Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

July 19, 2014

Income inequality

The French economist Thomas Piketty has published a best-seller -- imagine a 645-page book about economics becoming a best-seller! -- called Capital In The Twenty-FIrst Century. He has examined statistics going back to the French revolution, able to go back that far because that's when France began keeping meticulous records, and he seems to demonstrate something that Marx probably already knew: if capitalism is unregulated, the value of capital will increase faster than the value of labor.

That's why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The 20th century was disfigured by two terrible world wars, the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s and much else, but now that things are getting back to what passes for normal, we are seeing increasing economic inequality, as we were seeing it a hundred years ago.

Needless to say, the so-called American "conservatives" don't like the news. A couple of weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, somebody from the Cato Institute cried that Piketty's statistics are wrong, at least as far as the USA is concerned, because something or other wasn't taxed 40 years ago, but is now, and something else was taxed 40 years ago, but isn't now. As so often, the Times Literary Supplement is more reliable. in its June 27 issue, a long, fascinating review of Piketty's book by Duncan Kelly includes this:

There is considerable disagreement in current economic work about whether the site of the real movement in extreme wealth inequality is taking place in the top 0.1 per cent, the top 1 per cent, or the top 5-10 per cent. That's because how you choose to measure inequality matters for the sort of political conclusions you want to draw. You would struggle to find a serious scholar, though, who disagreed that particularly in Britain and America, rising wealth inequality is the norm rather than the exception. 

Just so. The middle class in the USA is losing confidence in its own country and there simply aren't enough decent jobs for ordinary folks, no matter what sort of blinders some people choose to wear.

 

July 19, 2014

The beasts who fired the missile

It is clear that the Russians have supplied anti-aircraft missiles to the thugs and criminals who are causing all the trouble in eastern Ukraine, and that they have shot down a civilian airliner, killing nearly 300 people. Fritz Plous has a good idea:

If Obama really wants to take charge of this situation he should call the allies together -- along with the airline industry -- and arrange an immediate embargo on all commercial air traffic into Russia from outside. No flights over or into any Russian-controlled terrirory until Putin comes to the table and agrees to disarm the so-called "separatists."  And no Aeroflot flights out. You want to go to Moscow to to business? Fly to Warsaw and take the overnight train.

Ah, but that would take a president with some guts. Once again I wish I could vote for Harry Truman. Does anyone remember the Berlin airlift?