|
there are so many problems with these supply side fictions that it's almost impossible to know where to start. you can't say that capital is unimportant in a capitalist setting, but it's lunacy to think of capital as all that matters, particularly given that capitalism stands in for a social system and not just a bunch of simple-minded hydraulic relations and simple-minded graphs. what's obviously a problem with these sycophantic milty freidmany supply-side fictions is that there's no account---at all---of production. it doesn't matter to the narrative. if you exclude production then on one side you fetishize the movement of capital. there's likely some hayeky backdrop to this (arguments about the opacity of a firm to itself)..but what has happened in the hands of the supply-side nitwits is that the history of commodity prices as an index of firms' relative performance has been replaced with the history of the performance of various financial devices---in a context wherein this circulation is more and more autonomous. running in another direction, the exclusion of production is of a piece with the wholesale exclusion of the social world from neo-liberal stories. which is a condition of possibility for hilariously fatuous bromides about ethics and/or virtue and/or responsibility coming from people whose economic viewpoints correspond to policies that are an unmitigated disaster for most people.
but because the main characters in supply-side fictions are investors, the social consequences of supply-side policies are erased.
again....again.....again, what i do not understand is why anyone takes this horseshit seriously after 30 years? obviously the right is reality-impaired at the level of conceptual accounts of the world and so cannot be expected to suddenly be able to offer a rationale for policies that would promote anything namby pamby like full employment or an equitable distribution of wealth or social justice. no no, what we get from these clowns is class war and a militarization of class relations. but i digress.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|