Experimental science has made a huge improvement to human life. You cannot say the same for experimental 'social science'. Society is what people make it among themselves, not something that a theoretician, sitting in a library or a monster sitting in a politburo, tells them to make it.
So sayeth the 'comfortable conservative".....yet 'the dismal science' can be what we make it.
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