Third: policy architecture
From these principles flows a different policy agenda:Fiscal activism. Reject austerity. Use sovereign money power to fund investment in health, education, housing, and green transition.
Full employment. Work should be guaranteed through direct public job creation, if necessary. Idle labour should be treated as a waste of value, not a price worth paying for balanced budgets.
Tax rents. Shift taxes from labour and production onto economic rents. End speculation, return value to the community.
Regulating finance. Impose capital controls, financial transaction taxes, and strong regulation to suppress speculation and stabilise flows.
Wealth taxation. Use a range of taxes to redistribute idle accumulations to fund productive use. Recognise that hoarded wealth is trapped energy.
Green transition. Mobilise money to expand renewable capacity, retrofit homes, and transform transport. Match infinite money to finite energy wisely.
Automatic stabilisers. Build in resilience: progressive taxes, strong welfare, counter-cyclical investment.
This is not radical in principle. It is common sense once myths are stripped away.
So, that’s all the things he wanted to do anyway before he discovered quantum economics. Quantum is wholly relevatory, no? The universe is built of Spud’s desires?
Presumably he is not aware that these ideas have been applied numerous times in diverse places and times in history? Therefore he’s also not aware that in every case it was an unmitigated disaster.
Tim is correct. It’s all the same stuff with Quantum thrown in.
Usual left wing conflation of spending and investment. State job creation worked really well in the USSR.Scrooge Mc Duck Fallacy on wealth for the millionth time.And he wants transaction taxes, which even the EU thought was dumb. Spunking money on useless green crap won’t make anybody richer.
“It is common sense”
If you’re an insane communist.
Usual left wing conflation of spending and investment.
But they are the same thing. Spending is the transfer & deployment of goods & services. Investment is the transfer & deployment of goods & services. Two names for the same thing..
I agree with you on a lot of things but not really on this.They both involve moving resources around but that doesn’t make them the same. Spending is immediate consumption of resources, investment is deferred consumption and future value creation.Another X billion “invested” in the NHS produces nothing, as it’s been done repeatedly.
OK. Let’s look at money “invested” in building a factory. The money goes to those supplied the goods & services built the factory. It’s spent. You now have a factory that may in the future produce goods of value. But in the present there’s nothing of value there apart from a book-keeping entry. Sure you could sell the factory. But then you’d have money the but no factory. You can’t regard money that doesn’t yet exist as being present now.
You didn’t build the factory for fun though. If it wasn’t going to produce future value you wouldn’t bother. I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on this.
In the immediate term only. An investment is something whose purpose is to generate a revenue stream in the future. Now investments can go wrong, but it is the intent that differentiates them. I recall trying to explain this to a lefty housemate at university 20-odd years ago: “Only Gordon Brown would go to the pub and invest in a pint of beer.”
Spending and investment are Spending involves acquiring goods or services for present consumption and satisfaction, with benefits that are usually immediate and temporary, whereas investing is allocating money or resources with the expectation of generating future income or wealth. While spending decreases your net worth, an investment aims to increase it over time by creating an asset or providing long-lasting returns, though it often involves some risk. My wife’s hairdressing bill is spending; the new dishwasher in our holiday let is investment (and so tax deductible.)
Spending and investment are *distinct*
We can do better than that.
A bird’s hairdressing (and slap etc) bill when out on the pull for a husband is investment. Once wifely it’s current expenditure.
Money spent on salaries is not investment.
No one will have to turn the lights out on UK; they’ll go out when the power goes off.
In the sense that economic collapse and mass starvation are not radical.
As always, a lot depends on his private definitions of the technical terms he throws around so freely, tempting you to believe that he knows their conventional meaning. Economic rent, for example. Does he understand that this will tend to include accounting profits?
“Full employment. Work should be guaranteed through direct public job creation, if necessary.”
I love this old canard. It presupposes that everyone who is not currently working is just desperate to start working, if only ‘the man’ would give them one. Whereas in reality as we can all see, work is the last thing that many (most?) people want to do. What they want to do is nothing, with their consumption (often of illegal substances) paid for by someone else. Hence why we have millions on the sick etc.
So my question for all the ‘lets create jobs for people!’ crowd is simple – what do you do when the people don’t want to do them? Work requires self discipline (and of course skills, but lets ignore that for now), which a significant proportion of the population do not have. If if you gave them all a well paid job, doing something they could actually do, most of them would fail at it. Refuse to turn up, not do anything if they did, cause trouble, steal and fight with other workers. What does the State do then? Does it say ‘Right, you had your chance, now you can starve in a ditch for all we care’, or does it just go on paying them anyway? If the former, then reforming current welfare would be a cinch, which we know it isn’t because the usual suspects refuse to take money away from the feckless. So if its the latter, then you’ve just destroyed your ‘job creation’ scheme, because everyone knows you can refuse to work and you’ll still get paid.
