critique of loon theories around banking/money creation/the federal reserve

[phildwyer]

What makes you think that that will be the case

It is the case now.

Honestly, I'm not making this up.

 

[frogwoman]

No, I am an anti-capitalist.

In sharp contrast, Herr Pig has just outed himself as a pro-capitalist, which will not surprise the perceptive greatly.

You might be but you're still connected to capitalism. Everyone is.

 

[SpineyNorman]

No, I am an anti-capitalist.

In sharp contrast, Herr Pig has just outed himself as a pro-capitalist, which will not surprise the perceptive greatly.

No you're not. You'd have to know what capitalism is to be an anticapitalist.

 

[ymu]

<snip>

Phildwyer deliberately demands that anti capitalism cannot be anti Semitic, thus allowing him to indulge in his thinly veiled anti Semitic rant, and hides that he never reveals the nature of his 'anti capitalism'

He's actually just doing it for kicks. Which is arguably worse.

 

[frogwoman]

It is the case now.

Honestly, I'm not making this up.

that's bollocks. Even penny sweets are worth more than a penny now.

 

[phildwyer]

that in fact goes further than mcarthyism ever did by naming names

McCarthyism never named names eh?

Get a freaking grip man.

 

[Delroy Booth]

At some point today, if I'm still housebound by snow, I might just go through the thread at all the various little statements Phil's dished out as fact and collate them all in easy-to-reach repository just so you can see how much of a flagrant bullshit-artist he is. Latest one to add to the list.

No-one ever called capitalism logical.

Bet I could find a few people who did.

 

[phildwyer]

that's bollocks. Even penny sweets are worth more than a penny now.

No, you don't understand. Google "future value of money" or something.

This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money#Present_value_of_a_future_sum

 

[frogwoman]

No, you don't understand. Google "future value of money" or something.

but what's plainly demonstratable when i go to the shops (that the price of things goes up, sometimes down, but mostly up) is surely a refutation of your idea that being paid for your work is usury, since usury is lending money at extortionate rates, the value of money usually decreases rather than increases, so how can it be interest, and how can the former value of the money be less than what it is. If you are paid by your employer you don't necessarily pay that money back straight to them do you? they keep some of the money you should have got but you don't necessarily use their services.

if you work for a company but never buy from them or use anything they buy, you walk to work etc, then how are they lending you the money? they are giving part of it to you and just keeping the rest of it.

 

[SpineyNorman]

It's a complete nonsense argument and you're wasting your time discussing it with him mate - he doesn't actually believe it.

What's happened is he's been exposed as a complete ignoramus when it comes to political economy, and especially Marxist political economy, so he's ended up painting himself into a farcical corner in which he must argue that wage labour and usury are one and the same.

Ignore him. He's a bit of a parsnip and I feel a bit sorry for him now - must be pretty humiliating for an Oxbridge educated professor to constantly have his arse handed to him in arguments with peoplewho enjoyed none of his educational privileges. The best education money can buy and he still couldn't find his own arse with both hands.

 

[butchersapron]

Thanks to Sihhi for putting me onto Hemphill, the googling of which led to this gem of a page:​

​

Don't believe banks create the money they lend? Neither did the jury in a landmark Minnesota case, until they heard the evidence. First National Bank of Montgomery vs. Daly (1969) was a courtroom drama worthy of a movie script. Defendant Jerome Daly opposed the bank's foreclosure on his $14,000 home mortgage loan on the ground that there was no consideration for the loan. "Consideration" ("the thing exchanged") is an essential element of a contract. Daly, an attorney representing himself, argued that the bank had put up no real money for his loan. The courtroom proceedings were recorded by Associate Justice Bill Drexler, whose chief role, he said, was to keep order in a highly charged courtroom where the attorneys were threatening a fist fight. Drexler hadn't given much credence to the theory of the defense, until Mr. Morgan, the bank's president, took the stand. To everyone's surprise, Morgan admitted that the bank routinely created money "out of thin air" for its loans, and that this was standard banking practice. "It sounds like fraud to me," intoned Presiding Justice Martin Mahoney...​

​

​

Dollar Deception: How Banks Secretly Create Money​

​

​

You, of course, don't mention that the case was thrown out and nullified.

