Socialists live in cloud-cuckoo land! (Today's Bee Letter)

 Answering the 8/4/26 Bee editorial "What do Democratic socialists want? A look at their platform"
by Chicago Tribune Editorial

In the old days, newsmen would interview even opposing views just so they got their facts straight. When did reporters get license to mischaracterize the opposition so completely?

Your editorial says that among their unrealistic wishes "The [Democratic Socialists] platform and messaging skip over the part where someone still has to build the smartphone...[and] finance the next medical breakthrough" dismissing these as absurd wishes. Why the public sector couldn't produce smartphones and innovative drugs (says some anonymous editorial board in Chicago)! 

But public financing is responsible for 80% of the inventions that made the smartphone possible, and for 75% of innovative drug research. Privately-owned PG&E is still 35% more expensive than publicly-owned SMUD, and PG&E's C-suite keeps attorneys on retainer in case they face negligent homicide charges for skimping on maintenance to goose profits, burning down the ironically-named town of Paradise.

Can we have facts, please, not just capitalist fantasies? 

MMT's Answer to the Austrian Economists

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

This Austrian economist tries to debunk MMT and one of its founders, Warren Mosler. Nice try. [Caution, the video's not short or particularly coherent.]

My comment:

How is the government going to service its debt with revenue from the private sector? Do dollars really grow on billionaires? Does government really need to get tax revenue to provision itself? Can't it "print" money to pay its obligations? Gosh, I wonder! (Hint: taxes make the money valuable. They don't and can't provision federal programs.)

Does government invest in useful, productive things, or mobilize idle assets with its money?... And does the government do nothing productive to create value? What about the 80% of the iPhone's inventions that come from government-funded research? What about the 75% of innovative pharmaceutical technology that comes from government-funded research? (Of course, the Trump administration is working busily to kill this particular goose.) See Marianna Mazzucato here for the answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r1IPsldbBg&t=41s 

What you need is the BEA chart of GDP growth rates showing the government's intervention (New Deal and the big public works project called "WWII" are the massive exceptions to the rather modest business cycles). Here it is: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-Growth-Rate-of-US-Real-GDP-19292013_fig16_287386917

 

Plenty of straw-manning here. Reinhart & Rogoff tried to make the case that large budget deficits impaired the economy. They neglected to separate monetary sovereigns (US, Japan, UK) from non-sovereigns (Greece, Liberia, Panama) and even made a mistake in the spreadsheet formulas that made their point. This kind of stuff simply serves the oligarchy promoting austerity. 

Steve Keen vs. the Inflationistas

Here's Steve Keen's take on inflation and the current state of the economy...

 

His summary: 

Inflation hit 9% in 2022. Everyone panicked. Today it's 3.4% and the [federal] deficit is bigger than it's ever been.
So let me get this straight. 
The government is spending more than ever, Trump is throwing half a trillion extra at the military, DOGE collapsed before it even started, and inflation went down?
"Budget deficit equals Zimbabwe." That's the logic you'll find in every economics textbook on the planet.
I've been calling it bollocks for 30 years and the numbers keep proving me right.
Here's what actually happened.
All that deficit spending landed in people's bank accounts.
Not in some abstract financial black hole.
In actual accounts where actual people used it to buy things, hire workers, build AI data centres, and keep the economy turning over.
That's what government spending does. It creates money in the private sector. It doesn't steal from it.
Elon Musk showed up promising to gut the whole thing. Slash spending. Balance the books. Save America.
He came, he went, the deficit got bigger, and the economy kept going. Funny how that works.
The crowd that screams hyperinflation every time a government runs a deficit has had four straight years to be proven right.
Inflation went from 9% to 3.4%.
They're still waiting. 

A reply by one of the LinkedIn comments contradicts Keen, and proves, once again, that listening is not a skill available to conventional economists: "Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, not deficits (Whatever textbooks you read). Deficits relate to inflation if they are financed by the banking system leading to a large enough magnitude and rate of growth in money that definitely causes inflation after a necessary lag." 

Let's ignore the comment about how budget deficits aren't monetary (What exactly are the Feds spending with those deficits? Poker chips? Bonus airline miles? Could it be even [gasp!] dollars?) 

The comment echoes Miltron Friedman's statement that "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." [From a 1963 speech in India] I've written about how bad Friedman's economics is when it's put into practice (see here). Hint: it's truly awful. But let's say all that is TLDR (Too Long, Didn't Read).

Let's take a look at a brief description of inflation as the Friedmanite Monetarists would say it:

When the money supply increases too much more than productivity because the Fed (our central bank) issues too many dollars, people tend to spend more, bidding up prices. Result: inflation.