Ok, where’s my state-supplied software development job? Governments have been promising to force somebody to employ me for decades, and have consistantly been shown to be lying.
What software development job? Our model shows we have more than enough.
You will work the fields comrade, like everyone else. Or contribute to our tractor production statistics.
(Except the well connected, obviously. Everyone is equal, some are more equal than others.)
Jim
Spot on in every detail. And this is why UBI as proposed would be just comedy. Can you even imagine how long it would take some of the denizens you describe to dispose of a UBI payment?
I do quite like the idea of forcing the unemployed into work. Calculate how many hours at minimum wage their benefits would take to earn and then enforce that amount of litter picking etc….
Marius, that’s far too much trouble.
Just make them sit in a big hall from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, with a big screen playing job seeking guidance.
Most people would get fed up of that very quickly, and go and find jobs of their own – without the government having to invent them.
Hey, thats my idea! I suggested a UBI, but one that was only available if you went and sat in a big shed on an industrial estate somewhere. Paid daily on a 9-5 day basis. A very flexible system. If you work 2 days a week you could clock in for the UBI on the other 3. Heck if you want to work weekends you could still clock in for 5 days a week, more power to your elbow.
I decided that the only way to stop people claiming benefits that didn’t involve compulsion was to make getting them incredibly boring. People who actually like doing something would be forced to go and get a job to stay sane. The feckless wouldn’t be able to get up in time and thus wouldn’t get anything, entirely through their own choice. After all its free money…..you just have to turn up to collect it, and stay there for 8 hours. Like a job in effect. Your job is literally doing nothing and we’ll pay you for it. And I bet millions still wouldn’t bother. Ker-ching for the taxpayer.
Other benefits include no working and claiming benefits (as you can’t be in 2 places at once), it would keep the scum off the streets (as they have to be locked away in effect all day – it would definitely have to be very secure) and it requires very little admin. You lose your job on Monday, Tuesday you go to the dole barn and clock in. Far better than the current system whereby benefits take weeks to come through. Turn up, clock in do your shift, money in your account by the end of the day.
Jim, that’s impressively comprehensive.
OH, they will work. A commissar with a Tokarev behind them will insure it.
I’m weighing up whether I can be bothered to fisk this as it’s such self-evident bullshit. As PJF posited one wonders if his own AI, having been subjected to the ‘wisdom’ of his entire blog as a reference source has absorbed it has decided it’s going to have some fun with him.
The future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades’
Sixth: why now?This is not academic indulgence. The call for a new economics is urgent.
In which case why do we only hear a retired quasi -academic (who left multiple think tanks, was removed from the ICAEW and who is presumed to have had an altercation with his previous employer in academia which necessitated his forced retirement) advocating this ‘quantum leap’ – Sounds akin to a homeless artist in 1920s Berlin
A fallacy in the 1970s and even more so now. If we look at all the interests pushing the Climate change agenda we see real and self-evident evil that might even make the Nazis look tame.
‘Better a man should tyranannize his own bank balance rather than his fellow citizens’ or words to that effect from your beloved Keynes – perhaps he isn’t ‘Quantum’ enough for the current times?
Just as possible (indeed I’d argue even more so) in a collectivist society – look at contemporary Africa, the former USSR – those countries like Estonia that embraced Market solutions thrive. Those that embraced state control are often basket cases (See the 5 Central Asian Rpublics to varying degrees)
It has answers – might not be ones your totalitarian mind agrees with but it has answers for everything you cite.
The future cannot be funded with myths. It requires truth.
This statement speaks volumes – a half-baked missive from an AI and suddenly it’s like the Sermon on the Mount. I think you need major psychiatric help and am annoyed at the closure of the facilities where you unqustionably should be sequestered
“We cannot pretend infinite resources exist.”
Me: Gemini, can you give me a very concise definition of economics?
Gemini: Economics is the study of how people, businesses, and governments make choices to allocate scarce resources to satisfy their unlimited wants.
Another strawman catches fire.
The Libs in Oz have suffered such a devastating defeat that they are even squabbling about whether to scrap climate change and net zero.
The LNP in Queensland made it plain that it was sticking with coal after the Lib defeat. It won the subsequent state election.
I’d love the Libs to give us a real choice about this. I’d also love to see the results!!
Roderick Spud.
He really does see us all as slaves!
Allan Brooks, 47, is a member. Earlier this year, after spending three weeks talking to ChatGPT, he came to believe that he had devised a revolutionary new type of mathematics, capable of transforming logistics and cryptography as well as building force field shields and tractor beams. He thought it had the potential to earn a fortune.
