Mind's Eye Re: turning the world Greek

What makes you think the public sector can run the private sector? As
in the past, the two are often in oppostion. Again, just make some
historical substitutions.

There are systems of meritocracy that work. The military is one
example but there are others. Merit is not always measured by
financial gain.

Wealth can only buy "so much" of an advantage- the rest is up to
character.

The private sector probably works harder because they can see/use the
rewards whereas the public sector is hamstrung and dependent on others/
policy/elections. (Rat/mouse experiments.)

What is misunderstood is the concept of Democracy- which was a very
controlled system in ancient Greece. America has become the symbol of
Democracy but there is much misunderstanding about individual and
group rights. We offer the opportunity to suceed which is not the same
as a free ride.

Who has set up the systems that control personal/national finances?
Sometimes individuals but usually with the permission and regulation
of the government- which was once controlled by the Papacy, for
instance, and some may now be controlled by Islam or other strict
"isms".

"Rents" are the price one pays to live in a society. (Even apps are
leased and cannot be transferred.)

At any rate, few systems survive with an empty treasury/debts that
soar above GDP.

If voters want to be dazzled rather than directed they will continue
to vote for entertainers rather than managers.





On Sep 1, 7:35 am, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> A common phrase in my childhood when we couldn't understand something
> was 'it's all Greek to me'.  Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy are all
> Euro periphery nations now on the brink of collapse.  I've been trying
> to explain what's going on in a series of lectures recently.  I start
> from the premise that economics is all Greek to me.  This is some
> combination of me not understanding the muck and my belief that what
> it's all about is a politburo imposing the Greek fate on us all.
> Michael Hudson has written extensively on this.
>
> Most of us can't debate economics because we can't get our attitudes
> out of the Idols that generate our 'understanding'. I usually start
> with a few questions about debt and what money is.  It's rare anyone
> has much sensible to say on either, let alone knowledge of the history
> on might find in, say, David Graeber's 'Debt: the first 5000 years' or
> Paul Ormerod's 'Dr Strangelove's Game'.  I veer off a little and
> explain that when I started university teaching, you could base a
> course on text like this aiming at truth than than quantitative
> manipulation.  These days, education has shifted towards producing
> technocrats with instantly transferable job skills.  Teaching doesn't
> get much further than compiling and manipulating spreadsheets.
>
> Ask yourself who owns the debt, what is its size in comparison with
> the productive economy.  The answers are startling, but less so than
> the general ignorance in which we have been educated not to know.  I
> test the latter with a bit of computerised button-pushing before I
> start.
>
> The debt is several times the productive economy - or rather the
> consuming economy.  It's owned, in the main, by a small number of
> people through stock markets and bonds (bonds are much bigger than
> shares these days).  As few as 92,000 people own most of it around the
> world.  These are the politburo or alien lizards who run the show.
>
> I venture off into some Thorstein Veblen and a book on Germany and the
> world wars by an Italian - 'Conjuring Hitler'.  This is really to show
> that current economics isn't new at all.  I run through some economic
> modelling and then ask what results we'd get if we designed our
> spreadsheets from history rather than theory, including a turn on
> delta, gamma and Poisson leap hedging.
>
> My last question is 'where did the money go'?  You see, all the
> spreadsheets work, but they don't show what money is or where it ends
> up.  Something called the Cantillon effect helps here.  Money is
> effectively 'radioactive'  and the plan worldwide Greek.  We cut
> schools, police and welfare services and the money goes to a rich
> oligarchy who fund our politics, destroying the hope of democracy.
> Viewed as a physical system, economics is a control system that uses
> more resources in control than in production.  We don't go for this in
> science, except in highly complex experiments as at CERN and
> Fermilab.  The essence of economics is a plot by a government of he
> rich to own everything and rent it back to us.  This is the essential
> Greek model.
>
> It's easy enough to get to this stage.  The arguments can be made very
> accurately.  This is only stage one.  Underlying the argument are the
> Idols - complex soaked-up collective ignorance that actually prevent
> economics as a science and our recognition that finance is a
> complicated, religious control fraud (Veblen comes free on the Net).
>
> Lecture two starts with the question 'what is our evidence that
> private sector disciplines work better than the public sector and if
> so, why is the private sector so interested in running the public
> sector rather than producing radical, innovative, better
> alternatives'?  This is something of a Wittgensteinian turn as I think
> organisation itself is misunderstood in private versus public sector
> debate.  Underlying this is the ideology of meritocracy and its
> contradictions that money buys unfair advantage and wealth results in
> rents the rest of us pay.
>
> Is your country turning Greek?

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