Paul Mattick jnr video
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The Great Recession and the Failure of Capitalism with Paul Mattick
Besides explaining why Keynesian ecnomics wont work he talks on the burden of taxation question.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-30DYYS2F4
He does however make a distinction between the state sector spending and investement and the private sector spending and investment with only the latter actually being the capitalist economy.
YFPSA
Brian
Brian wrote:He does however make a distinction between the state sector spending and investement and the private sector spending and investment with only the latter actually being the capitalist economy.Yes, that struck me as odd too. At one point he says that because 35% of GDP passes via the State in the US that means only 65% of economic activity there today is actually capitalist. So, he seems to think (as his father did in Marx and Keynes) that capitalism is essentially private, free market capitalism. But then he also says (very eloquently) that capitalism has never existed without the state (which is true) so there seems to be a bit of an inconsistency here. Surely state economic activity is capitalist too?This said, I don’t think we should nit-pick too much since most of the lecture is good, especially where he develops the point that capitalism is not a system geared to meeting paying demand (let alone to real needs) but one geared to making profits and where he explains who really bears the burden of taxation. A whizz-kid on our facebook site says you can listen to him on taxation by going straight to here.A pity he didn’t answer the question on what a modern, non-capitalist society might be like since he does have the same idea of this as us (classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless) but I suppose this was because he was supposed to be giving an academic lecture. Just hope it wasn’t because he didn’t want to appear utopian.
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