Belligerent Savant wrote:whatever Alison McDowell reportedly may not grasp with respect to govt taxing or borrowing does not take away from her years-long research into the other topics/points of interest she raises. Of course, she's not the only person digging into the aims of the WEF and this would-be 'Great Reset', however realized these aims may or may not be in the near or long term.
Focusing on her point(s) specific to money and rendering a hand-waving dismissal of the rest of her ample contributions is very much 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'.
I didn't do that. To repeat, she identifies real problems in some detail, but
remedies incorporating this starting assumption —
The government does not have the money to cover these needs...The poor have very little income to pay in taxes...so the government cannot meet the needs of the people.
— will have serious shortcomings. Because, among other reasons, A) it's simply untrue, and B) it falls right into the waiting arms of private financial predators (:cough: WEF?) — who need us to
need them.
Maybe another day I'll go over her interview again to distinguish what's good to know and what she needs to
unlearn.
Belligerent Savant wrote:does not take away from her years-long research into the other topics/points of interest she raises.
It does if she's starting with such a
fundamental error as quoted above. Money flows from the center, not from the periphery to the center. She's shooting herself in the foot—needlessly hobbled—by surrending the whole
concept of money to rich fatcats (and let's not discount the poor's pathetically meager tax contributions—"stakeholders"!).
The "common sense" myths about money are deeply ingrained at the
unconscious level. They can be
very difficult to break:
[T]he public discourse reflects significant errors that render it almost impossible for participants to make informed assessments of macroeconomic developments independent of the politics involved.
[...] Problems in communicating the complexities of economic concepts and evidence are amplified by the ideological assumptions that dominate the public debate. Economics as an academic discipline and profession has come to be defined by a set of beliefs that are associated with the dominant free market paradigm. The consequence of this is a narrow debate....
[T]hink-tanks and media outlets produce an array of ‘research’ or ‘policy’ reports such that the
public understanding has become straitjacketed by orthodox concepts and conclusions that, in themselves, are erroneous, but also lead to policy outcomes that undermine prosperity and subvert public purpose. The willingness to tolerate mass unemployment, rising income inequality and poverty is a manifestation of this syndrome.
Prior to the global financial crisis (GFC), mainstream economists pronounced the business cycle dead and declared that we had entered a period of “great moderation” (Stock and Watson, 2002; Lucas, 2003).
These economists categorically failed to foresee the catastrophic consequences of the labour market and financial deregulation they promoted. It is reasonable to expect that professional failure on the scale of the GFC would lead to a re-evaluation of the paradigm within which these economists work, and major changes in economic curricula and research.
Mainstream economists, however, have re-energised their anti-government free-market biases and effectively reconstructed what was a private debt crisis into a sovereign debt crisis, obscuring their role in the crisis and deflecting attention from the flaws in their model. The dynamics that created the crisis (deregulation, reduced financial oversight, etc.) continue to be advocated by the mainstream as solutions.
The fact that mainstream macroeconomics has retained its hegemonic status in the face of its failure to resonate with reality is, in no small way, due to the way economic debates are framed in the public discourse. Framing refers to the way an argument is conceptualised and communicated by speakers and listeners. Processes of conceptualisation proceed by way of adaptive reasoning on the basis of models and representations. Research in cognitive philosophy and cognitive linguistics suggests that the models that constrain our thinking operate at a largely unconscious level, and that the abstract concepts we draw on are “largely metaphorical”, “imaginative”, and “emotionally engaged” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 3-4).
Proponents of neo-classical macroeconomics have been extremely successful in their use of common metaphors to advance their ideological interests. What is, in fact, a myth that is designed to advance a narrow ideological interest, is constructed and accepted by the public as a verity. Thus ideology triumphs over evidence and we accept falsehoods as truth.
Recent psychological studies have highlighted the extent to which pre-existing biases influence the way in which we interpret factual information, including straightforward statistical data (for example, Kahan et al., 2013). This presents a problem for the communication of research outcomes that bear on public policy design, particularly where findings may be counterintuitive, or may challenge a dominant or controversial discourse, as in the case of economic austerity or climate change.
[...] There remains a role for better education of essential concepts in addition to a reconsideration of how the concepts are related.
http://espace.cdu.edu.au/view/cdu:40221 ... _40221.pdf
(Full 20-page text at link.)
I'm leaving bitcoin et al. aside, because I don't think it will ever become the
unit of account, and that's what we're talking about here. If bitcoin holders can use bitcoin to address any of the
real problems McDowell identifies, I'm all for it. But the chief motivations I've observed among bitcoin holders is to 1) get rich, as quickly as possible, and 2) defeat the dollar!—because government bad, collectivism bad, central banks bad. Me getting rich good! So, while public-spirited action would be welcomed, I don't anticipate the existing bitcoin society (ahem) jumping to the fore with bitcoin-based solutions to real collective problems. With all that, I do pledge to study this question more closely in the future.
Also:
why oh why didn't I buy some bitcoin years ago?! I like easy earnings as much as the next person, but I'm really bad at these kinds of gambles.