Trickle-Down Never Happened. A short study of this convenient myth.
Market Winners Rob the Rest of Us. Money is a crude way of running a complex society. Smart money depends on ‘stupid money’ to balance the books. Obviously no one starts investing with the intention of being ‘stupid money’, just as no one goes betting or gambling with the intention of enriching the bookies and casino owners. But that’s the way it works out.
The errors of New Right economics. How assertion of the ‘Rights of Money’ hurt the Middle Class, as well as ordinary workers.
Adam Smith and the New Right. How their ideas are indeed quite similar. Both assume that an elite should control society. And like his modern admirers, Smith had a way of excluding ‘off-message facts’. Pretended not to know about unfree Scottish labour in The Wealth of Nations, but had mentioned it in the public lectures the book developed from.
Mean & Average. Why New-Right economic policies have been sub-standard. Including details of growing inequality.
Hayek and the Liberalettes. How his beliefs are rationalism disconnected from common sense.
New Right Ideas – Hayek and Ayn Rand. Why the USA had to rely on first-generation immigrants to think up reasons for letting business do what it liked.
Milton Friedman and his Errors. He treats the economy as a set of disconnected households that trade, or refuse to trade, without ever being compelled to make a trade they don’t like. But households as units of production are found only where trade is marginal and agriculture dominant. They exist where capitalism is excluded by law, custom or sheer poverty.
Sir James Goldsmith: Rich, Loud and Ignorant. And how a lot of success was due to luck, including an unforeseeable bank strike in France that saved him from bankrupcy.
Capitalism, a non-Christian theology of the Age of Reason. How Adam Smith’s ideas flowed naturally from his rejection of Christianity.
A review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, showing its contradictions and absurdities.
The broad range of meanings that democracy can include. Also available as a PDF, Problems 14.
The Radical Rightists of 1979. A review of Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, by Christian Caryl.
Arkwright and the rise of the factory system. It has no single beginning, but Richard Arkwright was a major contributor to a system in which a few people controlled the work of many. He was hard-working and clever, but also a man who stole other people’s ideas. A man who turned the work of many into wealth for just himself.
How John Stewart Mill twisted the idea of liberty. He was happy to endorse authoritarian rule for what he saw as progressive ends. And approved of China being busted open by the Opium Wars.
Globalisation, as Attempted by the British Empire and the USA.
Economical With The Irish. How a noted British magazine like The Economist can feel comfortable about the vast number of avoidable Irish deaths in the mid-19th century Potato Famine.
Sociocide. How Liberalism and North-West European norms became global norms by all sorts of dubious and oppressive methods.
From two magazines, Problems and Labour Affairs., with other old articles on the website.
Long Revolution 