Quote:
Originally Posted by Waxing_Gibbous
It's something of a false analogy these days that being wealthy "takes money away" from the poor.
Reaganomics essentially initiated an unlimited supply of M0 (the stuff in your pocket) through financial de-regulation and shifting inflation control from fiscal (money supply) to monetary control (interest rates).
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Peter, you are confusing money with wealth. Money comes from a printing press, wealth comes from labour. That floating compensation represents 100s if not 1000s of person-years of labour that has been appropriated for a socially useless purpose. The tradespeople who built that could have been building hospitals for the poor (to used a cliched example). When socially-produced wealth is privatised there are winners
and losers. [Pointing out - quite correctly I'm sure - how aide money is wasted does not affect this fact.]
Reaganomics, of course, was not the first example of putting the printing press into overdrive. It's happened before and ended in hyper-inflation, poverty, tears, discontent and helped produce the social conditions that allowed the rise of facsism. There should be a correspondance between the goods (or, more correctly, use-values) in circulation and the money in circulation. Throwing money at our economic ills can paper over the problem for a while (hopefully until after the next election) but there will be a day of reckoning.