Fascinating video here that provides a Marxian point of view. 1) The economic understanding is fundamentally Keynesian, 2) the assumption is that a fixed pie always exists, 3) he can’t see the world as anything but a contest between capital and labor, 4) he assumes that wealth accumulation means criminality, and 5) he had no answers at all beyond calling for socialism, whatever that is.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/13167/how-a-marxist-sees-the-crisis/
How a Marxist Sees the Crisis
Previous post: Deflationary Delusions and the Dangers of Central Banking
Next post: Ebeling on Pearl Harbor
{ 32 comments }
Shoot and i thought the two previous video’s where going somewhere, and of course no mention of the printing of money.
“I don’t have the solutions…”
That about sums up this socialist rant.
I love how when he is looking at the different ‘understandings’ of the crisis, he doesnt mention the Austrian understanding…
Not surprising at all. I’ve heard of people who’ve gotten degrees in economics who’ve never heard of the Austrian school. So the absence of an Austrian viewpoint doesn’t mean he’s dissing the Austrians. It could just mean he’s ignorant of their very existence.
Actually he does mention Hayek in the beginning, but in a derisive way.
But he doesnt actually mention Hayek’s understaning of the Business cycle. In fact he implies that we(as a country I assume) have been too devoted to Hayek(a claim which is laughable on its face, but still)
Oh and heres a good refutation of that video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJGAs2KwoWk&feature=related
That is Lee Doren from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He is certainly not an Austrian and he thinks anarchists like Rothbard are lunatics. But he has his plus points.
Well, even if he’s not strictly an Austrian, he’s certainly spot on in a lot of his comments.
I’v been watching his critique of the environmentalist nutjob video ‘The Story of Stuff. ‘ And cant help but agree with most of it.
That critique is total crap. His main point is that Harvey’s point about wage stagnation is totally false. His evidence is that Per Capita Income has been increasing, and he equates PCI to wages. PCI is a terrible measure of standard of living, and includes non-wage income such as investment return (90% of all investments are held by wealthiest 10%) and corporate and government income (definitely not personal income). None of these are in any way related to wages.
WAGES HAVE BEEN DECLINING. SEE: http://extremeinequality.org/?page_id=8 and http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/01/revisiting-wage-stagnation.
In general the rest of the video misrepresents Harvey’s points and his statements and fully devolves into a character attack several times. At the very least, this person could have used the full half-hour lecture. A decent response to that critique is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahyuDNLn_Es
For information on how and why inequality is bad for everyone, you can read Rich Democracies, by Harold Wilensky.
This is really nothing new, it’s pretty much how every “educated” individual sees the crisis.
Who is this guy, Jesse’s Cafe? Someone linked to his article from a goldbug site. I would guess that he’s a Marxist, but the bit of economic writing of his that I read is so empty of information I really have no idea. But it’s good for a laugh at what some think of the Austrian school.
LOL. Herbert Hoover, the great Austrian liquidator. Where do people get these ideas – do they go to secret meetings at night in remote locations and repeat mumbo-jumbo until they’re hypnotized?
He then goes on to give sexual and medical metaphors for what he says are the failures of the Austrian school, using arguments completely devoid of any facts or logic. But he gives the Austrians a very faint compliment by stating that the Neo-Liberals are worse. Again, without giving any particular reason. I once heard a Marxist-spouting union person identify Neo-Liberals are being the next thing to the antichrist, so on the circumstantial evidence of rhetoric I suppose Jesse is some kind of Marxist.
Jesse’s whole shtick is to basically shout “a pox on all their houses” while offering no real concrete solutions of his own, other than “the financial system must be reformed” (how?) and “balance must be brought back to the economy” (how?).
His view of the Great Depression is basically the same as you’d find in any eighth grade civics textbook: at first we tried the strategy of the evil liquidators (he even made a post once arguing that the Fed tightened monetary policy in the early 1930s, a direct contradiction of the historical data on currency in circulation), and then FDR took over and made everything better. He seems to understand that the U.S. government is corrupt and incompetent and yet persists in the belief that vigorous state action (of some kind, rarely discussed in any particulars) is needed to make everything right again.