But this ignores the supply side of the supply/demand interaction in the market. The biggest recent US inflation occurred in the 1970s following the Arabs using the "oil weapon," reducing how much oil they shipped to the US. The price of oil in 1971: $1.75/bbl. In 1973, the price of this critical commodity quadrupled virtually overnight as the Arabs restricted supply, peaking at $42/bbl (about the current price, inflation adjusted) in 1982. The Reagan administration got lucky because Alaska's North Slope oilfields came online shortly thereafter increasing the domestic petroleum supply again and prices retreated to around $10/bbl.

Oil is not an optional purchase for both homes and industries, so people were stuck bidding for it even as supplies diminished. (Guess what's coming following Iran shutting the Strait of Hormuz!)

But say the government issued lots of dollars and people chose to stick them in their mattresses, or savings accounts, or paid off debt with the dollars. Where's the bidding then? The uncertainty about the destination of dollars issued is one reason there is no coherent theory of inflation in any economics, conventional or heterodox.

Shortages of food in Zimbabwe and manufactures in Weimar Germany preceded their inflations, eventually becoming hyperinflations. 

So...where's the Friedmanite beef? (Hint: it doesn't exist) 

 

Visions, not blindness

I came across this link today

Eye Implant That Restores Vision to the Blind Cleared for Sale Futurism

 ...and was reminded of a story from the Phenomenology of Perception (pdf). 

Something like this has occurred before. People born with congenital cataracts, a hardware problem, were promised vision after the cataract operation was discovered.

But after the hardware problem was solved, the surgeons discovered an underlying sofware problem: The patients without a hardware impediment to light reaching their retinas didn't know what to do with it once it arrived. They literally could not distinguish between a circle and a square on a plain background.

The intrepid surgeons discovered they needed to train their patients to use their gaze as they had previously used their touch to perceive the different outlines of figures. This tedious process meant that patients had to painstakingly construct a "vocabulary" of sight--edges, corners, depth, etc. This is what those infants are doing as they crawl around, touching everything, putting things in their mouths and so on. 

I've read that the patients receiving the cataract surgery to cure their hardware issue often found constructing that "vocabulary" so difficult that they went back to living as blind people. 

In any case, it will be interesting to see the kind of training required for an eye implant. It may surprise the hardware guys to find software is necessary. 

The Odyssey Controversy

(by) Mark Dempsey

Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey has been in theaters for some time, and I went to see it. I have some complaints, but it was mostly enjoyable. I particularly like the way Odysseus (Latin: Ulysses) was penitent about the way his clever war-making was making the planet less safe, and contradicted "the law of Zeus." [spoiler:] He even ends up exiling himself from society to demonstrate his penitence.

But then I read some critical reviews of Nolan's Odyssey, particularly from those who read the Homeric poem in the original language. They basically said "Nolan's version is not Homer's." Among other things, Nolan's Odysseus is penitant, while Homer's original is an unrepentant thug, revelling in his bloody belligerence. The objectors to Nolan's version say it's puts a hopeful face on thuggery that Homer never did. 

At this point, I have to confess I'm puzzled. Shouldn't we celebrate at least backing off from making war? Is (realistically) accepting thuggery something to be celebrated, and anything that turns away from it is "hopium," designed to delude people?

My only quibble with Nolan's version is the "music," in quotes because it's just a bunch of kettle drums pounding away. I wear a hearing aid, and with the aid turned off the "music" in the theater I attended was still much too loud. Bring earplugs, and you probably won't be bothered. 

. 

Attention Difference Delight

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

After having recently encountered people recently diagnosed with ADD who were distressed by the diagnosis, I've concluded it's important to remember this "illness" can have a positive side.

Thom Hartmann--an ADD sufferer himself--points out that the different mental strategies for interpreting the environment are like the difference between farmers and hunters. A farmer can patiently manage a single plant or field of plants without worrying about danger on the horizon. A hunter scans the horizon for game, and must act (impulsively?) to decide whether to pursue a rabbit or a deer when both are within sight. 

Western "civilization" appears primarily geared to farmers, and often shuns or dismisses hunter consciousness as useless. But there are situations where even hunter thinking can make a positive contribution. 

One example: salespeople profit from quick assessments of the impact of their sales presentations. Hartmann contends that even Ben Franklin was a polymaths, mastering everything from electricity to "Franklin" stoves, to printing because he was an ADD guy. In my personal experience, one of the most brilliant software engineers / architects I worked with was diagnosed with ADD, but he could quickly fix problems that frustrated the "farmer brain" coworkers.

One Scientific American survey even points out that the families of truly innovative thinkers often have members whose mental states (or mental illness) are anything but normal.

So let's celebrate our neurologically diverse brethren (and sistren) as people who can make a contribution instead of mischaracterizing them as useless and impulsive.  Diversity is not optional, and often contributes to human progress.

Doggy fun

 

Just a dog having the best day of its life. pic.twitter.com/mYKZrXCnOJ

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 20, 2026

When you call your dog… Without calling him. pic.twitter.com/iHvt7YkTjo

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 18, 2026