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This week and last, there has
been discussion of economic policy-- including how to deal with the
persistent problem of less than full
employment at fair wages
-- often meaning union wages and sometimes meaning wages
temporarily determined by compulsory arbitration.
Everyone on PKT List knows the
micro-economic problem -- that higher wages can put employers out of
business and the wage-earners out of work.
Everyone here also knows the
macro-economic problem that low or lower wages can dry up sales and put
employers out of business and the wage-earners out of work.
Everyone here also knows that
wage subsidies to guarantee high nominal wages, sales, profits and
employment, can cause enough inflation to be self-defeating -- and,
in all events, require what Bill Hummel might call,
political will and
acumen in lawmaking or administrative
institutions: institutions whom we know rarely attempt
this semi-command solution and almost never thereafter have been able to
long sustain it.
Yet John Gelles
keeps advocating this solution -- or something like it. And now
Trond Andresen asks that PKT face unresolved policy issues.
Trond, among very few of us,
may be able assess the current state of computer assisted semi-command
economic operations. Not just for wages and subsidies, but for commodity
prices and, say, luxury taxes (to allocate more resources to affordable
necessity markets), and for debt-free money and tax-free income and
wealth, too, for that matter.
I trust that some in this
forum see the need for such economic operations and computer applications
to make them work -- as vital post Keynesian thought: thought
that may be missing when the theory of credit and/or foreign exchange
absorbs so much of our interest.
John Gelles
-- Owner of The Individual
Estate
Account-- a Website for
Government Tax and
Spending reform. The National
Entertainment
State must
become The National Education
State-- with
Free Tuition for Life-- and a Goal for
Everyone to
Learn the Nuts and Bolts of Money
as a Tool
for Effective Production and for Indi-
vidual
Economic Security-- a Goal christened in
World
War II as Freedom from Want.
Em-
bedded, as well, in the
Site is Belief in Freedom
of Speech, Religion
and Enterprise.
www.tiea.us |