Economic Propaganda since WWII

I don't know how many people are familiar with Google Ngrams but it is used to track word usage over years and decades.

I am trying to upload a picture and it is not working.

It is an ngrams graph of:
Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, invisible hand and planned obsolescence.

Adam Smith and his Invisible Hand have been used for propaganda purposes for decades in my opinion.

 

So we have economics versus physics. Newton and Smith were both big deals in 1800 with Newton losing to Smith by 1860.

Money makes the world go round not physics.

LOL

Smith remains top dog through to 2019. Einstein surpasses Newton by 1960 but Keynes never approaches Smith. In fact the Invisible Hand that does not exist almost reaches Newton.

Wealth of Nations may have been in the public domain for nearly 100 years but that could only have mattered to most people for the last 20. It can now be downloaded and searched. How is it that Smith mentioned education EIGHTY TIMES and Invisible Hand only once but we have been steadily punched with that invisible hand since 1975.

 

The graph for Adam Smith looks kind of different after 1975 then before. Not smooth swoops up and down but a steady and tiny bit jagged upward climb for more than 40 years. There is a steady rise of Invisible Hand also.

But look at what happened to the Think Tanks. They just pop up out of nowhere in the 60s.

Research after the first televised presidential debate showed that people who listened to Kennedy and Nixon on the radio felt that Nixon won, but those who watched on television went with Kennedy. Nixon was to nervous and fidgety. Television changed America but it cost money.

Who would come up with the money to pay for Think Tanks to sell us the Invisible Hand in the so called Marketplace of Ideas?

John Kenneth Galbraith created a TV series about economics, Age of Uncertainty, that aired in 1977. As soon as Milton Friedman heard about it he had to make one called Free to Choose. After 1970 Friedman gets more play than Galbraith.

Money bought the most minds. Welcome to the Neoliberal world.

 

"The graph for Adam Smith looks kind of different after 1975 then before"


On August 23, 1971, less than two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. mailed a confidential memorandum to his friend Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Chair of the Education Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo was titled Attack On American Free Enterprise System and outlined ways in which business should defend and counter attack against a "broad attack" from "disquieting voices."
https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/




The Lewis Powell Memo: A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/demo...-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/

 

Can we ever have enough Think Tanks?

Economic Think Tanks
https://economics.virginia.edu/think-tanks
https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.ttanks.html
https://business.baylor.edu/Steve_Gardner/TTANKS.HTM
https://thebestschools.org/magazine/most-influential-think-tanks/

 

Technology has changed the economy since Adam Smith. Henry Ford surpassed Adam Smith and peaked in 1925. He didn't stay below Smith until 1955 but is still above John Maynard Keynes.

Then there is the elephant in the room:

GNP & GDP

Gross National Product and Gross Domestic Product

did not exist as concepts before WWII, since 1960 they have overwhelmed everything else. GDP is presumed to represent the economy with reasonable accuracy. Adam Smith did not have to deal with the depreciation of durable consumer goods.

Where is the data on the annual depreciation of automobiles purchased by American consumers since Sputnik?

 

Massive dark money windfall: New conservative group got $1.6 billion from single donor

A new group led by a prominent conservative lawyer has received $1.6 billion from one donor -- the largest single contribution to a politically focused nonprofit that's ever been made public, and a fortune that could be used to fuel right-wing interests.

...then funneled more than $200 million to other conservative organizations last year, a tax form CNN obtained from the IRS shows.

Marble Freedom is led by Leonard Leo, the co-chairman of the conservative Federalist Society, who advised former President Donald Trump on his Supreme Court picks and runs a sprawling network of other right-wing nonprofits that don't disclose their donors, which are often referred to as dark money groups.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/22/politics/dark-money-donation-conservative-group-invs/index.html

 

In 2002 we got The Commanding Heights propaganda video:



derived from the book of the same name.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Commanding_Heights

But it is so curious that these intellectual battles about economics cannot advocate mandatory accounting in the schools.

https://www.upi.com/Accounting-collegians-vs-5th-graders/82121056408042/

5th graders can do it?

There is a peculiar thing about that article. I first saw it more than 10 years ago. It was longer and there was a picture of the woman who did the study.

