Re: Spam Alert: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Fwd: Re: [gang8] The Southwark dimension

[Rodney Shakespeare]

 Dear Social Credit members, In previous posts I have dealt sufficiently with Austrians and replied sufficiently to Gunnar Thompson, all of whom are determined to let huge rich-poor divisions remain in the world because they are opposed to the wide ownership of productive capital paying out its full earnings.   I now refer briefly to Michael Hudson.  I understood that he and  had a tacit agreement that he  would stop being deliberately offensive about binary economics -- here is no transfer function in b.e -- and, in exchange, I would stop pointing out that he has never read Binary Economics being one of those egregious members of the gang of 8 who pontificate about things without having read the relevant books.     Alas, it seems that he has some deep need to keep providing me with the opportunity to say that he attacks binary economics without knowing the first thing about it.   Rodney Shakespeare. ----- Original Message ----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, July 11, 2003 6:16 PM Subject: Spam Alert: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Fwd: Re: [gang8] The Southwark dimension -- --------- Forwarded Message --------- DATE: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 11:33:21 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: In a message dated 7/11/03 10:05:46 AM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Dear Michael:   First, let me note Krehm underscores the point which I raised at the outset of exchanges with Rodney Shakespeare on Gang8 some months ago: The notion that everybody must become a capitalist is a morbid one. It stems, I believe, from the bizarre notion of the Binary Economics people that machinery itself produces wealth. It doesn’t.   In other words, Capital is not an independent Factor of Production - hence Keynes's 'sympathy' for "the pre-classical doctrine that everything is produced by labour, aided by what used to be called art and is now called technique, by natural resources which are free or cost a rent according to their scarcity or abundance, and by the result of past labour, embodied in assets, which also command a price according to their scarcity or abundance.  It is preferable," Keynes concluded, "to regard labour, including, of course, the personal services of the entrepreneur and his assistants, as the sole factor of production, operating in a given environment of technique, natural resources, capital equipment and effective demand.  This partly explains why we have been able to take the unit of labour as the sole physical unit which we require in our economic system, apart from units of money and of time."  (General Theory, Ch. 16)   Now to your comments:  I thought the key was HOW the economic surplus was to be paid out: as stipulated and fixed interest payments, or as flexible earnings.      Could the latter reading be what was meant? If not, SHOULD it be what was meant?    As I see it, the very concept of such "economic surplus" cannot be divorced from the "bizarre notion of the Binary Economics people that machinery itself produces wealth."   For if "everything is produced by labour", then "economic surplus" cannot arise so long as "labour" receives a dollar's income for dollar's worth of labor. So what the Binary Economics people must be talking about is an income transfer mechanism akin to the interest rate mechanism under contemporary monetary arrangements whereby the purchasing power of "a dollar's income for dollar's worth of labor" is diluted so that some may reap where they have not sown.   The social welfare system is such a mechanis m and, since it "takes" from some and "gives" to others, people will hold different views on its adequacy or fairness.   Cloaking such differences in the jargon of Binary Economics serves no purpose. Gunnar Dear Gunnar, Your point is good that capital is not an independent means of production. Perhaps the tendency of economists to cut everything apart reflects their own autistic character, along with the polarized ideas that economies must be either socialist or libertarian rather than a mixed combination. "Capital" like "wealth," has come to mean property claims, either physical or now, increasingly, financial in character. Of course, the essence of Marxism is that a workers does NOT receive a dollar's wage for the dollar-value of labor. That is where profits are created in the Marxian scheme. Even if workers DID receive dollar-for-dollar, they would still be exploited by rentiers, whose rent and interest claims have no counterpart in out-of-pocket costs of production and hence are socially unnecessary. You are right that Binary Economics cloak s what is in reality a transfer function, dissolving it into an amorphous social rhetoric. Does Social Credit do this too? If so, how would either system be expressed non-amorphously? As the classical economists would say, what is the INCIDENCE of these social welfare payments? And once there is an incidence of such payments, is there a form of exploitation involved? Michael Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT The gang8 list is devoted to Creditary Economics. To unsubscribe, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. --------- End Forwarded Message --------- ____________________________________________________________ Get advanced SPAM filtering on Webmail or POP Mail ... Get Lycos Mail! Login To Lycos Mail ==^^=============================================================== This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. 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