MORALITY BACK INTO ECONOMICS – ONE POST AT A TIME (response to ‘economist’s view

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2014/02/forget-the-minimum-wage-job-losses-its-government-cuts-thatll-getyou-mad.htmlADDING MORALITY BACK INTO ECONOMICS – ONE POST AT A TIME

(response to ‘economist’s view’)

NOTE: current macro economic models assumes either (a) a nation state or (b) universalism. But it does not account for moral differences in a heterogeneous polity. My argument is that these models are increasingly predictive under artificially heated economies, and increasingly NON-PREDICTIVE under increasingly normal economies. The rate of change in wealth determines our tolerance for ‘immoral’ behavior. The lower the rate of change, the less tolerance, and the rate of contraction determines the level of intolerance.

I believe that this is one of the missing ‘laws’ of macro economic analysis.

Moral heterogeneity is a bad thing. It’s not a matter of race. it’s a matter of morality and identity. Race just happens to influence identity and morality a lot. Less so in the UK than the States for example. Less so in Canada than the UK. For obvious reasons: density and rates of change.

— POST FOLLOWS—

–“I love the clarity and consistency of the posts on this blog. But Cosmopolitan morality is not universal. It has a specific ideological origin. And it’s both a luxury good, and a status symbol, and symbol of conspicuous consumption.

I’ve been arguing since ’06 I think, that people DEMONSTRATE by their actions that they will absorb significant personal harm, in order to ‘punish’ cheaters and free riders.

At present, the financial community is an ally against the state. And the state has very, very bad polling numbers. Trust (polling number on our civil interactions) has declined rapidly since the 60’s along with the increase in our homogeneity of interest.

So the people in both the USA and in Europe, are rebelling against what they see as ‘immoral’ behavior both by the state, and in the case of Europe, the low trust high corruption southern europeans. And in America, the high trust protestants against the low trust everyone-else.

‘We’ are not a family. There is no Cosmopolitan ‘we’. We are an empire.

Cooperation is very different from redistribution. And redistribution is only tolerable if it does not produce immoral consequences. We can agree to cooperate if we have different objectives. But we cannot sacrifice across trust, family, race and cultural boundaries.

We can all agree that the means of redistributing money via the financial system instead of directly to consumers is simply an artifact of previous technical limitations – limitations that we no longer have. MMT looks like a partial answer to the problem since we can issue debit cards and accounts to individuals at near zero cost. And we could even eliminate the financial system as a distribution network.

This has the benefit of making work a means of obtaining luxuries, rather than absolute necessities. And it removes employment from consideration in policy, and instead refocuses us on productivity.

The problem is, that the only way that will be enacted over moral objection, and over economic constraints, is to eliminate all entitlement programs, and all social service programs, and roll them into the new model.

The conservatives will go for this solution if it means disbanding interference – including in the labor and social market, by the state.

The truth test then, is whether people on the left are actually interested in such conversion of the economy and polity, or whether it’s just political power over the productive class. “–