The “Open Door” is a soup kitchen run by a church in nearby Winsted. I used to take youth fellowship groups there on Thanksgiving to help out. That’s one reason I bring them up, to encourage others to seek out their local soup kitchen and either volunteer or donate. The need is great and so [...]
This letter is mainly about lobsters, though there is a reference to Pop coming out to Iowa for the first time to meet his employers and how glad they were to have him come out. July 15, 1965 Mr. Harold Lufkin, V. P. Newton Mfg. Co. Newton, Iowa Dear Mr. Lufkin: A couple of letters [...]
Covered in the previous post was the concept that since capitalism involves production then the normative goal of profits should be to perpetuate production. Using profit for capital improvements or simply to buy stuff encourages production; so, too, does investment into research and development. Using profits to invest into futures trading or even into companies [...]
Capitalism in its pure, unadulterated form, its operational definition before laissez faire economists and free market libertarians make adjustments and excuses to fit actual practice to the meaning, is private production that generates profits. I have covered the problems with “private” and “production” in a laissez faire, corporate economy. Now let’s examine profit, the capital [...]
Sorry for the lag time in posts. I’m involved in a very ambitious project which I will share with you shortly. To recap this series on capitalism: capitalism is private production that generates profits. Capitalism has existed at a small scale, but not at a large scale, despite the adjustments/excuses that grand economic scholars make [...]
This is the second part of the “Why Capitalism Has Yet to Succeed” series. I added the caveat “at a large scale” because, in truth, capitalism can and has succeeded at a small scale. An example of that is where they use BerkShares, close by to where I live. BerkShares are local currency for the [...]
Few economists would agree with the title of this post. Yet, as I often proudly proclaim, I’m no economist. I’m an empiricist, and as such I take seriously the literal meanings of words, or the basic models of concepts. There is disagreement even among economists over the meaning of capitalism; some of that disagreement is [...]