 

People who try to use Smith and the Invisible Hand to justify the excesses of modern finance capitalism typically have not read Smith, or they would know that he did not support their views. Smith opposed grants of monopoly privilege, was highly suspicious of business interests, and opposed taxation of production (especially wages) and trade, favoring instead the taxation of land rents. The Invisible Hand refers to the quite reasonable and correct view that when exchange occurs by free consent, people's pursuit of their own self-interest leads them to serve the public interest through their productive enterprise. Modern apologists for privilege invoke the Invisible Hand to mean that we should not try to second-guess the market -- which they describe as "free" when it clearly is anything but -- because it always produces an optimal outcome and distributive allocation.

 

The most profitable investment for the long term is in social engineering. Why bother making a product or service that people want when you can just brainwash them to not resist you taking them for all they're worth?

 

There. Fixed it for you.

 

Your 'fix' doesnt make a whole lot of sense. While land ownership is probably the foundation of prosperity, it doesnt have anything to do with brainwashing people to accept authoritarianism. Private land ownership is in fact the best way to prevent from being achieved the power monopolies that engender authoritarian controls on a population. All resource (except sunlight I suppose) is ultimately derived from the land. Anyone that can't own land is ultimately dependent on (and therefore subject to control by) those that can own land and therefore control the resources.

The notion that people owning land somehow creates wealth inequality and oppression is one of the social engineering/brainwashing programs of which I speak. Some day when theres not enough land for everyone, it may start to become true. But we're a long, long ways off from that yet. Most of the worlds land and resources is currently locked away in roughly equal portions between government preserves and monopolized corporate holdings, most commonly as a result of government cronyism granting monopolistic practices, both in a clear design of creating resource scarcity as further means of control.

People that own land are far harder to control than those that don't. We need more landowners, not less.

 

Where did I talk about a fix?

We could set an upper limit on land ownership so the rich could not drive real estate prices beyond the reach of most people. There are nearly infinite ways for societies to work, who decides which?

 

That was a reply to someone you prolly have blocked.

 

Sorry?

 

Another poster in this thread quoted a comment of mine and claimed to 'fix it' for me. Either you can't see their claimed 'fix' of my comment (which would be because you have that poster blocked), or you didn't bother to read their quote in my response to it. Either way, my comment regarding 'your fix doesnt make sense' was not directed towards you, but rather to the other poster.

 

It appears that I should just search for 'Keynes' not "John Maynard Keynes".

I have not found any instances of Keynes mentioning planned obsolescence but it was not as big a deal by 1946 as it is now. Economists act like the glow of money is more important than natural resources and technology.

GDP: Grossly Distorted Propaganda

 

I think I blocked bringiton in a thread about climate change.

 

there are truths and then there are truths, if all people beieve a lie is truth it then becomes a functional truth...gold is "GODs" money is an example....
just the fact that quite a few people make good money speaking about something called a bible is another, studying hard science eases mans burden and therefore increases mans wealth. the Allies won WW2 by using modern production to out build weapons to defeat the Axis, all the bravery and histrionics asside

 

That was supposed to be flow of money.

 

That explains it.

 

Because you didn't like being reminded that you can't refute anything I say.

 

Unless you know something about the issue, that is.

No, that is indisputably false, as many of the world's least prosperous countries -- Bangladesh, Honduras, Pakistan, Paraguay, the Philippines, India, El Salvador, etc. -- have the most entrenched and egregious private landowning, while miraculously prosperous Hong Kong has had no private landowning for over 160 years. China has achieved the greatest miracle of economic prosperity in the history of the world in the last 40 years with no private ownership of land whatsoever. So you are just wrong as a matter of indisputable objective fact. Are you willing to learn from the fact that you have been proved objectively wrong? I predict that you are not.

It most certainly does. You -- along with almost everyone else -- have been brainwashed to accept that landowners can rightly own your right to liberty, and charge you rent just for their permission to access economic, social, cultural and natural opportunity:

"The best slave is the one who believes himself free." -- Goethe

No, all history shows that private landownership is in fact the best way to make sure it is landowners who achieve the power monopoly that engenders authoritarian control of a population. Google "patroon" and start reading. Google "ancien regime" and start reading. Google "feudalism" and start reading. Who do you think exercised the crushing authoritarian control that provoked the Russian, Chinese, Cuban, French, and countless other revolutions in history? In virtually every case, it was private landowners. Like you.

Which proves that owning land means owning absolute authoritarian control over everyone else's ability to access and use those resources.

Proving that it is precisely ownership of land and resources that enables authoritarian control. You just want that authoritarian control to be exercised by private landowners like you, so you are legally entitled to abrogate everyone else's rights without making just compensation, rather than by democratically accountable government that secures and reconciles the equal individual rights of all.

We know that in the millions of years before anyone owned land, all of our remote ancestors were free to use land and resources, as that was how they survived. None of those people were forced into dependence on others precisely because no one owned the land or their liberty rights to use it. The moment the first land thief claimed to have somehow obtained ownership of the land, and found others stupid enough to believe him, everyone else was under his authoritarian control.

No, it is an indisputable fact attested by all of history. Private ownership of land inherently and automatically creates wealth inequality and oppression because landowners are legally entitled to take wealth from everyone who needs to use land to survive -- which is everyone -- in return for nothing. The more land you own, the more you can take from those who need to use it to survive, and the more wealth you have to buy up even more land. This is a positive feedback loop that inevitably creates massive inequality and oppression.

The first society to have private landowning in the modern legal sense was the Roman republic. Before that, land was always held in various forms of customary or traditional tenure, but could not be bought and sold like other forms of property (the Book of Leviticus explains how the ancient Israelites allocated land among families and clans, just as one example). The Roman legal institution of private landowning demonstrated clearly how landowning forces wealth inequality and oppression on whole populations, exactly as I explained above. Landownership started out fairly equal in the early days of the republic, but over the centuries, the laws of economics forced the land into fewer and fewer hands, until by the second century CE, just 2000 individuals -- 0.01% of the population -- owned 90% of all the privately owned land in the Empire.

You are again proved objectively wrong by the indisputable facts of history.

Wrong again. As soon as anyone owns land, there can never be enough land for everyone. Indeed, no one ever even thinks of owning land until there is not enough for everyone. Land commands rent precisely and ONLY because there is not enough of it for everyone.

No we are not; we are in that situation now, and have been for thousands of years, as every homeless person on the street proves.

Which proves you wrong and me right. All private ownership of land is based on forcible dispossession of all who would otherwise be at liberty to use the land. This theft is almost always effected by governments for the unearned profit of politically connected landowners. There is no other source of private titles of ownership to land, and never has been.

Right, because they wield irresponsible authoritarian power over others. Duh. You could with equal "logic" observe that people who own slaves are far harder to control than those that don't, or that people who own their own nuclear weapons are far harder to control than those that don't. Such people are "far harder to control" because they have the power to control others.

GET IT???

Like we need more slave owners, not fewer? Like we need more people owning their own nuclear weapons, not fewer?

Give your head a shake. What we need is liberty, justice, and the secure, equal individual rights of all, which private ownership of land inherently violates.

 

I stopped at "China has achieved the greatest miracle of economic prosperity in the history of the world"

No. China is littered with ghost cities that its workers were all scammed into investing in as retirement plans. They were sposed to live and work in cramped factory dorms for decades and then retire to the luxury highrises in the brand new metropolises dotting the country everywhere. Except they're all just concrete sculptures of luxury highrises. They didnt bother to install any plumbing, eletricity, elevators, street lights, windows or doors. A large portion of Chinas GDP rests in the value of this available 'housing' that is actually worthless because no one will ever be able to live there. As usual, the collectivist utopia is founded upon a big pile of **** with a thin coat of fresh paint just waiting to collapse.

 

GDP is Grossly Distorted Propaganda

Economists do not talk about NDP, NET Domestic Product. They have been ignoring the depreciation of durable consumer goods since Sputnik. Manufacturing trash designed to become obsolete is not creating wealth.

We have been listening to economists who can't do algebra since WWII.

NDP = GDP - Dcap [Western economic calculation]
NDP = GDP - (Dcap + Dcon) [reality]

Dcap: Depreciation of Capital Goods
Dcon: Depreciation of Durable Consumer Goods

Where is the data on the annual depreciation of automobiles since Sputnik?