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One of the great ironies of contemporary left-leaning commentators is that despite their insistence on paying attention to institutional factors that others all

One of the great ironies of contemporary left-leaning commentators is that despite their insistence on paying attention to institutional factors that others allegedly neglect (see how Pfeffer constructs the popular but false dichotomy of "self-interest and profit maximization" versus "human well-being, longevity and happiness"), they are largely stuck in thinking in terms of the very same institutions they abhor. Effectively, the current approach is mostly fine, it just needs a few tweaks and reforms to turn it into a "social democracy". If money is the problem, then the solution is not to engage in petty social democratic welfare reforms, but to end the monopoly on currency and allow for communities and individuals to coordinate savings-investment decisions and account for their local capital using the denomination of currency that they have decided to create. This is the mutual credit solution as advocated by 19th century anarchists and a minority of monetary reformers since then. Pfeffer quotes Article 23 on the "right to work," and indeed full employment has always been a bizarre fetish for Keynesians, social democrats, Marxists and conservatives. The Protestant work ethic is the right-wing version of the labor theory of value. It is a contradiction how so many bemoan the supposed rat race working conditions and then advocate the "solution" of having the state put everyone into the rat race through full employment policy. Nowhere have I seen any social democratic reformer argue for artisanal crafts and decentralized governance. It's always more and more massive centralization. I will note it was the mercantilists who first provided economic rationales for full employment. And they went to great lengths to achieve it: anti-vagrancy and poor laws to forcefully turn people into serfs. The current proposals are more humane, but borne of the same logic of "to live is to toil". I will also note that a reason why formal models haven't focused that much on things like subjective utility and happiness is because those suffer from intractable aggregation problems. It's easy to speak of the "public interest" in colloquial language, it is brutally difficult to model and quantify it, actually drawing the line of how far it extends. Then, of course, interpersonal comparison of utility is fraught with issues because there is no measurement of utility as such. Robert Nozick's thought experiments have been good at illustrating this. This trite paternalistic reformism leads nowhere except to further exacerbation of instability.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- c22 11y ago
  I think the argument might just be that radical disenchantment requires proposals of radical change.
crdoconnor 11y ago
>Pfeffer quotes Article 23 on the "right to work," and indeed full employment has always been a bizarre fetish for Keynesians, social democrats, Marxists and conservatives. The Protestant work ethic is the right-wing version of the labor theory of value. It is a contradiction how so many bemoan the supposed rat race working conditions and then advocate the "solution" of having the state put everyone into the rat race through full employment policy. There's a really banal reason for this. The vast majority of people want jobs. In Argentina when they implemented an incredibly popular "right to a job" scheme (Plan Jefes) and then replaced it with basic income (i.e. get the same money but you don't have to turn up to work), a majority continued to do their jobs. It helped that the jobs that the state were paying them to do were, by and large, necessary and rewarding - looking after the elderly, etc. I doubt if the work they were doing were debt collection or cold calling to sell insurance they'd have wanted to continue working.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  But the whole sentiment that looks down on poverty and exalts exorbitant wealth in of itself which the author underlines, emerges from the same train of thought that treats labor and full employment as the end of all ends. There's little functional difference between the conservative presenting a just world where hard work ensures success, from a social democrat who argues for large-scale centralization to shuffle people into the same capitalist institutions they allegedly look down on because "people want jobs". They're both far-reaching implicit assumptions of a labor theory of value in structuring a society. Indeed, it was the neo-Keynesian focus on full employment that led to short-sighted reliance on economic models like expectations-agnostic Phillips curves and IS-LM models with interest-sensitive money demand to the exclusion of other macro considerations, that ultimately culminated in a stagflation bust in the 1970s. Nor was this even a perversion of Keynesianism. It was Keynes himself who formulated simultaneous-equations IS-LM in lectures from 1933-1934. Employment as end in of itself also led to mercantilist-era injustices. But again, this is tangential to the issue of money.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

c22 11y ago
I think the argument might just be that radical disenchantment requires proposals of radical change.

crdoconnor 11y ago

>Pfeffer quotes Article 23 on the "right to work," and indeed full employment has always been a bizarre fetish for Keynesians, social democrats, Marxists and conservatives. The Protestant work ethic is the right-wing version of the labor theory of value. It is a contradiction how so many bemoan the supposed rat race working conditions and then advocate the "solution" of having the state put everyone into the rat race through full employment policy. There's a really banal reason for this. The vast majority of people want jobs. In Argentina when they implemented an incredibly popular "right to a job" scheme (Plan Jefes) and then replaced it with basic income (i.e. get the same money but you don't have to turn up to work), a majority continued to do their jobs. It helped that the jobs that the state were paying them to do were, by and large, necessary and rewarding - looking after the elderly, etc. I doubt if the work they were doing were debt collection or cold calling to sell insurance they'd have wanted to continue working.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
But the whole sentiment that looks down on poverty and exalts exorbitant wealth in of itself which the author underlines, emerges from the same train of thought that treats labor and full employment as the end of all ends. There's little functional difference between the conservative presenting a just world where hard work ensures success, from a social democrat who argues for large-scale centralization to shuffle people into the same capitalist institutions they allegedly look down on because "people want jobs". They're both far-reaching implicit assumptions of a labor theory of value in structuring a society. Indeed, it was the neo-Keynesian focus on full employment that led to short-sighted reliance on economic models like expectations-agnostic Phillips curves and IS-LM models with interest-sensitive money demand to the exclusion of other macro considerations, that ultimately culminated in a stagflation bust in the 1970s. Nor was this even a perversion of Keynesianism. It was Keynes himself who formulated simultaneous-equations IS-LM in lectures from 1933-1934. Employment as end in of itself also led to mercantilist-era injustices. But again, this is tangential to the issue of money.