Doug wrote: "They've kept the thing going for centuries" this is a strawman. I'm not talking about all the oligarchs throughout the history of capitalism. I'm talking about the ones we have or have had for the last 30-40 years. The original investors in the Bank of England knew damn well how money and credit worked- they bought their shares with Tally Sticks! The british government only phased out tallysticks in the early 19th century. As capitalism has developed there has been more and more mysticism around economics and money. You can already see this in the early 19th century with the arguments between the bullionists and anti-bullionists (roughly Ricardo and company versus Thornton and Tooke). the anti-bullionists actually won the battle but the bullionists won the war. Sure individual central bankers or bankers understand how money works to a greater or lesser extent but the knowledge has been progressively wiped from the general population- including many elites (I'm actually organizing a talk for early october on monetary policy that includes the head of financial markets at the Bank of Canada. my professors credit her with designing Canada's version of the corridor system for all you monetary policy wonks). Even 60 to 80 years ago understanding of how money works was much more widespread.
note that I'm not claiming capitalism wouldn't have problems if the oligarchy understood how money works. far from it actually. what I'm saying as an empirical matter i see very little evidence of widespread understanding of the monetary system among elites. It should be obvious to Marxists that this isn't required for a system to function or for it to be rigged in their interest. -- -Nathan Tankus ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
