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Related: About this forumEconomist Michael Hudson: the Financial Sector and Real Estate Speculators as Parasites
Jack Rabbit
(45,984 posts)I just finished reading all three volumes of Capital. I first read volume 1 in college about 1973 and re-read it two or three times since, but this is the first time I read volumes 2 and 3. This helped me to follow Professor Hudson's argument in the above video. The rest of the key to understanding is from following the news with the assumption that big media is lying to us.
Karl Marx was fundamentally a British classical economist. He didn't add a great deal to classical economics, but he did extend it to its logical conclusion through a dynamic philosophical analysis. I've always been a little suspicious of Marx' use of Hegel's dialectical idealism, but I must also admit that by applying that method to material phenomena Marx made far better use of it than Hegel himself. Hegel's The Philosphy of History is some of the silliest stuff I've ever read. Chapter 32 of the first volume of Capital read eerily like the daily headlines when I first read it in 1973, and no less so since.
The parasite will kill the host, move to the next host and move on until the host species becomes extinct, leaving the parasite nothing more to feed on. Neoliberalism is a useless theory, used only to justify a parasitic economic relationship between bankers, who do not produce any new wealth, and those of us who work for a living. We need a sustainable economy that takes the survival of the the human species and the environment that provides for it into account. That is why in this election year I enthusiastically support a democratic socialist over a neoliberal.
Thank you, Baobab.
appalachiablue
(41,171 posts)a lobbyist a few years ago.
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)we will have a chance to fix it.
Until then they simply feed what he is talking about.
Baobab
(4,667 posts)because they are not profitable enough, we're dooming oyr country to death by parasitic churning.
They will try to suck the value out of everything real and good, and turn it into a parody of itself.
But not understanding how the real thing works, (because if they did they would not be churners) they will basically just be like a cargo cult imitating the external aspects of something and never get WHY it worked when it did.
When infrastructure is built because of services liberalization the jobs will go to low bidding firms on the other side of the world, unless the US gets rid of its higher wages too. That's the plan.
Due to the falling tax receipts innumerable other "redevelopment" schemes will result in the destruction of all livable communities. Ironically it will be claimed to build "affordable housing" however it wont be affordable.
Businesses will fail Sucking more money out of taxpayers - bailouts driven by bad trade deals (rent extraction)
Entrepreneurial types will likely leave because of the likelihood of failure due to endlessly worsening parasitic cronyism and jobs will never be created and all the creative energies that we need will become wasted lives or go elsewhere.