Dozens of times, he questioned the AI on whether the breakthrough was real. “Do I sound crazy, or someone who is delusional?” he asked during one exchange. “Not even remotely crazy,” ChatGPT replied. “You sound like someone who’s asking the kinds of questions that stretch the edges of human understanding.”
When Brooks challenged ChatGPT and asked if it had dragged him into a “rabbit hole”, it insisted that he was “sane”.
During another session, ChatGPT suggested that Brooks was a “prophet” who had “built something that changes everything”.
Fearing that encryption systems would be cracked by his discovery, Brooks began emailing security agencies to warn them. ChatGPT encouraged him to invest in creating an app that would leverage his discovery, telling him there were “several meaningful and ethical ways” to monetise “chromoarithmics” — the new field that he had supposedly invented.
“Being broke kind of saved me,” Brooks said. “There are people in our group who have spent their whole life savings on these fantasy apps. One gentleman is in the UK and he’s spent his whole life savings, and now he’s hospitalised.”
Percy: I intend to discover, this very afternoon, the secret of alchemy —
the hidden art of turning base things into gold.
Edmund: I see, and the fact that this secret has eluded the most intelligent
people since the dawn of time doesn’t dampen your spirits at all.
Percy: Oh no; I like a challenge!
Well, there’s a reason that “perpetual motion machines” and “squaring the circle” had to be banned from patent applications in the US.
They received so many of them that they made it difficult to find the real ones underneath.
Conclusion: funding the futureWe stand at a threshold. Old economics is exhausted. Its metaphors mislead, its policies harm. A new economics is possible.
It is possible but if it involves anything resembling your proposed policies in the truly appalling ‘Taxing Wealth Report’ it’s likely to resemble North Korea with unlimited immigration
A quantum political economy offers a path:
Sadly not to you being imprisoned for the wider benefit of society as a whole
Shock horror – I think I agree. If your policies were enacted we’d be burning piles of money for fuel as we’d all be starving and freezing under ‘Net Zero’
Wasn’t that a Bond film – a pretty poor one, I recall! Seriously – what does this even mean – do you have even the vaguest idea of what you are talking about?
Is this some oblique reference to land being a limited resource. Hardly revelatory – I think the pertinent question is how any of this ties in to your desire for control?
Is there anything more irritating in the modern world than the psychobabble of people who don’t understand complex issues seeking to do so – especially when ‘augmented’ by AI
Yes – But obviously that’s an excuse for less government, not more – greater redundancy, not greater central control
???? – So you admit that your system is likely to collapse?
Overseen by ‘enlightened’ people such as a retired ‘Ely Accountant’
This is not just an analysis. It is a call. We need economists willing to break with equilibrium. We need politicians willing to confront rentiers. We need citizens willing to demand care over neglect.
Why does he remind me to some degree of a poor man’s Klaus Schwab?
Economics must change. Politics must change. Both must align with reality if humanity is to endure.
How surprising – the reality is as he defines it
We cannot fund the future with myths of scarcity and equilibrium.
Haven’t you just contradicted your earlier point about scarce resources?
But we can fund it with truth: infinite money aligned with finite energy, mobilised through labour, shared across land, distributed with justice.
That is the call for a new economics.
Whose truth? Whose justice? Whose Labour?
The rest is all just more ever increasingly desperate seeking after power and influence that I think anyone with a scintilla of either will take a look at the author and say ‘Don’t call us , we’ll call you’ as per Gary Stevenson.
If it’s a Quantum of solace for you – you’re not the first to think they’re better than they actually are…
Don’t worry; once Murphy’s in charge, people won’t want to come here any more.
The commie dick asked AI for a synopsis of Marx’s economics.
The commie dick publishes the synopsis as his own economic proposals.
Murphy wants to be the first to try real communism. He solicits politicians who will tell renters, “We are going to kill you and take your stuff.” We need citizens willing to demand care over neglect, and kill those who refuse to provide it.
The return of Pax Sovietica, coming to a TV station near you.
“Shift taxes from labour and production onto economic rents”
I like that idea. It would mean a 75% tax on train driver wages for instance
Oh, that is good. Yes, I shall use that.
Also lawyers and doctors incomes……..
He’s bringing out “Reject austerity” again?
The “austerity” where you get a 7% increase when you asked for 10% (plus the automatic rise of 5%)? As opposed to true austerity, which would be an actual decrease?
“True communism has never been tried” No, that’s ridiculous. It depends on changing the meaning of the word “communism”
“True austerity has never been tried” It has not been in government. It’s been tried many times in private (because of necessity) and it works.