How to Rendition An Inconvenient Economist

I haven’t heard any discussion by the economists or politicians about the tidal wave of debt that is engulfing Canada.

The following information is from a Statistics Canada credit market summary data table as of the end of June 2012: (The debt statistics for Canada up to the end of September 2012 will be released in about 3 weeks by Statistics Canada).

Total debt in Canada as of the end of June 2012 (bottom line of the data table) was 5.1 Trillion $

From the end of June 2011 to the end of June 2012 the total debt in Canada increased by 209 Billion $.

For that 12 month period the total debt in Canada increased at a rate of 572 Million $ per day.

I would have to agree with Karl Denninger when he said (a few years ago) “You cannot expand credit at a rate faster than GDP forever without suffering a financial panic and collapse”.

https://www5.statcan.gc.ca/cansim/pick-choisir?lang=eng&p2=33&id=3780122

“The older I get, the more cynical I become about government intervention in the economy.”

Gee, if I didn’t know any better I’d say ol’ Stevie boy is starting to sound like an Austrian! It is true that those who work for the government statistically have the lowest opinion of government programs. Maybe that’s because when you are funded by theft and you are not constrained by the profit motive, only negative outcomes are possible?

You need to go deeper. You have to look at the violence. You have to look at the contradictions.

You have to be able to see the guns and how they skew the incentives, always for the worse. It’s so hard for people to see, and then once you do, it’s impossible to unsee.

taxation is theft.
war is murder.
violence against those acting peacefully is always wrong.
We know these things and practice them in our own lives, yet we make this magical exception for the goons of the state.

everything they have is stolen.
everything they say is a lie.
everything they claim to do, their aim is the opposite.

the war on drugs = rampant drug abuse
the war on poverty = rampant and always worsening poverty
the war on terror = rampant terrorism (TSA? SWAT? Drones?)
public schools = mass indoctrination and retardation of critical thinking

It’s hard to accept. I get it. Twelve years in government indoctrination centers takes a lot of undoing.

But trust me – its worth it. Cast it aside. Let it go. Once you see those who claim the right to initiate violence against others as the scum that they are, it all falls into place.

It’s time to put down the gun.

FB post in response to this article by some guy named John Vermazen:

First of all, the idea Karl Popper, anti-communist extraordinaire and apologist for the West in the Cold War, wrote the final word on science is absurd. Falsifiability was critiqued at length, it isn’t how science is actually practiced. Kuhn and Lakatos wrote the definitive works revising the concept in light of plain reality, while Paul Feyerabend famously reduced Popper to absurdity in Against Method.

Secondly, Steve Keen is nothing but a new wave alt-Keynesian who proposes strategic state interventions into a capitalist economy with debt jubilees. He is an apologist for capitalism. His MO is to create a “capitalism that works better” where the capitalists still exploit labor and systematically maldevelop the globe while wrecking the environment, but with less losses from crises and slowdowns.

The Marxist labor theory of value is not the Ricardian labor theory of value; it is not true that there exists some metaphysical value attached to each and every commodity exact equivalent to the concrete amount of labor-time which was put into producing it. People think this because they only read Vol. 1 of Capital, and nothing else. Marx’s point was to CRITIQUE Ricardo’s theory of value, and classical political economy generally. The fact is that calorie counting is and has never been the constraints on actual production–what is the restraints is there are a fixed number of hours in a day that a laborer can work. To go on and on about thermodynamics is pure absurdity: it goes without saying production always conforms to thermodynamic constraints because thermodynamic constraints govern ALL PHYSICAL PROCESSES. The EIA and IEA constantly produce reports on how much energy we consume–its hardly written off as a carry-over. The fact is that no energy has ever been recovered for “free”–the Earth’s surface recieved the same amount of potential energy from the sun for millions of years. What changed? The social organization of human labor to exploit the potential chemical and solar energy through domesticated crops that greatly expanded the capacity of food storage available to human social units in given units of time. That said, if we ever have a communist mode of production, econophysics-like concepts may be important to the purposes of in-kind and physical accounting for value-less production processes.

In any case, the Marxist theory of value is better dubbed the value theory of labor. The central issue is how human creative capacities must be accounted for as labor-values, must be subordinated psychically and socially to production as a concept–this itself is the product of a society based on wage-labor and generalized commodity production: the capitalist mode of production. The social revolution is the overthrow of human creative powers being caged within value.

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I don’t know enough to argue with this guy, except that I know this sentence from his response is hogwash: “The fact is that calorie counting is and has never been the constraints on actual production–what is the restraints is there are a fixed number of hours in a day that a laborer can work. “

Deconstructing The Price Of Gold – Gold Bugs Better Sit Down For This One https://chartistfriendfrompittsburgh.blogspot.com/2012/11/deconstructing-price-of-gold-gold-bugs.html

Hi Illargi,

There are people out there trying to do honest work that neither violates thermodynamics nor fails falsifiability, instead of dictating some belief system incapable of defining either debt or value.

I guess that will be the remaining aboriginal/indigenous pre-industrial peoples – what’s left of them. Without being too Zerzan, all civilization is based upon conquest and the subsequent ‘assimilation’ (theft) of resources whether from the ‘natural’ (existing self sustaining ecosystems) and the sustainable humans who exist in such, or from other ‘civilisations’. Trying to get the current high priests of this current culture to change would be like trying to stop the Aztecs priests from performing their blood sacrifices to their gods, or to fight Cortes – not gonna happen dude…. their mindset/system was just too tight.

Without digging into John Gall’s Systemantics too deeply, his axiom of

(Gall, 2006, “the Systems Bible”, 3rd Ed. p.130) has stood the tests of time, the Family being his best example.

L,
Sid.

Using an econometric unit of energy flux density [joule/$/sec^2] to quantify the value of production does rely on arbitrary EROEI boundary conditions. This becomes problematic when accounting for the embedded energy of tools and the energetic leverage of innovation, but no more so than with monetary valuation.

The first law of gravitonomics:

All economic activity is leveraged on the facilitation [labor] and maintenance [capital] of a food surplus.

corollary;
All social control is leveraged off the facilitation and maintenance of a food shortage/scarcity.

The first statement is falsifiably true.
But it seems to indicate a gross misvaluations of labor and tools employed in food production, which should be valued more than their price affords.

Providing that hierarchical division of labor decouples capital surplus from food production [grain tokens], and providing that all social control constrains economic activity and limits aggregate surplus, the corollary is also true.

Thank you for an incredibly lucid explanation of where value comes from. I would prefer that you had used the term “wealth” instead of value. This is my conclusion from some years of independent rumination but you have put it crystal clear for me by relating it to the laws of thermodynamics. I intuitively knew that energy was at the core of wealth but you made the jump to the thermodynamic laws. WOW. I have already printed this blog post and filed it. It is great to have you back and writing regularly. Say hello to your female collaborator. I enjoyed her conversation at our dinner table a year or so ago.