Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

I'll never understand economics...

I often hear this from my fellow Catholics. It is just not good enough. If you look at the encyclical Caritas in Veritatis, it is evident that the Catholic laity have a clear duty to attempt to understand the truth about economics.

Economics as taught in academic institutions is mostly a load of baloney and if you have reasonably normal thinking capacities you should not expect to be able to understand it.

The entire subject of economics has been surrounded by a fog of confusion for the past 100 years. If you are a conspiracy theorist you should be able to find good reasons why it is in some people's interest to ensure that confusion prevails amongst the populace. And that is the underlying reason for the present mess. Economic theory as presented by the so-called experts, including most politicians and journalists, is a crock of shit.

Anyhow, there is no reason why any person of average intelligence should not be able to understand economics and there is no excuse. There is material out there which explains quite clearly how the system works.

A good place to start is Progress and Poverty by Henry George which can be downloaded from the internet. A more recent though slightly technical exposition is A New Model of the Economy by Brian Hodgkinson. There are also courses run by the School of Economic Science at various centres round the country, including London, Croydon and Brighton.

In my experience, Christians in general and Catholics in particular seem content to feed the hungry and never bother to ask why there are hungry people when there is plenty of food around, or dismiss it as "a consequence of sin". If one does not bother to look beyond that glib answer then one is part of the sin.

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer