BS Economics to Excuse Capitalism

BS Economics to Excuse Capitalism

Posted on 23-10-2012, Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work

What agitates me, and that happens fairly often, as you know, is when headlines and pundits tell you about an economic problem in such a way that they really do 99% ideological indoctrination and 1% analysis. Nothing illustrates this better than the current spate of particularly liberal economists in an around the New York Times and publications like that explaining to all of us that the problem of the US economy today is that demand for goods and services exceeds supply.

There is no need for an abstraction like that. A vague idea as if the sky opened up and instead of rain and snow we got supply and demand and they weren’t lined up the way the ought to be. Let’s be real clear and look at the reality of what we are talking about. Yes, it is true, that the supply of almost everything is interrupted, inadequate, delayed an on and on and on. Now, why is that? Something mysterious? Not at all! Straightforward like an arrow.

We have a minority of our people in a position to decide on supply. They have a name; they are called the capitalists. They are the ones, the employer class, who decide whether to invest in producing the supply of goods and services or not to. They are the ones who invest in maintaining the supply chains. Remember the ship that was stuck at the Suez Canal? Well, that is because the Suez Canal hadn’t been widened further than it was. It hadn’t been dredged as deeply as it ought to have been. And all those factories that aren’t quite producing the supply we need, well, you could have invested in more of those factories. You could have teams ready to repair them quicker. You could have stockpiles of inventory that could have been moved if the factory itself were shut down.

Do you know who made all the decisions about whether there be supply? The capitalists! The ones who are in it for profit. It wasn’t profitable, they thought, to maintain the supply chains in good order, to produce the supply and to have inventory of it. And so, we don’t have enough. Let’s be clear. We, the majority, the people, the employees are now suffering an inflation, a delayed delivery of the goods we paid for, the unavailability. We live the failure of a system that allows a tiny minority to make all of these decisions. No wonder they don’t tell us the truth because we would point the finger of blame right at them.

No, no, no. They have their ideological servants to tell us about the mysteries of supply and demand which somehow didn’t work out they way we would have liked. That is straight out ideological BS! Keeping everybody’s criticisms away from the persons and persons and persons who don’t want us to understand that this is how capitalism works. The minority, after profit, makes the decisions and the rest of us, without those decisions, without that power live with the results or not, as the case may be.