Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "The Real News Network"
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@Roger williams
The "left" today is pro globalist, pro open borders, pro multiculturalism, pro EU, pro status quo, pro establishment, and so on. And the Clintons its allied with is also pro-imperialism, wars, pro censorship, and pro oppressive trade policies that harms the 3rd world.
Here you do a classic neo leftist comment where you attack a person instead of their argument:
" Also, political "correctness" only frustrates people who want to use disturbing language and gender & racial stereotypes with no accountability."
It is not racism or sexism to hold people to the same standards as oneself. I never tell a black person to go back to his hut and stop appropriating white culture as he uses technologies and culture that white people have invented. So then I expect that blacks shouldn't cry about cultural appropriation either.
And I never call it "womensplaining" when a woman tries to learn me a thing, so then the stupid term "mansplaining" needs to die as well.
And the left is too brainless, dishonest and ignorant to see a difference between racism on one hand, and justified criticism of religion and immigration on the other hand.
If you are against homophobia, sexism, and hatred towards non-muslims then you get called an "islamophobe" - which is basicly the same thing as a "racist" according to the left.
So the left tries to silence the debate with political correctness. And now we see the backlash against the left come, as people all over the world is leaving this rotten sinking ship. And people join the nationalist right because they know that they are the only ones that dare to stand up to the muslim bullies that harass other immigrants for being to "westernized" and women that are having too much fun and go out and not weaing an ugly beekeeper suit.
Indeed. You lefttards simply doesn't understand how other people think. You see racism everyware - even in places where there is none. And its not usally the immigrants that feels offended when someone waves the national flag.
Nope.
Instead it is usally white leftwingers that feels offended on other peoples behalf. The left makes claims to represent other people and speak for their views.
But my mother thinks modern feminists are retarded and says that they don't speak for her views. More immigrants votes for the nationalist party in my country, than there are immigrants voting for the left.
So it is simply just nonsense to think that "feminism" and womens opinions are the same thing. They are not.
And many (if not even most) LBTQ community members does not share the leftwing pro-censorship views. Indeed, many LBTQ activists like Diana Davidson defends the typical white cis-males that the left loves to throw shit at, and says that they are in fact more tolerant towards LBTQ than most people inside the LBTQ community...
you see many homosexuals are for example intolerant towards bisexuals and calls them "gender traitors" and being mean to them when they flirt with a person of another gender.
So the modern left needs to die. And political correctness is something they can shove up into their ass.
I am not a rude person irl, but I do however think that people needs to grow some thicker skin. I see no reason why people who claim to have been offended always should
take precedence in the leftwing world view.
People feel offended all the time for the most stupid shit, and people needs to learn to live with getting their feelings hurt and move on.
I do for example think it would be a very bad idea to censor jokes or criticism of religion because a few religious fanatics feels offended. You can no longer call prophet Muhammed a pedophile in Austria eventhough he was one.
So where should one now draw the line in the sand about what people can joke about?
Shouldn't christians now also demand censorship towards people who are rude towards their ideology? And what about feminists, shouldn't they also be able to silence offensive comments they disagree with?
Where do you draw the line in the sand?
I say fuck them all. Everyone should have the right to mock and criticise every ideology even if some people will get angry and sad.
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People take more risks when the consquences aren't too harsh. Its true that it can lead to some "moral hazard problems", like the same problems as limit liability companies.
Welfare states get less lost days to strikes, less resitance to change and less demand for protectionism when people fear losing their livelyhood.
And its true that European immigration has failed, for two reasons. 1. too many low qualified people coming at the same time.
2. Not enough education. Rather than trying to make everything low wage jobs the government should try adapt the workers instead, so they could take other jobs and provide training. Matching supply and demand on the labour market.
And get a smart tax system so the housing market works well, and infrastucture, so people can take empety jobs.
High wages is the key, not low wage shit jobs.
High wages makes it more profitable to replace humans with robots. And with welfare the workers dont strike when it happens but retrains and take another job.