 

[phildwyer]

but what's plainly demonstratable when i go to the shops (that the price of things goes up, sometimes down, but mostly up) is surely a refutation of your idea that being paid for your work is usury, since usury is lending money at extortionate rates, the value of money usually decreases rather than increases, so how can it be interest, and how can the former value of the money be less than what it is. If you are paid by your employer you don't necessarily pay that money back straight to them do you? they keep some of the money you should have got but you don't necessarily use their services.

if you work for a company but never buy from them or use anything they buy, you walk to work etc, then how are they lending you the money? they are giving part of it to you and just keeping the rest of it.

No one ever called it logical.

My entire point on this thread has been to show just how illogical it is.

 

[ymu]

..The best education money can buy and he still couldn't find his own arse with both hands.

It isn't. It really, really isn't. A mate of mine did BA English there. One week his essay title was "Dickens".

It's a fucking joke of an education. The only thing it teaches you is to scramble out two essays a week and argue bad points well. That is why Dwyer is good at this trolling shit.

 

[phildwyer]

The best education money can buy

I never paid a penny for my education.

I bet you did though.

 

[SpineyNorman]

It isn't. It really, really isn't. A mate of mine did BA English there. One week his essay title was "Dickens".

It's a fucking joke of an education. The only thing it teaches you is to argue bad points well. That is why Dwyer is good at this trolling shit.

That's not true at all though is it? It's not perfect but it's far, far better than what most of us get. And the extent to which it's a 'joke' really depends what you're comparing it with.

 

[frogwoman]

happy pesach everyone btw.

 

[SpineyNorman]

I never paid a penny for my education.

I bet you did though.

Nope, I've never spent even a fraction of a penny on education and I never said whose money was buying it.

Face it phil, despite all the privileges you've enjoyed, despite the position you now occupy in academia, you're still an ignorant cabbage.

 

[phildwyer]

It isn't. It really, really isn't. A mate of mine did BA English there. One week his essay title was "Dickens".

It's a fucking joke of an education. The only thing it teaches you is to scramble out two essays a week and argue bad points well. That is why Dwyer is good at this trolling shit.

You're an ex-public schoolgirl aren't you?

 

[SpineyNorman]

Here we go

 

[phildwyer]

Nope, I've never spent even a fraction of a penny on education

Well I'd be asking for my money back if I were you.

 

[frogwoman]

You, of course, don't mention that the case was thrown out and nullified.

In 20 years that pioneering case at Horsham Magistrate's Court will have passed into legend.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Well I'd be asking for my money back if I were you.

What does that say about you? An Oxbridge educated professor who can't even win an argument with a someone whose education was a rip off even though it was free. You're purple sprouting broccoli.

 

[ymu]

That's not true at all though is it? It's not perfect but it's far, far better than what most of us get. And the extent to which it's a 'joke' really depends what you're comparing it with.

I've learnt more from Captain Hurrah, Butchers and you than Oxford ever taught me (politics, economics and philosophy combined ). I don't regard being taught to bullshit well as an education. It's a passport into the kinds of jobs where employers go starry-eyed about Oxbridge and little else. It was the worst decision of my life and I didn't know anyone who wasn't more interested in the fucking Oxford Union than their degree who didn't agree with me (about the quality of the undergraduate courses, that is).

The syllabus is appalling across the board. You do get access to some great minds, but it's very rare that you will get a tutor who is up to much. The best strategy with lectures is to go to the ones with known good lecturers regardless of your subject. The ones that apply to what you're studying most likely are not being run in the term you are studying it and are often the most appallingly didactic summary of their most recent book/paper which you'd be a great deal better off studying alone.

It is much better for post-graduates, but the standard is not particularly high for them. I did some marking for them where three students were clear fails. The papers got fudged so that they all passed. I was appalled. There was nothing I could do.

 

[frogwoman]

My old uni is considered better than oxford at a lot of subjects, as are some of the former polytechnics like Loughborough etc. On the whole though it is a massive privilege to go there.

 

[phildwyer]

'The papers got fudged so that they all passed. I was appalled.

I say what rotters.

Roedean if I had to guess.

 

[TruXta]

No it's not really, it's quite irrelevant.

The article you quoted earlier is credited to Robert H. Hemphill.

Researching him, the internet reveals that he was Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta during the depression. Just maybe he knew his stuff and was in a position to spill the beans.

