Economic Misinformation
A recent headline in the New York Times, “Health Insurers Making Record Profits as Many Postpone Care,” reveals the failings of a corporate capitalist economy. Let me first add the caveats that what we have in this country would be more accurately dubbed corporate socialism than corporate capitalism, and as with anything “failing” depends on [...]
Continue reading about The Failed Corporate Capitalism Model
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 [...]
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 [...]
Well, this is only the second entry for humanitarian efforts and already I’ve encountered problems with the selection process. Charity Navigator is one of the resources I used, particularly for the efficiency data. Yet they also rate organizations according to their capacity. This is a formula for concentrating resources, though I’m sure not intentionally on [...]
The NYT article I linked to in the last post detailed how the oil industry reaps subsidies. In responding to the article, the oil industry representatives did not refute the tax breaks that the oil industry gets, but rather justified them. One thing to keep in mind is how big and consolidated the oil industry [...]
This feature started with a NYT article about risks that BP has been taking for years. There recently was a related NYT article, titled “As Oil Industry Fights a Tax It Reaps Subsidies,” by David Kocieniewski. This hearkens back to when I first started this blog, in late spring of 2008. At the time oil [...]
The last post established that the power of nation states serves to legitimize corporate wealth. The most striking application of this principle has been in the Middle East, where since the start of the twentieth century western intervention has formed nation states in the region with an eye towards oil. Though the indulgence of oil [...]
Our indulgence through oil begins, historically, with the indulgence of corporations. The explosion at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig begins with the first stock issued to the Dutch East Indies Corporation. Here’s a question for you to ponder. What do nation states have that previous city states did not have? The answer is not great territories [...]