Your country gets rich by selling high tech products that few others are good at, thereby you can take very well paid.
woodchips, potato chips or microchips is the question.
If no safety net at all doesnt seem smart. Korea was forced to adopt free market policies to get IMF loans after the asian crisis. And since then the brightest minds have becoming doctors...so much so that they are about 5 times more common than before. Why is that? Why not becoming scientists or engineers? Because those are high risk jobs, so before even taking an education like that you try to get an education which will guarantee you an income no matter what, so if you get out of work you can open your own clinic.
This is just waste of peoples time, talent and money. And with a good social safety net resource allocation (the big brains so to say) would have been much more rational and better.
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+Dave Snipes America was more succesful under the rule of communists leaders as Truman and Eisenhower with a 97% tax on the rich, than America today. And America become rich thanks to protectionism and not free trade, since it was the world champion of high tolls in the 1800s.
And its nothing wrong that the citizens get their share of the pie, since productivity is more based on the society and institituions than the individual. Even the richest guy on earth, Warren Buffet himself admitted this when he said that he would have been very poor if he had been born in a poor country instead, since he claim to be a very poor farmer.
The taxpayers have funded the research behind the internet, SIRI, GPS, semiconductors and touch screens which apple uses, and most of the drugs big pharma collects profits from, so its not unfair to share the pie instead of having a bunch of company owners taking everything and give nothing back to those who enabled their products in the first place.
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Nato is outdated, and so are the EU - which was an institution created after the old colonial power France hoped to regain a voice on the world scene after her loss of her colonies and the loss of the Suez Canal. And France never liked the idea of remilitarizing Germany (as America wanted), but she could accept the idea if the German industry was put under international control where France had a saying... so the EU was created.
Fear of Russia is alos outdated. Only a clueless idiot think Putin is the same threat to Europe as the USSR. Russias population is declining, and its GDP is smaller than that of Spain, and her control over Eastern Europe is gone, and the military equipment is mostly outdated Soviet stuff.
So.. is there any need for European colonialism in 2017? Is there any risk of a Soviet invasion or a German-French war? I think not. And neighter am I willing to fight for an undemocratic, non-transparent, institution led by corrupt men with legal immunity. EU just wanna be like the USA. But I have zero interest in fighting for big buisness interest of EU prestige.
My country had peace for over 200 years without any EU so I prefer to let my own country build up its military with the purpose of self-defence by a conscripted mass-army, rather than join the EU plan of offensive battlegroups and rapid deployable forces of proffesional soliders... so people wouldn't whine as much over unpopular colonial wars, because its easier to support a pointless war fought with foreign legion troops instead of having your own son sitting in the frontline and fighting for nothing..
The EU needs to die. And each country should handle its own affairs, including its defence. And each country can trade with other countries - which have worked well for many European and Asian countries who havn't been EU members.
Instead of the stupid failed "one-size-fits-all" approach, each country will be free to design policies that actully suits them. So each country will get stronger, and therefore more capable of holding other countries up.
The world economy worked much better in the protectionist period 1945-75... than it have since after 1975 with the introduction of neoliberalism, and with the EU expansion from the 1990s onwards.
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I agree. The left should continue to doubling down on the current road so the socialdemocracy in Europe can continue its Pasok trend and lose their seats in every European parliament as they lose all support.
The old left stood for class struggle and the welfare state, while the new left stands for identity politics and open borders. And the new and the old left stands in opposition to each other. Because of immigration.
Either you have open borders, or either you have a welfare state. Simple as that.
And in 2015 the new left won the struggle and told all old leftist to fuck off and leave the leftwing parties - which they did. And now they have joined "populists" instead because they are tired of all IDPOL bullshit, islamophilia and open borders. The leftwing parties are dying. While the populists gain ground.
And the IDPOL lefts solution is to doubling down of the current road - which makes even more people to abandon this sinking ship.
And now Socialdemocrats in Denmark and Sweden desperatly tries to change course to save themselves from utter destruction. 30 years ago did the Swedish socialdemocrats get 45% of the votes in a normal election, but now their support have fallen like a rock thanks for feminism and open borders - and the Swedish nationalists will probably become the largest political the next election.
Its fun to see the IDPOL movement finally destroying itself. Hopefully that would make it possible for a real leftwing party to grow in the future. A real left without feminism, LBGTQ, mulitculti, pro-EU, blacklivesmatter bullshit.
A real left that instead fights for ordinary men and women and the workers. That wants higher wages, democracy, national souverignty.
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@cosmicviewer477 "Haven't studied the European elections"
If you don't live in a bubble with likeminded people, then you would have noticed by now how the left is dying. Only 2 countries in western Europe got leftwing governments, and even in those (Spain and Portugal) the left have lost about 10% support the last decade.
In France have the socialdemocrats lost 90% of their seats in parliament. In Greece have the leftwing Pasok party gone from 44% support to 5%. Labour in UK managed to lose elections in labour strongholds like Stokes and Copeland that have supported labour for decades.
And the socialdemocrats in Sweden is sinking like a rock from 45% support in 1994 to 28% today. And the trend is similiar in rest of Scandinavia, and the Danish socialdemocrats have become a nationalist anti-immigration party just to stay politically relevant and not drop out of parliament.
And in the elections in 2017 held in Austria, Germany, France and the Netherlands did the left lose support in 94% of all the districts (890 out of 946).
And in France and the Netherlands have the left lost 20% of the votes. And the socialdemocrats are now a completly irrelevant force of just 5% of the votes in parliament.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2017/dec/29/2017-and-the-curious-demise-of-europes-centre-left
And this trend is worldwide. We have also seen landslide victories for the right in Brazil, Argentina, Columbia, Chile and in Peru there even was two rightwing parties competing with each other for power and there was not even a leftwing candidate for the presidential run off.
And in the USA have seen a red wave that led to the Republicans getting Trump as their president, and the right took over control over congress, the senate, the house of representatives, and the supreme court - A total victory so to say.
And then the left tried a counter-offensive in the mid-term elections with the hyped Democratic "bluewave" that was said would sweap in and take over the country. But the bluewave ended in a failure. And everything seens like Trump will get re-elected since his approval ratings are strong, and Americans have historically tended to prefer to keep sitting presidents in office with only president Carter as an exception. Nor do I think Hillary or Pocahontas are strong enough to challange him.
"the so-called Walk-Away Movement which just became another useless hashtag"
You can call the walk away movement a fake fantasy all you want, but the election numbers speak for themselves. The modern left is not popular among ordinary people.
"Finally, this notion that people are pushing back against social justice is no indicator because they are probably just as misguided as you are"
Social justice activists are fighting each other. There are tremendous hypocrisy and doublethink in this movement. And the focus is on the most banal pointless issues like sexist air conditioning and racist-plasters.
So why should I care? You got nothing relevant to say, and there is therefore no reason to listen to you.
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I disagree. Britain could have gotten a much better deal if the negotiations had been done by a non-remainer and if traitor media didn't try to sabotage Brexit.
Britain had a strong hand at the negotiating table, since the EU is in economic trouble and the UK would leave a big black hole in the EU budget when leaving - which needs to be filled somehow by somebody. And when the EU is already having a popularity crisis and all strong Europhile leaders are handcuffed (Macron is super-unpopular, and Merkel is about to resign after catastrophic elections) then the EU would have to offer Britain something in return for British cash.
We now see what would happen if taxes would have to increase in EU countries like France to make up for all billions that EU loses with Brexit. The left have made catastrophic elections all over Europe while the populist right is winning everyware.
So if you wanna hold this EU shit togheter, then its necessary to solve this fiscal problem smoothly.
Another thing is that Britain can cause great harm to the EU economy a lot if the EU choose to play unfair - as they have. Trade wars are nearly always won by countries which are running a trade deficit (as Britain) while big exporters (like Germany) get severly harmed while the importer nations suffers nearly no harm to themselves at all.
USA and Japan during the 1930 illustrate this phenonemom.
Britain does not need Germany, as much as Germany needs Britain. Britain can always choose to buy cars from Japan, Korea, USA and other places instead of Germany - and other countries are happy to make hundreds of billions in profits from car sales to Britain if the Germans don't want to sell cars. And while hundreds of thousands of German workers lose their jobs, lots of jobs are created in another country.
So a skilled negotatior which doesn't betray her own country would use this fact to her advantage during the negotiations with the EU.
Britain is also a unique country. It does have good relations and historical ties with America and other places, and president Trump is very friendly with UK and wants allies in his trade wars. And this is also another thing that should give UK some leverage in the negotiations with the EU.
And even a worst case scenario of crashing out of the EU would not mean the end of the world. Trade will still happen with the rest of the world, even without a trade deal. Just like China and the EU could trade with each other for years without any trade deal in place. All that would happen would be that Britain then will trade according to WTO-rules. And that will not be the end of the world. Australia also only trade on WTO rules and that country is not poor like a failed state.
Transitioning away from the EU can be a little painful, but that is not the fault of Brexit but rather the fault of the EU. And staying within the EU will not end well for the economy since the economic policies of the EU are fundamentally flawed - as the Eurocrash in 2008 has shown.
Personally I hope that Brexit will mean the start of a new era of import-substitution, and that British manufacturing can make a comeback by Britain buy more British goods instead of importing similiar products from other countries. And that is the short term solution.
Exporting more stuff to other countries and dealing with hard international competion should be more of a longterm goal for Britain and that thing will need more time to achieve now when British manufacturing have been neglected so much for so long.
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@phaedrussocrates7636 First of all, just because I don't care as much about climate change as you do doesn't mean that I don't think we should reduce our dependency on fossile fuels. Peak oil, peak coal and peak natural gas are serious issues. What you do is to label everyone who disagrees with your climate views as a heretic and as an evil person. And of course you will scare people away from the left when you behave like this, you idiot.
"we will put a man on the Moon in 10 yrs"
I don't care to listen to racist fools who include reparations for the negro slavery in their plan.
And replacing all buildings in America with new energy effiecent buildings is just insanity in the level with Communist China where they demolished buildings to get wood for heating the owens in the steel mills so they could meet their governments insane targets of tonnes of steel produced.
Normally does a country only builds a few percent of new homes to add to the national housing stock, while most of peoples need for housing has to be meet by people trading houses with each other. But you insane clowns thinks that you could scale up things, and perhaps build 10 x times as many homes in a decade.
And not only that... you fix all real estate such as stores, depots, office buildings, warehouses, industrial buildings, shopping malls, hotels etc
There is not enough skilled construction workers for that and nor do you have enough cranes and machines to build all that in just a decade - as you are also shutting down all fossile fuel.
There is absolutly no reason to take the left serious anymore.
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@indulgencerofindulgence5970
Thanks for taking your time to comment.
"And you shouldn't elevate any form of government this way, you shouldn't have to believe in democracy or any other form of government"
I think it is important that we don't kill political opponents for only having a different opinion. And no political leader should be able to take away fundamental human rights, whether it be freedom of speech, equality for the law, or whatever.
Brazil have had a long period of problems long before Bolsonaro. A few years ago it for example made the incredibly silly decision to make political satire illegal - which is a decision worthy of Erdogans dictatorship more than a western style democracy. No one should stand above mockery and criticism.
But I understand that political leaders in Brazil are both dumb, thin-skinned and corrupt.
Things are not perfect where I live either. Democracy is on decline in Europe as well. The government here in Sweden wants to make fake news illegal, and make it forbidden to say negative things about the Swedish nation. In Austria its illegal to mock or criticise religion. Germany wants to ban fake news. Britain wants to forbid porn and "hate speech".
We are with other words building a hell looking like Orwells 1984 where you are not free to speak or to think. And this is not a society in which I want to live in.
I want everyone to have their freedoms, so that I can be free, even if it would mean that stupid people can spread their stupid information and mislead others.
Democracy is certainly not a perfect system, but I prefer it over an Orwellian dictatorship any day of the year.
And there is nothing that guarantees that a country gets competent leaders with dictatorship or monarchy.
So what I want is a system with a large degree of free flow of information so there can exist enlightened citizens that make informed decisions.
And if a rich elite just wants to take over the government and steal money from the people to enrich themselves, then this behaviour can be countered with direct-democracy, where the people can just demand a referendum and smash the will of the corrupt ruling class.
And if you share the burdens and benifits of being a citizen in your country, then everyone would have an self-interest in making your economy and country to work well for everyone - instead of just having one group of people trying to get rich at the expense of another group.
So I want a society where everyone pays taxes, everyone serves in the military, everyone follow the same laws, everyone gets free healthcare and education and so on. It should be a society where everyone is equal and no privilegies exist.
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@qinby1182 "WHAT YOU MUST UNDERSTAND EU IS NOT AN ORGANISM WITH A WILL OF ITS OWN IT IS A UNION REFLECTING THE WILL OF THE MEMBER COUNTRIES"
The will of the ruling elite in those countries. Not the will of the people.
But I guess this difference doesn't matter to middle class champagne socialists.
"what is with you and the fish fixation??"
I like cods. Both on the plate and in the ocean.
And I hope future generations also will get the chance to taste its delicious low fat white meat.
*"Should also add … that Sweden did not have a war for 182 years is a very stupid comment…
all the neighbors are smaller and who wants to conquer Sweden???"*
Nope it is your comment here that is stupid and display ignorance of history. Sweden had Russia as its neighbour until Finland became independent in late 1917. Sweden was also much targeted for its iron and Britain planned an invasion of Norway and Sweden in 1940 to take control over that vital resource, but their plans had to be abolished when Hitlers troops attacked Norway in April.
And during the cold war was the Soviet union a serious threat to all countries in its proximity.
"Anyway EU is a peace project"
It is a project for European imperialism now when the old colonial empires are dead, and the big countries sees this as a chance for revenge and to retake the global influence they have lost since France and Britain failed to retake the Suez canal in 1956.
Why else would it want its own army? Why else would it have its warmongering rethoric towards America?
Why else would it want a small rapid response force that can be deployed anyware in the world with a short notice, when a large conscription army is a better option if the goal is to defend Europe from a foreign invasion?
I have no interest in having my country being part of a military pact. Especially not with warmongering imperialist countries like France that only invaded Libya in 2011 so that their oil company Total could steal their oil.
Why do the richer countries in EU give money (GIVE, not borrow) to the poorer"
Because Eurocrats wants their own power and prestige to grow, and bribing the people Eastern Europe is a cheap way to get public support there for the EU project.
And as the economist Guglielmo Meardi says so have the EU only made the poor worse off in those eastern countries.
"BUT AT LEAST THERE IS A FORUM TO DEAL WITH IT"
As I said earlier, there have been international cooperation before the EU. And unlike the EU have they also been able to function. While the EU only have produced failures in immigration, in economics, in research (like the outdate galileo project), in fighting crime, in enviromental policies, in democracy, and in fighting corruption.
So if some countries want a military pact, then fine they cant create their own alliance while Sweden keeps its long tradition of neutrality instead. And if European countries wanna help each other fight crime or sharing firemen, planes and helicopters to fight wildfires then there is nothing that prevents them from doing so even if an EU doesn't exist.
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Overall do I think this global "one size fits all" suits the world badly.
What we need is more national democracy and solutions more suited for the situation for a specific country.
Another important reason why I reject globalism, is that poor countries almost always needs protectionism to industrialize so they can get out of poverty.
In todays world order all countries are forced to have free trade regardless if they like it or not. And that might not be much of a problem for advanced economies like USA, but for uncompetative less developed countries like in Africa this is devestating.
And most of this "Washington consensus" ideology also have close ties to fascism - as we have seen in Chile under Pinotchet, in Iraq under George W Bush and Russia under Yeltsin. And TTIP, TPP and CETA are also globalist institutions that are highly anti-democratic in their nature.
The track record of international institutions like the World Bank, IMF and WTO during the 1980s and 1990s is not pretty, unless one likes genocide of ordinary people in 2nd and 3rd world countries.
And todays unnecessarily harsh copyright and patent laws only serve to enrich an elite, while innovation is slowed down, internet is censored, people in poor countries die when they don't get access to cheap copies of medicines, and developing countries get it harder to aquire foreign modern technologies - which are needed for poor countries to be able to increase their productivity in their economy so they can get out of poverty.
Todays globalist world order sucks and needs to be destroyed.
The WTO should throw all modern treaties into the trash and go back to the 1960s GATT agreements, which offered poor countries more policy freedoms to implement protectionist policies. And the banking sector was better regulated.
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I want to end the wars, and get my democracy back. I want to end NSA spying on its people when they are not suspected of any crime. And I want freedom of speech back. Copyright laws should be weakened.
And the fascist trade deals should be scrapped, and poor countries should be freed from the shackels of IMF and WTO rules.
I want the left to deal with inequality, and rebuilding the safety net, and let the government involve itself in the economy again to make industrial policy. Full employment should be a national priority again.
There should be a strong government that can bring the financial sector in order. And some areas of public life should not be runned for the sake of profit - like the military, the police, prisons, schools, and basic healthcare.
And the government should look at other succesful models of managing housing so it can benifit all of society instead of just the rich - like South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Germany.
Those are some of the issues that I care about. Your hobby horses can you keep for yourself.
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This guy is shitty and cannot even make good criticism of clowns like free-stuff-Cortez.
Printing money is not a problem as long as you use it for productive investments instead of spending the money on useless consumption. If you borrow the money to start a buisness or getting a good education that allows you to make more money in the future, then there is no problem with borrowing money. And the same thing is true for the government - you can create money (aka "borrowing money") and use the money to improve the economy by more money for research, education, job training programs for workers, infrastructure etc.
When you use your money for good things, then creating money is substainable.
But if you spend your borrowed money on things that doesn't improve the economy, like the upkeep of the useless EU parliament in Strassbourg, or money for printing up EU propaganda, or wasting billions of money on airport nobody uses... then of course will get the value of your currency destroyed in the long run.
And the system becomes unsubstainable.
And here is my problem with MMT. It cannot work when politicians lie and rebrand 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁𝘀 as 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀.
That will harm the credibility of MMT in the long run just like Epstein says. And todays left is simply too immature for having a reason to exist. When immigration of millions of low educated, highly criminal, not-easily-assimilated groups of people come in to your country you have to realize that it is a problem. It is a 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁 and NOT an 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀.
And as long as the political establishment refuse to tell the truth, then the idea of MMT will be doomed to never succeed.
You cannot make a clownish wishlist of open borders, closing down all nuclear plants today, and then demand an univeral basic income of 30.000 dollars a month for everyone. This shit will not work. And as long as my leftwing party is allied with clowns that propose this, then I will continue to vote for other parties.
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I never said all guns should be banned. I think hunters can have their guns, and those guns should not be automatic. And bump fire stocks should be illegal. And magazine capacity should be restricted. And background checks should be harsh. The government should also make a rifle-by-back program so people can sell their guns to the government for a market price in order to reduce the fire arms in circulation in society.
With all those measures we can limit the harm a shooter can do. And the police can quickly outgun a normal criminal. Which in turn makes society safer and the police doesn't need armoured vechiles like in America.
