According to the media, the main issue in the election has been the state of the economy. The Labour Party has made it the central point in their campaign, seeking to blame the outgoing Conservative government for slow growth and stagnating living standards. In a typical example of their (rather overblown) propaganda Rachel Reeves, the …
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We’ll need universal basic income — AI “godfather” . The godfather in question was Professor Geoffrey Hinton, so dubbed because he was a pioneer of neural networks on which AI is modelled. He told BBC Newsnight that a scheme ‘giving fixed amounts of cash to every citizen would be needed because he was “very worried …
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Chancellor-in-waiting Rachel Reeves’s commitment to private capitalist business knows no bounds. ‘We will be the most pro-business government ever, vows Reeves’ was the headline of an interview with her in the Times (25 April). For the record — to remember when someone asks you to vote Labour in the coming general election — her exact …
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‘Greggs faces profit margin pressure amid rising wage costs’ reported Business Matters (15 May). Roisin Currie, the company’s chief executive, was reported as saying she expected that the company’s costs would rise by between 4 and 5 percent this year and that ‘the majority of cost inflation pressure that we face this year is wages’. …
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That was the word used by Chris Weston, the CEO of Thames Water, to describe how the business was regarded by its shareholders in the absence of the water companies’ regulator, Ofwat, allowing an increase in the price charged to customers (Times, 29 March). It’s an odd word, not to be confused with ‘uninvestable’ (with …
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On the First of April the Guardian seemingly pulled off a good April Fool as many people wouldn’t have recognised it as such. They published an article by a ‘Stuart Kells’ who argued that banks can create money out of thin air and that governments don’t need to tax or borrow money. ‘Stuart Kells’ begins …
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In the November/December issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, Benjamin Radford dealt with a question ‘What do you make of the memes going around comparing billionaires to hoarding dragons and monkeys? Are billionaires hurting the world by hoarding their obscene wealth?’ He answered that billionaires were not like the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit who slept …
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‘Pet care rip-off is a case of bad capitalism’ ran the headline of Emma Duncan’s column in the Times (15 March), subtitled ‘Profiteering by vet chains and children’s homes will only bolster appeal of socialism to the young’. Let’s hope so. Earlier that week the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had announced that it had …
Read more “Cooking the Books 2 – What would ‘good’ capitalism be?”
Last month the BBC released a podcast of Laurie Taylor discussing capitalism with two authors of books on the subject. The first was Michael Sonenscher, author of Capitalism, The Story Behind the Word (reviewed in the January 2023 Socialist Standard). He told Taylor that the word originated in the 18th century (in France as capitalisme) …
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An enquirer from Vietnam has asked us (and others) a couple of questions on Marxian economics. Here they are with our reply. Does the commodity value come mainly from demand, market evaluation and utility, not from labor? (explain labor theory of value v/s marginal value theorem) A commodity (as a product of labour produced to …
Read more “Cooking the Books – Two questions answered”