He quoted, in a foreword to Irving Fischer's book 100% money:

"We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon."

Irving Fischer was considered by both the Nobel Prize winning economists Milton Friedman and James Tobin to be "the greatest economist the United States has ever produced".

This is money theory. It is mathematics. One thing I know about mathematics is that race has fuck all to do with it and really you would have to be an idiot to claim otherwise. Hemphill is not right or wrong depending on what race the bankers are. He is right or wrong depending on the maths. And he is right. The fact that your magazine printed something else by another author is here nor there. Even if Hemphill had sympathies with it it doesn't matter.

The extraordinary thing is that apparently on urban75 this is considered "loon" stuff. What that shows is just how fantastically programmed we are. We've been frogs that have been so marvellously boiled we think the current arrangement is 'the system', just the way things are. The way things are is that we've been fantastically ripped off and are slaves on timeshare. In the 1960s when they were designing all those wonderful labour saving machines, washing machines, dishwashers, massive advances in technology for production, etc - they thought, "what are we going to do with all our spare time?". Ha! How many of us can say they can work 20 hours a week and be fine?

We are talking about a country that was bankrupt in 2008 with a currency that was worthless. As far as I know, they still have fractional-reserve banking. They've just picked themselves up off the floor remarkably.

Ah, Irving Fisher, first president of the American Eugenics Society. You just can't help yourself can you.

 

[frogwoman]

Oy vey.

 

[J Ed]

We have been through this before, but once more... With feeling.
I distrust the term anticapitalist, (not least because it a negative term which Ill describes positivist alternatives to the present society), it is a catch all umbrella which covers such a wide range of viewpoints and pretends that, despite all evidence to the contrary, we are all on the same side. That proponents of ideologys whose inspirations happily slaughtered forerunners of my political tradition, and today publish apologetics for those acts, are really working for the same ideals as me.
Anti capitalist arguments do not in any way mean a progressive agenda, reactionary politics which embrace capitalism raw and unbridled are a relatively new phenomena: fascism, in all its manifestations is anti capitalist, as are the various religious fundamentalist political movements. Anti semitism as a modern 'scientific' theory was deeply anti capitalist.
Phildwyer deliberately demands that anti capitalism cannot be anti Semitic, thus allowing him to indulge in his thinly veiled anti Semitic rant, and hides that he never reveals the nature of his 'anti capitalism'

Reminds me a bit of the schtick some people have that anti-Zionism is anti-racist therefore they as anti-racist campaigners can never be considered to be anti-Semitic, even while they are saying that Jews control Western governments!

 

[frogwoman]

Reminds me a bit of the schtick some people have that anti-Zionism is anti-racist therefore they as anti-racist campaigners can never be considered to be anti-Semitic, even while they are saying that Jews control Western governments!

If you mention zionism it's a magic get out of racism free card.

 

[Delroy Booth]

Confucius was fine with lending money at interest, no wonder his ideas proved so ephemeral.

So was Calvin. He was well into usury infact. And I quote, Max Weber, General Economic History, Chapter 21, pg 271:

In northern Europe the prohibition against usury was broken up by Protestantism, although not immediately. In the Calvinist synods we repeatedly meet with the conception that a lender and his wife must not be admitted to the Lord's Supper, but Calvin himself declared in the Constitutio Christiana that the purpose of the prohibition of interest was only the protection of the poor against destitution and not the protection of the rich who carried out business with borrowed money. Finally it was the Calvinistic leader in the field of classical philology Claudius Salmasius, who in his book De Usuris in 1638, and in a number of later tracts undermined the theoretical foundations of the prohibition against interest

Good job that Calvinism had nothing do with the growth of captalism in western europe, otherwise Phil would look like a right dick.

But I trust no-one will deny that, of all human activities save perhaps murder alone (with which it was equated by Cicero among others), usury has everywhere, and at all times, universally been regarded with the greatest possible hatred and contempt by the people, and condemned on ethical grounds by every major religion (Judaism very much included), and condemned on rational grounds by every major philosopher up to and of course including K. Marx. There are excellent reasons for that, as we are now learning.

By the way chapter 22 starts with a rational account of the logical necessity of capitalist development, so there's one figure who considered capitalism "logical" - Max Weber (and by the way just because something has inherent contradictions or illogical aspects does not make the totality of that something illogical)