Its true that the market price goes up, and I cannot see why that would be a bad thing. In the past (say the 1950-1990s) when Sweden was a closed economy there was hand grenades or military guns in circulation. And the only deaths by fire arms was caused by non-automatic rifles for hunting.
But since Sweden joined the EU and opened up its borders to other European countries weapons have been flooding into the country, and especially from surplus ex-Yugoslavian army depots by criminals who have bribed Generals to sell their stocks of arms.
So now the price of weapons in western Europe has fallen like a rock. And a hand grenade can now be bought cheaper than a milk package. And now most gun violance is done by drunken persons with imported Yugoslavian arms.
And as weapons get cheaper more thugs can get their hands on them. And the Swedish police is fighting an uphill battle against heavier and heavier armed opponents, which are getting bolder and more aggressive.
I can have some symphaty for the American position though that closing the borders between each state is not a desireable solution. So doing as I wish to do with Sweden is not possible. And too many guns are already around in American society to get things under control.
So I guess things has to go stepwise when America is slowly de-arming.
I would also just trying to close the border with Mexico since I'm not a believer in legalization. Neighter in guns, drugs or anything else. If money is the problem, then the solution would be to provide people with other ways to earn an income, like for example selling food crops instead of weed.
Most large criminal gangs now also makes their income from a broad range of activities - smuggling mexicans, prostitution, selling drugs, blackmail, kidnapping etc, so just legalizing everything would do nothing to get rid of any criminal gangs.
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@krisinmcirvin782 I've read the book. And I think Mitchell's reflections are useful and extremely important and some of the best designs for a post-EU policy for a country.
And I would add "Reviving British Manufacturing" and other such books to the most read list for to the post EU project.
I do however think that Mitchell takes things a little bit too far in his book. I think small countries needs to be careful about their money printing and national debt, even if I am far from a debt-hawk but rather the opposite. I think debts are mostly just a tool to scare people into submission, and that countries can pile up more and more debts without a problem if the economy is strong - as Mitchell himself mentioned with Australia case.
But a country like Sweden is not USA. And with the shitty state of our economy right now I would try to be careful even if we already have our own currency.
We cannot just print up money and expect foreigners to accept our money as they were US dollars.
A 2nd problem with Mitchells theories is that of the green new deal. I love his job guarantee programme. And I am sympathic towards the idea of building railroads and creating new green jobs - as in for example the biotech industry to create enviromentally friendly substitutes for different materials we use.
But on the other hand do I not think this green new deal ever will become a hugely profitable buisness. And I think we lie to ourselves if we claim it would be.
Planting trees might be good for the enviroment, and it might be necessary, but it is not creating any growth in our economy but I rather look at it as boring maintance.
Its just boring shit we have to do.
Taking a shower and washing our clothes might be good things to do, but it is not really making us excited and enriching our lives and feel like we have gained any extra in our lives.
And this is also why I think people are so reluctant to pay for this. There is no economic growth to be had.
And same goes with green energy. No energy source will ever be able to replace oil. Uranium is a limited resource which would only last a few years if it was used to replace all fossile fuels consumption in the world at the current rate.
We don't have enough rare earth metals for highly effiecent solar panels, and we don't have neodynium for magnets for windturbines. Hydroelectric power cannot be built unless you have rivers, and geothermal energy is not very effiecent if you have to dig too much far into the ground... which means that it is only practical in vulcano countries like Iceland and Indonesia.
And biofuels demands large areals of land and they have a too low EROEI to even replace a fraction of a country's oil demand - not even Brazil's military dictatorship with its ethanol cars or Hitlers regime of evil scientists could bring their country's out of oil dependency... so I highly doubt anyone can find a good replacement for oil this day either. And this will not change no matter how much money you throw at throw at the problem.
So believing that a green new deal would ever be a hugely profitable affair that manage to replace fossile fuels is nonsense in my opinion.
