On 9/20/08, Julio Huato <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Can somebody please measure all this stuff and straighten things out > for me? Thanks.
It's not the quantity of the stuff that matters. It's WHICH metric is used to quantify it. Labor or debt. As long as the discussion can be constrained to avoid the question of labor, it will be the non-owners of capital who pay -- one way or another: unemployment, cuts in real wages, taxes, war. The point I would insist on is that regardless of the quality of the mountain of debt heaped up over the past decade or two or three, without that debt there would have had to have been either massive unemployment or some sort of profound social upheaval. I would venture that without the dilution of debt quality there couldn't have been such a massive expansion of debt. The options thus were bad debt, mass unemployment or (potentially emancipatory) social upheaval. Say economic growth after the bailout is slow for several years (a modest proposition), then the unemployment rate will mount. People may then attribute the increased unemployment to the aftermath of financial distress. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. But, rather than being the CAUSE of unemployment, it would be more accurate to view the financial distress as simply the withdrawal of a palliative. Paulson and Bernanke can put as much bailout lipstick on the debt pig as they want, but it's still a pig. The pig is that the bad debt regime was always already conceived and executed as the pro-capitalist alternative to an emancipatory social evolution. -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
