Category: Economics

Capitalist Raider Culture or Why Geography Matters

Viking Reenactors - Iceland.

It’s easy to look at what happened between the so-called Western nations and the rest of the world and call it racism.  But what if the problem with white people isn’t racial, but geographic?

These speculations began while I was reading a Geography textbook from 1920 — that’s 100 years ago this year.  Reading about the land and resources of people around the world is interesting in and of itself — Vermont was a wood state, Maryland grew a lot of strawberries, that sort of thing.  But where it got especially interesting was when it came to the differences between peoples of foreign lands.  

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Keeping Up With Our Former Selves

Happy Girl Smart Phone

People today aren’t so much keeping up with the Joneses as keeping up with our former selves. Things we used to be able to afford are suddenly too expensive. It’s not because we make less money nominally but that everything costs so much more. And so when commentators talk about people not getting a raise in 20 years, that’s what they’re talking about. The earning power of our money is less.

This doesn’t even get into the situation of people’s whose nominal income has been flat — or worse, has slid — but who are still forced to pay higher prices that assume a much higher income level. Read More

The Debate on Socialism

I ran into a friend the other day, and the first words out of his mouth were “Since when did the Democratic party become Socialist?” My short answer was — they haven’t. They’re they same old corporatist, center-right party they’ve been for years. It’s just that Republicans, seizing on the rhetoric of Bernie Sanders and a few others, have decided that socialism is the Democrats’ Achilles heel and so they’re making a big issue of it. Oddly enough, however, this could turn out to be a good thing. By drawing attention to it, they’ve opened a debate that’s been dormant for decades. Read More

Money Wants To Be Free

12/14/2008

Suppose we were to uncomplicate money.

I was reading a story in the Washington Post today about how the city of New York is cutting a daycare program for middle-class Alzheimer’s sufferers.   The program is badly needed by the families it serves, but the $1.2 million price tag and relatively low number of beneficiaries made it tempting to city government, and they cut the program.  All 12 centers will close by the end of the month.  Meanwhile, the hundreds of families they served are out of luck.

Once again, the question arises — why must we do without needed services provided by willing service providers just because of this arbitrary, made-up thing called money?  It’s true that when viewed through the usual lens of “because that’s the way capitalism works”, you can almost rationalize hurting real people to save a buck.  But when you jump up a level and look at the big picture, it just seems stupid that people go cold or hungry or without healthcare or education, because they weren’t blessed by birth or circumstance with a large enough share of the coin of the realm. Read More

What Is Capitalism?

Originally posted on iBrattleboro.com 10/28/2008

When I was ten, I borrowed a book from the School library called Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, which purported to explain the various economic systems to ten year olds.  My parents made me take it back because they said little children should not be reading about dangerous ideas like communism.  I showed them — in my senior year of high school, I wrote a term paper on The Communist Manifesto.

Despite this early interest in economics, I realized recently that I have almost no idea what capitalism really is, despite the fact that I use the word all the time.  So this essay is an effort to learn. Read More