The goals are just as unrealisticly optimistic as Mao's great leap forward which ended in a disaster. I like the idea of MMT, and that is also the reason why the last thing I want to is to let this idea fall into the hands of unicorn fairydust clowns like Occasio Cortez that says everything is for free.
You can get rid of oil dependency, open the borders, give everyone UBI, a job guarantee program, free healthcare and education and a new green deal all at the same time.
Sorry I cannot support that. This will make me and all other MMT supporters looklike idiots. Because these proposals are idiotic and overly ambitious and not thought-through.
It sounds like the great leap forward 2019.
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@krisinmcirvin782 To a large part do I agree with you and Mitchell. But even Mitchell himself said in the book you refer to that France could not defend its ambitious economic programme even with capital controls.
So the government is not almighty. And especially not shortly after a Brexit, Grexit or Swexit.
Putting a new industrial policy and central bank policy in place will take time, if we are going to be realistic.
So the tools of controlling our own economies will be limited at first so it is important to not create too much capital flight and crashing the value of ones own currency and making imports more expensive and thereby destroying many domestic industries.
So even money can have an impact in the real world. But once a country gets its souvereign policy tools in place and have a stubbord support for its own national key industries, then the country can play much more aggressively and print money and spend. And economic growth will make the debt-to-GDP ratio to fall and the spending increases will kill off unemployment, and the rapid increase in production will make the amount of stuff grow faster than the amount of money chasing it so inflation will not be a problem.
On the contrary, deflation will instead grow, and that problem can easily be fixed by more inflation from more money printing. And then can the government create even more money, and it will not result in higher prices since people will use it to instead build up their own household savings instead of using the money in the economy to bid up prices at the shelves of grocery stores.
Standard of living will be maximized and inequality will dissapear. And with high wages and a strong consumer base will there be strong incentives for technological development.
A million things can also be done about the fiscal policy, but I am already too longwinded to go into that.
Suffiecent to say that MMT is a great tool in the tool box, but I think weak countries needs to be realistic about the dangers of capital flight and currency crashes.
And capital controls cannot fix this overnight. Because capital controls works best in a preventionary role rather than in the role of curing an already sick and infected economy. Introducing capital controls would only make foreign investors more nervous about more government restrictions or get them even more suspicious that the economy would crash - which could lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy as foreign investors desperatly tries to flee the country.
And when every foreign investor runs towards the exit and tries to sell their stocks and currency they have, then the currency will fall like a rock and the stock market crashes. And the country will be in a big economic mess with crashed companies and mass unemployment, and the interest rates for borrowing money on the international markets would go up as few people have any trust in the ability of the country to pay.
And then the IMF can come in a buttrape the country, when it have a knife pressed against its neck and can blackmail it into any harsh loan conditionalities.
So it is no big surprise that small countries do not like to pile up much debt and invite foreign direct investors so they can cause financial panics like this. The benifits of borrowing money and getting foreign money does not compensate for all damage done afterwards.
It is simply better to play safe and don't pile up debt, and try to limit risky foreign investments into your country.
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Protectionism is a good thing when it comes to protecting infant industries. But it is simply idiotic when it comes to protecting old outdated industries that needs to die the death of "creative destruction".
The EU protectionism is only of the useless variant. The Chinease can buy up the next generation of European high tech firms without politicians lifting a finger to save their crownjewels from getting stolen.
The only protectionism the EU does is to protect farmers that are overproducing expensive food so that European consumers have to pay an overprice for food, and african farmers get thrown into poverty when European subsidized food gets dumped on African markets and dump prices so much that Africans go out of buisness.
The EU trade policies is wasteful, immoral and destructive to the planet since the overproduction of food waste limited resources like fresh water, topsoil, phosphorus, and fossile fuels for tractors, planes, waterpumps, creation of fertilizer and pesticide.
And when too much food is produced and can't be sold for profit, then food are burned despite all resources that have been wasted on producing that food. Millions are starving, but the EU rather destroys food than changing course.
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