Capitalism

 Investment bankers have gone in the past few months from being the “masters of the universe” to the object of universal scorn. Across the political spectrum in the United States, particularly at the fraying ends of its two main political parties, criticism of Wall Street can be heard. Even McCain and Obama– whose...
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Poisoned for Pennies – The economics of toxics and precaution: principal author Frank Ackerman with Lisa Heinzerling, Rachel Massey, Wendy Johnecheck, and Elizabeth Stanton (2008)   The purpose of Ackerman’s book is to expose the weaknesses of the “cost-benefit method” of economic analysis, which has been promoted heavily since the Reagan administration, and increasingly...
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So Wall Street has their cake and gets to eat it too. No surprise. And the politicians of all stripes wring their hands and make grandiloquent sound-bites of how they should be listened to. It’s just so much noise. Both Democrats and Republicans are shocked. SHOCKED! So much for the reputation of...
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Belgium is a patently artificial state inhabited by people speaking two different languages. It survived for many years with one of them (French) as the dominant language because it was the language of the ruling class. Now that this has ceased to be the case, and Dutch (Flemish) has also become a language of...
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AN ENTERPRISE’S RATE OF PROFIT is ihe ratio of the amount of profits it makes, say in a year, to the money-value of its assets at the beginning of that year. The average rate of profit of the whole economy is the ratio of total profit to total capital.The rate of profit would tend...
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In an exchange economy control over the use of the means of production is scattered among thousands of profit-seeking enterprises with no central co-ordination of decisions about the amount and the kind of wealth to be produced. Anarchy inevitably prevails. For a group of enterprises to make profits, its total productive capacity and output...
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To stick to the word’s original meaning only work which plays a direct part in producing wealth can be described as “productive”. Any other work would be “non-productive”. This is not to make a judgement as to its usefulness, but merely to record the fact that it does not result in any wealth being...
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The law of profits says that each enterprise strives to make the maximum amount of profits, and that each state strives to have the maximum amount of profits made by enterprises operating within its frontiers. An enterprise can only be said to “make” profits in the sense of acquiring through exchange more money than it...
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The reason the natural and industrial resources of the world are not used to provide the abundance they are capable of producing is to be sought, not in the realm of technology, but in that of economics. Economics is basically the study of what happens when wealth is exchanged — that is when it is...
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Last month’s G8 Summit in the far north of Japan was typical of meetings of the heads of state these days. Held in a remote location, well out of sight and sound of protest marches, and protected by an army of police, the meeting was carefully choreographed to convey an impression of competence and...
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