Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
I think the model is fundamentally broken.

Money = leverage is not a sustainable foundation for an economy. Taxing it slows down its velocity and constrains its influence. But it's still a broken model because the aim is almost always zero sum personal aggrandisement, not synergetic creative contribution.

There's nothing wrong with the concepts of social sponsorship and risky adventuring. But it's going to take some completely new political and economic metaphors to make stable non-insane development possible.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Mon Jul 13th, 2009 at 09:27:23 AM EST
[ Parent ]
... zero-sum claims on existing production rather than on the process of creation ... that's more deeply embedded than leverage. As long as there is a decentralized system, there's an incentive to focus on extracting tolls from occupation of strategic intersections rather than on creation of new product.

Progressive income taxation swings the incentives in the favor of going productive concerns ...

... but then we have just seen five decades plus of gutting the intellectual basis of economics as a social science, just as a side play in the fight to undermine progressive income taxation and protective regulation in the finance sector.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Jul 13th, 2009 at 09:34:26 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Display:

Occasional Series