Steve Keen is a
dissident economist who seems to have the large perspective that I
like, although I myself do not fully understand the details of his
discussions.
Steve Keen
He
contends that mainstream economics does not understand what money
is. That just rings so true to me. One of my colleagues, an
economist, told me candidly many decades ago that economists do not
know what a dollar is. It seems incredible but it fits with
everything I know about symbolic interaction.
Steve Keen was one
of the very few economists who foresaw the 2007 collapse.
“Minsky himself identified 1966 as the time at which America
made the transition from a productive to a Ponzi economy.”
Nineteen sixty-six
was the point at which the US decided it was all right to kill people in
Viet-Nam even though everyone could see that there was no valid reason for
it, that the war was false and unjustified. Even children knew
it was wrong. It was a conscious decision by the country that
what it did in Viet-Nam was justifiable, that the war was legitimate,
that murder was acceptable. The Senate walls dripped with blood, said
George McGovern, and the electorate showed him what they thought of his
truth speaking – he lost every state (except Massachusetts) to
Richard Nixon, an obvious criminal.
I remember 1966 very
well. Viet-Nam, the USA’s invasion of Viet-Nam, was the big
question, and the nation’s refusal to stop doing it, after
everyone, including the government, knew it was immoral, was the
disconnect point from any attempt to be true and good. That was the
breaking point for the US – socially, morally, economically.
Chicago Democratic Convention in 1966
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley in 1966
What Minsky and Keen
are saying is that 1966 was the point at which we overtly shifted
from a productive economy to a Ponzi economy, and what I say is that
it was also the point at which the USA overtly became selfish,
irredeemable, consciously criminal. After 1966, and particularly
after the events at the Democratic National Convention that year, it became openly understood and acknowledged that the
USA is a murderer and no one is going to do anything about it.
I read recently an
elite academic who referred to “the carefree ‘sixties.” That’s
a good indication of how far the country is lost.
Steve Keen does not
talk about Viet-Nam specifically, as far as I know, but there are
many good clips on YouTube in which he talks of what has been going
on economically since then, and what he sees in the future. Here is a
relatively short and understandable interview:
