Opinions on economics, tech, etc.

Insights and comments by "Mandrocles"

[mandrocles]

The benefits of inflation

As to most economic phenomena inflation has benefits as well disadvantages and the question is for whom.

The most notable aspects of the huge rise in living costs for most people started in 2022 is that it did not happen in China-mainland and that governments of the UK and other "western" countries do not seem very keen to fight it. In part this is due to government policy to stop buying cheap russian fuels and switch to USA supply that costs 3-4 times as much.

My guess was that higher prices are also deliberate policy to substantially cut the real cost of wages in their countries and to improve business margins, but it also has other benefits for the governments of the UK and other "western" countries:

There is "fiscal drag": income taxes are less than proportional at the lower end of the income distribution so increases in wage (even if lower than increases in the cost of living) increase the effective rate of tax.

A substantial part of government revenues comes from VAT or sales tax, and large increases in the cost of living mean large increases in those taxes.

The combined effect of "fiscal drag" and higher VAT or sales tax revenues affect mostly the lower classes rather than the middle-class and the upper-class that are the electoral base of most "western" governments.

[mandrocles]

Thatcherism with chinese characteristics: urban young

Interesting report about young people in China-PRC buying into fancy beach "follies":

He saw a gap in China’s sluggish property market to appeal to the emotional needs of what has become known as the “lying flat” generation – those who are rejecting societal pressures to overwork and overachieve. [...] Our generation cares about beauty and service,” Ma’s young design assistant tells me, as we pass a design boutique curated by Wallpaper magazine. “Our parents did all the hard work to build modern China, but we don’t have the same struggle. We are all looking for spiritual and emotional comfort.

How can these these young people be freely spending to buy “beauty and service” for their own “spiritual and emotional comfort” at their young age?

Obviously their spending is not funded by their work.

That spending happens inside or near big rich cities like BeiJing or ShangHai.

These young people probably are born and raised in cities by city based and raised parents.

City people have been subject until recently to the "one child policy", so most likely they are only children of parents who were only children themselves.

Because of the previous point many of them will inherit all of the wealth of their parents and their grandparents on both sides, because they have no sibling or uncles or cousins, or very very few.

Because their parents and grandparents were most likely city people they probably bought property for very low prices compared to today in the cities they lived in, in historic and prestigious areas, and now those properties have huge prices and rents.

Also because of being city people many of their parents and grandparents were probably local government officials, local party officials, middle managers, small businesspeople, and probably acquired a portfolio of properties; some of their parents and grandparents will also likely be the executives or owners of middle or large businesses and be prominent local or even national government or party officials.

So I guess that many if not most young middle class city based people in China-PRC are "trust fundies" with their trust fund being a portfolio of city properties on which colossal capital gains have accumulated (probably like in the USA or England of the order of half or one million US dollars or multiple millions of US dollars).

In "Thatcherism with chinese characterists" I guessed that many current middle aged and older middle class people are thatcherite property owners, it also looks like that their grown up children are already thinking and behaving like rentiers. I know several young middle class people in England who are like that too.

Being backed by significant wealth redistributed via property to their parents and grandparents from the lower classes they look forward to a lifetime of cultivation of their “spiritual and emotional comfort” by buying “beauty and service”.

Who will supply all the uncomfortable low wage hard work to provide “beauty and service” to them? Traditionally it has been the peasant migrants from the internal countryside, but that supply is dwindling. England (and the USA and most european countries) are solving the issue of plenty of low cost hired help (and plenty of tenants) with the mass immigration of young docile and cheap peasants from Africa and south Asia.

The ruling class of Japan have chosen another path, but I think it is somewhat more likely that the ruling class of China-PRC will make the same choice as the ruling class of the USA and England, because all those young urban thatcherite "trust fundies" are the inheritors and largely part of the ruling class, like in the USA and England.

[mandrocles]

Investors or executives and DEI

What might "first world" investors or executives think of DEI? In general they ask themselves two critical questions as to any topic: "Does it cost me money?" and "Does it make me money?"

As to "Does it cost me money?" DEI does not cost them money as it involves a change in the distribution of jobs among employees, without affecting overall costs like a labor union would: some employees of some types may replace for the more desirable jobs some employees of some other types. There are some administrative costs to DEI like hiring DEI managers, but those are generally negligible.

As to "Does it make me money?" DEI can make a lot more money for investors or executives: most "people of global majority" favored by DEI earn a global average wage that is 10 times lower than that of most workers in the "first world", and for investors and executives DEI means putting beyond criticism mass immigration of those much cheaper workers or mass offshoring to countries with those much cheaper workers.

If the typical wages of "people of global majority" were the same as or higher than those of "first world" workers DEI would not be of much interest to investors and executive, and corporate investors and executives sponsored politicians and media and corporate advertisers and HR departments would not have been promoting DEI so strongly policies.

Therefore the coincidence that "people of global majority" usually have much lower wages than the majority of workers in the "first world" and that therefore DEI both makes a lot of money for investors and executives and means that many "people of global majority" get "first world" corporate jobs as immigrant workers or as offshore workers looks like one of the biggest win-wins of the past several decades and anybody that objects ends up being called a racist.

[mandrocles]

Thatcherism with chinese characteristics

In the 1970s a right-wing english think-tank published a study of voting patterns which had enormous consequences as they found two main effects, one obvious and the other non-obvious and very important:

People who owned a car, owned property, invested in shares for retirement, voted for right-wing parties far more than people who used public transport, rented housing, had a defined benefit pension. This seems obvious because the former usually have higher income and status than the latter.

This difference however was largely independent of income and status. Particularly important for voting was that people with low income and status would often vote for right-wing parties if they owned very modest cars, property, and tiny investments in shares.

After that study right-wing parties across the world, but primarily in the UK, USA, Australia adopted policies to undermine public transport, rented housing (especially if public), and defined benefit pensions, with various excuses, and to subsidise directly or indirectly car travel, property ownership, share based pension accounts.

Note: with time it turned out that the key element is property ownership but only coupled with a solid expectation of long-term huge property profits redistributed from the lower classes.

"There were even prophetic council house sales by local Tories in the drive to create voters with a Conservative political mentality. As a Tory councillor in Leeds defiantly told Labour opponents in 1926, ‘it is a good thing for people to buy their own houses. They turn Tory directly. We shall go on making Tories and you will be wiped out.’ There is much of the Party history of the twentieth century in that remark."

"bought his council house in Devon in the early 80s for £17,000. When it was valued at £80,000 in 1989, he sold up and used the equity to put towards a £135,000 fisherman’s cottage in St Mawes. Now it’s valued at 1.1m. “I was very grateful to Margaret Thatcher,” he said.¨

These policies are the reason for the enduring appeal of thatcherism/reaganism for many voters who are workers, even if thatcherism/reaganism policies also include cutting wages and salaries and pension and social insurance, because those voters gain much more with property profits than they lose otherwise.

These policies are being implemented with great zeal in the People's Republic of China by the Communist Party of China: almost all social housing in the PRC has been privatized by the CPC, and the CPC has invested massively in promoting car ownership (even if there has also been big investment in public transport, in particular trains).

Now the CPC wants to switch PRC pensions from defined benefit to share investment accounts, as reported by the right-wing USA organization "Council for Foreign Relations":

"Beijing is pushing Chinese citizens to plan for their own retirements. On December 15, Chinese authorities launched a national expansion of their two-year old pilot private pension pilot project. According to the state circular issued jointly by tax, finance, and human resource bureaus, citizens participating in either of the two primary state retirement systems are authorized to open private pension accounts."

The only possible rationale for these moves is that the Communist Party of China has become vigorously anti-socialdemocratic, anti-socialist and anti-communist and intends to create a large base of car, property and share owners committed to thatcherism/reaganism and right-wing policies. China-mainland has been switching to a thatcherite/reaganite system like China-Taiwan, China-HongKong, Singapore, and previously the USA, the UK, etc.; this will also discourage productive investment and greatly increase financial speculation and rentierism.

That is not surprising: my guess is that virtually all the officials of the Communist Party of China own one or more cars and also significant portfolios of properties and shares, and are determined to protect their investments from the possibility of social-democratic, socialist or communist policies, and since they are all educated in marxism they understand well what their class interests are.

It is quite ironic that the Communist Party of China is today the party run by and representing the interests of landlords and speculators, the same as the Republican and Democratic parties in the USA or the Conservative, New Labour and LibDem parties in the UK.

[mandrocles]

The combination of mass immigration and diversity

It is not surprising that the "globalist" right-wingers (for example the Democratic Party in the USA and the New Labour Party in the UK, the corporate HR departments, most of the "legacy" media like "Fortune" or "The Economist") are very keen on the policies of mass immigration and identity diversity:

Mass immigration means an expansion of the labor supply and lower labor costs (as the head of the Bank of England told the UK Prime Minister) and of workers without the right to to vote. In addition it costs nothing to business owners and greatly increases profits for property owners.

Identity diversity means less unity among workers who end up fighting each other for their slice of jobs and wages rather than their employers. In addition it costs very little to business owners as usually resolves in the same jobs and wages being redistributed among workers.

But the combination of mass immigration and identity diversity is much stronger than either because:

A policy of mass immigration usually increases a lot identity diversity.

A policy of identity diversity usually increases immigration by reducing objections to it as most immigration is from diverse foreign sources.

Mass immigration plus identity diversity have indeed proven to be a very strong anti-labor-union strategy.

[mandrocles]

Dead-ends

The main characteristic of many houses in England is that most of their features are meant to be petty imitations of the features of a mansion of a lord of the manor. One of these features is that the mansion usually has a private tree-lined avenue that usually curves from the public road to the front entrance and indeed many english houses have a private drive-way that is several meters (instead of a tree lined avenue of 100m or 1km) long from the road to the entrance.

But that is not all: many english houses are in "estates" (same work used for the large park and buildings of the residence of a lord of the manor) that have private roads from the public road and these have a branching tree-like structure so they all terminate in dead-ends ("cul-de-sacs" is their posh name) giving a feeling to property owners that even if the road is shared with neighbours at the end and with every other estate resident at the entrance they are like the avenue to a mansion.

These dead-end private roads are indeed very popular and their usual excuse is that living at a dead-end is quieter and reduces maintenance road maintenance costs as there is no through-traffic, just like for the avenue leading to a mansion. Therefore english towns and cities are full of "estates" with a single or perhaps two-three entry points to a tree of dead-end roads, estates which do not allow through-traffic at all, or sometimes when they do it is very slow because of the roads are all curved instead of straight.

That means that the few public (and usually straight) roads that remain are the only ones that allow through-traffic and all the property owners of the estates must share them to get to the entrance to their estate. All these property owners therefore do most of their commute to and from work on heavily congested public roads just to have the smug satisfaction of enjoying a quick ride through their quiet and private (but shared with every other estate resident) road for the last few hundred meters of their commute, even more satisfyingly ending in their own private and unique driveway of several meters length. They are also very smug that owning a property in a dead-end enhances its valuation increasing their property profits.

While a few dead-end avenues to mansions of lords of the manor do not significantly impede traffic when every petty property owner craves their petty imitation dead-end alley allowing no through-traffic every one of them loses out as that creates large areas which are impassable. But still every petty property owner is so smugly content that they do live in a dead-end and screw-everybody-else, which from the point of every other petty property owner is them.

Who really gets ahead? Usually only older people and retirees, who like the lords of the manor live off investments, so do not need to commute and rarely need get out of their petty imitation mansions and do enjoy the peace of quiet of their own dead-end.

[mandrocles]

Why UK private sectors builders build slowly

So in the UK in areas with jobs (London and surrounding regions) the prices of residential houses keep doubling every 7-10 years (7-10% yearly growth) but house building is very slow and way below what is achievable.

This seems strange because by building more houses and selling them house builders can cash-in on this asset price boom. The common explanation is that they do not do that for because:

More housing would moderate the rate of increase of houses.

This would reduce their future profits.

But this explanation does not really work well: without building and selling they cannot realize their profits. But that is not necessary:

What actually is expensive in housing is not the house, but the land with residential housing permission.

Increases in price of the land can be effectively cashed-in by the executives of builders who own that land or by the executives of the land speculation businesses who own that land without selling it.

Instead of selling it they can mark it every year to higher market prices, and then recognizing the increase in booked price as a profit, and then pay themselves large bonuses on those book profits (this can be helped by making clever transactions).

Making book profits is pretty much effortless and cost-free, and to those executives must seem much better than selling the land or building on it and selling it.

Of course they still do some selling and building to generate cash-flow from which to pay themselves those book profits, but not that much is needed.

[mandrocles]

Clever inflation techniques

So in recent times I endured some interesting manifestations of some common clever sharp practice which is for a company to cancel your existing contract and then tell you that they assume that you agree to a new contract which is either much more expensive or has much reduced benefits.

Fortune.com terminated my "Digital" contract with a cost of $60 per year for 6 issues and archive access, and assumed I agreed to a new "Premium" contract for $227.40 per year with the same content but unrequested extra benefits I did not care about.

Since they publish 6 issues per year that means each issue went from $10 each to $37.40 each by subscription yet on their own online shop they charge $12.99 per issue and a number of online newsstands charge less. This is clearly ridiculous, so my guesses are:

Setting the price of the new contract to more than 3 times that of the old contract while promising unrequested extra features is going to crash their subscriber numbers, also because $227.40 per year or $37.40 per issue is extraordinarily expensive, way more than comparable publications.

Regardless I guess that many subscribers (in particular institutional ones) will just renew blindly, and then cancel in a year's time when they realize how much they have paid.

One possibility I thought of is that perhaps Fortune is collapsing and its executives want to squeeze one last gasp of revenue out of their existing subscriber base even if it will later shrink a lot, to award themselves one last round of huge bonuses before "retiring". I hope that is not what is going to happen, because Fortune has been for decades a high quality publication.

So I complained, stopped using the site and then cancelled my subscription, but they still charged me for the already elapsed part of the subscription period.

Then recently Netflix terminated my "Basic" contract for £6.99 per month, and assumed that I had agreed to a new "Standard with adverts" contract for the lower price of £4.99 but with reduced benefits (except for features that do not matter to me); a new contract type called "Standard" is more similar to the old "Basic" (no adverts) contract and now costs £10.99, over 57% more.

Here obviously Netflix reckons that "Standard with adverts" and "Standard" will bring in the same revenue, including those for advertising, so in effect their take per contract will increase by over 50%, thanks to advertising revenue for "Standard with Adverts" and to a large increase in contract price for "Standard" over "Basic".

That will not cause a large fall in subscriptions over time, but Netflix has had many cancellations, and I guess their current executives too want to squeeze their dwindling subscriber base as much as they can in the short term, and the future consequences may well be a problem for someone else.

Something similar happened at Amazon: the terms of my "Prime" contract were changed to include advertising in "Prime Movies" for the same price of £95 per year, and the previous terms are available for an extra £2.99 per month or 37.7% more.

There are aspects that are common to most or all cases:

The previous contract was terminated and I was assumed to have agreed to a new contract which was far more expensive.

The benefits of the new contract are designed to be somewhat different from those of the old contract to prevent an exact like-for-like comparison, even if they are substantially the same or else the new contract would not be offered as a replacement for the old one.

Computing and networking costs for both online magazines and online movies are still falling every year, yet pricing goes up.

My impression is huge price increases of contracts for online subscriptions are part of a government-supported policy fundamental change in real wage levels, as so many prices are inflating yet wages in general are not catching up, making UK workers a lot more "competitive" in the race to the bottom.

[mandrocles]

The essence of left-right politics

The essence of politics is simple:

Whether it takes longer find a tenant or a buyer for a property or to find a place to rent or buy.

Whether it takes longer to find an employee for a business or to find a job for someone unemployed.

If you are better off when it takes longer to find a place and it takes longer find a job you are right-wing and you are left-wing if you are better off it it takes longer to rent or sell or to find an employee.

[mandrocles]

Purchasing power

In several discussions online and in person about money, credit, taxation, spending, and economic policy in general there is a common use of overloaded, not well defined terms like "money" in particular, but also the rest of the above.

As to topics like distribution of income and relatedly inflation, money, credit, I have found that they become a lot clearer if one talks of purchasing power instead, at least in a political economy where many or most goods and services are commodities traded in markets, instead of being self-produced.

Purchasing power is what after all most people care about: they want income, money, credit, wealth, etc. in order to buy things, that is they want purchasing power, whichever form it assumes.

When a Real American says something like "I wish to make money fast" or "I always hustle to make money" what they really mean is that they want more purchasing power, usually they don't want to just accumulate bigger numbers in a bank account or more banknotes or coin in a vault (even if some do because to them that is a way to keep score).

So a large part if not most or all of the study of the political economy is to figure purchasing power and there are two large subtopics:

How purchasing power per person increases, that is how productivity increases (the development problem).

Who gets which slice of existing purchasing power, and how they get it (the distribution question).

So when reading economic or political news or discussions, the two most prominent questions are:

In the long term how does this affect the amount of purchasing power per person?

In the short term how does affect whom gets more or less purchasing power?

Note: an often forgotten distinction is that between GDI ("Gross Domestic Income") and GDP ("Gross Domestic Product"): GDI (expressed usually in currency terms) is in effect the total purchasing power in a state, and GDP (which also for this reason should be expressed in physical terms) is what can be bought with that purchasing power (plus net imports).

[mandrocles]

Technology vs. resources

There is a long standing line of argument that higher living standards today compared to centuries past are due to technology making everything more efficient, and the usual example is Adam Smith's story of the higher productivity from division of labour and specialization in pin factories.

An extension of that argument is that it is capital intensity and machinery that increases efficiency of production.

My impression is that there has been some element of that, but actually production processes have become far less efficient, even if at the same time cheaper.

Consider road haulage: a modern truck can carry larger loads more quickly than a cart driven by oxen, and is much cheaper too per unit of weight, but only by being enormously less efficient: the amount of energy per unit of weight carried needed for each truck trip is much greater (because of the higher weight of the vehicle and the higher speed it can run at) than for a cart driven by oxen, and similarly for the capital cost of the truck.

The reason that overall the diesel powered truck is much preferable economically to the hay fed oxen driving a cart is that the cost of diesel is much, much lower than that of hay for the same distance and weight carried, and that makes a much less efficient technology actually rather cheaper than a more efficient one.

The same applies to air haulage. However flight is one example of actual technology improvement, as today it is possible to build an air-frame efficient enough that human-powered flight that was not possible with older technology is currently just about possible.

For a final check consider sea haulage: diesel powered shipping is still cheaper than wind powered shipping even if wind is free of charge and diesel is not, and ships with engines are more expensive than ships with sails, and that's because diesel is so very cheap and allows greater speed and loads.

[mandrocles]

Inflation and bus services in England

The english government (like most of those of "the west") has adopted a policy of rapid inflation for a few years to make real wages more competitive, and has different types of consequences.

For example restaurant prices have increased a lot, and this has led to a number of restaurant closures, as the number of people who can afford eating at a restaurant has dropped.

This has had a different effect on bus services, because while restaurants are attended by people of several different income levels, so that higher prices can just select people with higher incomes, leading to a moderate fall in custom, bus services are almost only used by low income people, who cannot very much pay higher prices, so an increase in bus prices would result in a much bigger fall in custom than for restaurants.

Note: the situation is so dire that even the current far-right Conservative government has decided to subsidise bus services with a cap to £2 of single tickets.

Since this means that the bus services businesses cannot raise price a lot, they have instead been dropping the service level a lot, by making services less frequent and less reliable, with probably negative slack, that is capacity that is always short of demand.

This is also happening in many other price-sensitive areas, from the NHS to local councils in low income areas.

[mandrocles]

Preference for liquidity is important

J.M. Keynes wrote many interesting things in his book "The general theory" which were ignored or distorted by many other economists, and perhaps the most interesting is the concept of liquidity preference, which properly understood has quite important aspects.

The reason to me seems that the role of many economist is to praise those owning much capital, and one way is to claim that those owners are virtuous: by not spending their income or wealth, by abstaining from consumption, they provide savings to finance investment, and interest and profit are their reward, so the more reward they get the more they will provide savings to finance more investments.

But J.M. Keynes pointed out that unless it is physically hoarded somehow the money that people claim to "save" is always actually spent to buy some sort of investment: even just leaving them in the bank means investing those funds in a loan to the bank.

Therefore investors always spend their non-consumed money to purchase some kind of investment, and what matters a lot to them is its effect on the liquidity of their portfolio: they will prefer more liquid investments if their portfolio is already more illiquid than they wish, that is if they reckon that future investment purchases will yield more than present or past (already invested) opportunities.

So owners of much money don't virtuously sacrifice their consumption to save to finance enterprise, but rather switch from less liquid (and usually longer term) investment purchases for more liquid (and usually shorter term) ones.

Then there are two types of investment activities:

To buy assets low to sell them high, that is to speculate.

To buy inputs to production to produce and sell the outputs, that is to finance enterprise.

In general to finance production is less liquid than flipping assets, as production takes time and also often requires scale.

Therefore when the preference for liquidity increases far from financing enterprise "savers" switch massively to financing speculation. Such as the enormous government-supported speculation on housing rents and prices in the UK and the USA (and several other countries) where the vast majority (90-95%) of financing goes to mortgages (and trading stocks on margin).

[mandrocles]

The missing detail

I was belately reading Cory Doctorow's The End of the Road to Serfdom article about the fight by the ruling oligarchy of "the west" against too many resources being consumed by their working classes, and much of the content is a clear depiction of how successful that fight has been:

“Once that inequality tipping-point is reached, society grows inexorably more unequal and more unfair, as our rules change not merely to favor the rich, but to disfavor the poor”

“The thirty glorious years came to a halt at the end of the 1970s, when the wealth of the few had recovered to the point where the richest 10 percent could begin to nudge policy to their favor and everyone else’s detriment.”

“Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Brian Mulroney and other neoliberal politicians swept into office on the back of a campaign to blame social mobility for oil shocks. Once these plutocrat-friendly politicians captured politics, they set about refashioning it, striking hard against labor rights and public institutions.”

“We’d go back belowstairs, we’d learn to tug our forelocks again. We’d stop competing with their inbred darlings for spots at top universities”

There is however a major issue with that story: it is missing an explanation of how it is possible that in developed countries where 80-90% of families derive their income from wages and pensions and social insurance, so many voted for cutting workers wages and pensions and social insurance. That is not consistent with only a small minority of “the rich” benefiting from big upward redistribution.

That missing explanation is both absolutely crucial to understanding the politics since Reagan and Thatcher and quite simple: a large minority and perhaps even a plurality of workers have made a lot of money from rentierism, 20% to 40% of voters, so vote for more plutocracy, as they regard themselves as rentiers more than workers because:

A lot more workers survive into old age and enjoy good pensions thanks to social-democratic policies, but have therefore turned from workers to full time rentiers, thus making rentiers a much larger percentage of voters. In the past many retirees lived thanks to the support of their working children, so had a direct stake in better wages and working conditions, now that they derive most of their income from their pension and real estate assets to them better wages have become an increased cost.

A lot more workers have profited from enormous upward redistribution from those poorer than them thanks to being also owners of real estate assets (and stock shares in the USA), which have been doubling in price every 10 years for a long time.

The ruling class have not fooled many middle class voters into voting for lower wages and pensions and social insurance against the self-interests of those many voters; they have ensured alignment of interests by ensuring that decades of rising asset prices and rising rents redistributed to both the many middle class voters and the ruling class enormous amounts from the lower classes.

It is astonishing that the author of that article does not wonder why so many working class voters of the past several decades in most of "the west" have been voting to lower wages, pensions, social insurance, and does not come to the obvious conclusion that for many middle class voters the colossal profits they make on their real estate (and stock shares) drive their voting (“From the minute the average couple buys a home they're constantly calculating how much they'll make when they sell it””) and for them those profits are much bigger than their losses in lower wages, pensions and social insurance. The past several decades have been the era of mass rentierism.

It is largely futile to complain about the increase in inequality without taking into account mass rentierism, and in particular that many if not most of the potential political leaders of the workers are real estate (and stock shares) speculators and are making enormous profits from those speculations and badly want to continue to make them at the expense of everybody else.

It is not at all surprising to me that those potential leaders and so many middle class voters are keen on the politics of identity conflicts rather than on the politics of conflicts of interests, because their interests are not aligned with those of most workers.

It will be possible to change policies only when a large part of the middle class reckon that good wages and pensions and social insurance are more valuable and more secure than the enormous profits they have been making on asset speculation.

[mandrocles]

Poll taxes and tax morale

Summary: proportional tax rates pay not only for state services, but also for lifelong insurance against the risk of becoming too poor to be able to buy them.

Having mentioned this before in the context of state health insurance, it is a topic that comes up often and very few people on the economic left or the libertarian right seem to understand it or to want to understand it.

Tax morale is the willingness to pay taxes, and economic left people seem astonished that in effect many on the economic right object not just to progressive rate taxes, but they also object to flat tax rates, and in effect they want flat tax amounts, or poll taxes.

The reason is however obvious: many on the economic right look at state services in terms of purchasing a product, and they resent that flat (or even more so progressive) tax rates mean that the same package state services are "sold" below cost to poor people and way above cost to rich people, or even worse, that the package of state service "sold" to poor people for less is bigger than that "sold" to rich people for more.

The point here is that with flat tax rates of 30% the same package of state services is "sold" at a price of $3,000 to those earning $10,000 or $15,000 to those earning $50,000 or $300,000 to those earning $1,000,0000, when the cost of the package is probably around £15,000.

Because richer people often are tough negotiators always seeking to buy low and sell high, sometimes as a matter of personal principle and pride, they are outraged that the "jackbooted thugs of the government" are "forcing" them to pay a price many times more than the cost of the package of state services. That seems to them price gouging.

What economic leftist usually fail to explain, because they believe that rich people must pay more merely because they can afford to, is that there is actually no difference in the price of the package of state services between rich and poor people, but the proportionality buys lifelong insurance against the risk of becoming too poor to pay for the standard package of state services.

The correct perspective is that the standard package of state services is not purchased every tax-year and by individuals, but in advance for a lifetime as a group buy by all residents, and it is paid in instalments, and that includes very valuable and expensive insurance against being unable to pay the full instalment every year.

What if one does not want to buy the standard package of state services because they think it is poor value for them? It is possible to take personal responsibility and shop for membership in another state, there is a wide market in state memberships, with many different prices and schemes.

[mandrocles]

Absolute debt levels have a macroeconomic impact

It is common if weird fantasy of neoclassical Economists that absolute debt levels don't matter because debt is always owed by someone to someone else, and therefore the net effect is zero, and even if a borrower defaults, this merely means that the debt has turned into an unexpected donation from creditor to debtor.

It is a weird fantasy because:

Balance sheets matter: the balance sheets of creditor and debtor may look very different, and default can impact them very differently, with chain reactions. But in neoclassical economics balance sheets simply don't matter.

The debtor and creditor may have very different preferences for liquidity, and that is indeed the basis for lending: creditors want to be less liquid, and debtors want to be more liquid. Differences in preference for liquidity influence macroeconomic behaviour.

In the common but special case of banks lending there is no transfer of liquidity from creditor to debtor, but the creation of new liquidity as both an asset and a liability on the bank's balance sheet. After "depositors" lend money to a bank ("deposit" that money into "their account"), the bank does not take that money it has on loan from the account of its lenders ("depositors") and transfers it to the account of its own borrowers. Note: if a bank has $1m because a single "depositor" has lent to it $1m in their "account", and then makes a loan to someone else by crediting the borrower's account with $1m, that does not mean that the "depositor" accounts now has a balance of 0 because the $1m "deposit" has been lent out; both accounts have a balance of $1m. If a third party then is paid $500k from the "depositor" and $500k from the borrower, the accounts will have $500k, $500k, and $1m. Such is the miraculous world of bank double entry accounting.

Therefore bank lending and defaults change both the composition of balance sheets and the total amount of liquidity and its distribution and both can have large macroeconomic effects.

[mandrocles]

Neoliberalism in brief

Of the endless debate about what "neoliberalism" is, the important thing is in which essential way it differs ("neo") from classic ("whig", "libertarian") liberalism, and I think that can be answered briefly, as libertarianism mixed with rentierism:

Tight fiscal policy, loose credit policy.

Globalist "whig" on labour, goods and services markets but nationalist "tory" on asset markets.

Small government spending as to supporting people and industry, big government spending (including massive central bank intervention) as to supporting finance, real estate, military contractors.

The political background is that while classical liberals were in large part "new money" whig industrialists fighting "old wealth" tory rentiers, in the neoliberal era many industrialists are allied with rentiers because they have become in large rentiers themselves, having over time used "new money" to acquire "old wealth", so their interests are in part "whig" and in large part "tory", and this has allowed a resurgence of "tory" politics along the dominant "whig" ones.

«the Amstrad founder had given him tips on creating long-term wealth. “Lord Sugar said you make money from property and do business for fun. Many of our customers make money from property and I’d love to go into property development one day,” said Mr Wright.»