Combine that outlook with some terrible permabullish technical analysis on gold and you’ve basically got the Crossroads Cafe in a nutshell.
Unsettling.
I guess its progress of sorts when a Marxist knows better then to recommend a Marxist solution to an economic problem.
No discussion of the production of money. If he even thought about it, he would quickly see that those who gain access to ‘new money’ first benefit the most. Under a non-FRB system, all investment and wealth creation would come from those who save money, so workers who save a little bit of their check would directly finance business activities.
No mention of the role of government either. Mind you, I suppose if you are a marxist, you don’t want to get into a discussion about marxist governments exterminating millions of their own citizens.
Oh, err, well… those episodes were not true Marxism.
Logical Fallacy – No True Scotsman
Try again.
The scribbly animations are kinda neat.
We need something like that in nice videos that explain the business cycle theory, capital theory and other interesting Austrian insights.
Hear! Hear! Let us copy the useful tactics of the opposition and see if they complain of our “stealing” their idea.
“Sharing the wealth”? >:-)
FWIW, Reason TV did a ‘white board’ explanation of the UPS-FedEx dustoff several months ago. Not as detailed as this video (and RSA has a few other videos using the same animation style).
I like the style. Just wish it could be employed for Austrian insights.
Typical academic criticism of Austrian economics involves skimming the wikipedia article to get the spelling of the major names right, blame it for being just a bunch of far right, redneck, Social Darwinist, racist, corporate lobbying for big business, attribute it rise of fascism and the Great Depression and walk away whistling in the hopes that the uneducated brutes who read your brilliant takedown are too stupid to do their own research.
He does actually focus considerable effort on the mortgage industry and credit pushing. Where he seems to go wrong is as usual the Marxian confusion between capitalism and corporatism/mercantilism. In his statement that capitalism does not resolve the crises but just shifts it around, this seems to me to be a symptom of the government intervention involved in corporatism not pure capitalism.
It seems to me that if you join the government as an integral party picking favorites to Marx’s criticism, that you get something very close to the anarchist/libertarian description of the problem. Of course, leaving this vital link out of the description always makes the solution wrong for Marxism because it does not distinguish between favored corporations (i.e. in this case the finance industry) and the remaining businesses and entrepreneurs attempting to enter into voluntary transactions that benefit everyone.
It is interesting that he uses the monopoly board, but does not once mention the monopoly on money held by the federal reserve.
What would the game of “Monopoly” be like if there was not excessive money printing?
The next time I play, I am going to try this experiment. Obviously there would be no innovations and increasing productivity due to the nature of the game, but I am thinking that reaching a total monopoly would be difficult if not impossible to achieve.
Aaron, it is probably because of the price fixing – all the prices are fixed and there is some ghostly bank that is doing the initial selling.
The man is a good sketch artist, a very good sketch artist, but he is unable to follow his own advice – debate and dialogue on these important issues. The reason he cannot follow his own advice is because he is economically ignorant. Like a Marxist he tries to envision a world without capital. His fantasy and the fantasy of Marx is vain and empty and bizarre and destructive of human dignity and human civilization.
Bruce, I’m quite certain that the speaker is not doing the drawing, rather someone at the RSA (http://www.thersa.org/about-us/what-we-do). They have a project called RSA Animate (http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/videos/) and they have many similar videos there, one is about Superfreakanomics.
I guess we can get a similar animation of Austrian material when some Austrian goes and speaks at RSA.
He left Austrian economic theory out of the genres, which was his first mistake. He then used a detached mechanism of logic, where he would say a truthful fact and then try to associate other truthful or untrue statements with the truthful fact. But failing to actually explain the process adequately, however the animation was entertaining.
The anti-capitalists always seem to have a problem talking about the association with the state and the central bank and the nationalist monetary monopoly.
I wish that we could go back to what Thomas Jefferson said about banking and the banks in general. I think he was absolutely right.
I just wish that we could go back to what Thomas Jefferson said about banking and that whole industry.
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 1 trackback }