Milton Friedman - simply devastating left wing "buts" with reasoned logic!


Selene

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It is just sooo refreshing to see Phil Donahue's left wing arguments demolished in two and one half (21/2) minutes by a tiny little affable smiling curmudgeon using reason and logic.

Yes folks it is really this simple and when you attempt to argue capitalism with folks, this is the template:

Adam

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http://www.socialiststudies.org.uk/edu%20keyn%20marx.shtml

Excellent article here, debunking monetarism, from a socialist viewpoint not a left-wing one. Two completely different things.

I think you will find that many people on this list are Austrians, not Friedman-style monetarists. Some of the best critiques of his monetarism have been written by Austrians.

Ghs

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http://www.socialiststudies.org.uk/edu%20keyn%20marx.shtml

Excellent article here, debunking monetarism, from a socialist viewpoint not a left-wing one. Two completely different things.

The follow passage is from "The Birth and Rebirth of Monetarism," by David Ramsay Steele. From Free Life: The Journal of the Libertarian Alliance, Winter, 1980.

Steele, a former member of the the Socialist Party of Great Britain who became a free-market libertarian, is the author of From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation .

Marx the monetarist

Both Currency and Banking Schools were Monetarist: they both accepted that excessive issue of inconvertible paper money would drive up prices. Karl Marx was a devout adherent of the Banking School - a soft Monetarist perhaps, but a Monetarist nonetheless. Many of our present-day Marxists have dug up texts from Marx asserting that the quantity of money is irrelevant to its value. However, these texts refer to gold, or to paper money convertible on demand into gold. Marx explicitly pointed out that the exchange-value of inconvertible paper money would be regulated entirely by its quantity. Marx held that the price of gold, like all commodity prices, was governed by the labour-time required to produce it. This theory obviously could not be applied to inconvertible paper money. The division of monetary theory in this way is a fallacy of the labour theory of value. But it was what Marx held.

All major Marxist writers, insofar as they have paid any attention to the determination of the purchasing power of money, have been Monetarists. The same goes for all Marxist-Leninist regimes, including Russia and China. China's Monetarism is not an innovation of the recent liberalization: they were just as Monetarist under the Gang of Four. Prior to the Communist Party takeover, there was runaway inflation in China, which has left an indelible mark. (See the Peking pamphlet Why China Has No Inflation.) Where Communist Party regimes abandoned Monetarism for Keynesian policies, as in Yugoslavia, they have suffered from Western-style rising prices.

Leon Trotsky was not only a Monetarist, but a "hard" Monetarist and gold bug, who thought that commercial calculation would be devastated unless gold was employed as money. He called for the Soviet Union to go onto a gold standard, and predicted dire consequences if it did not. (Although a gold standard does guarantee that the money supply cannot be increased beyond a point, it is purely the regulation of the quantity which matters, and gold is not essential for that).

Ghs

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This brief comment by Friedman is interesting.

Why it isn't Necessary to "Throw the Bums Out"

Ghs

Isn't he so refreshing? His delivery and logic make everything so sensible. And his is very quick. I've always liked him.

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http://www.socialiststudies.org.uk/edu%20keyn%20marx.shtml

Excellent article here, debunking monetarism, from a socialist viewpoint not a left-wing one. Two completely different things.

The follow passage is from "The Birth and Rebirth of Monetarism," by David Ramsay Steele. From Free Life: The Journal of the Libertarian Alliance, Winter, 1980.

Steele, a former member of the the Socialist Party of Great Britain who became a free-market libertarian, is the author of From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation .

Marx the monetarist

Both Currency and Banking Schools were Monetarist: they both accepted that excessive issue of inconvertible paper money would drive up prices. Karl Marx was a devout adherent of the Banking School - a soft Monetarist perhaps, but a Monetarist nonetheless. Many of our present-day Marxists have dug up texts from Marx asserting that the quantity of money is irrelevant to its value. However, these texts refer to gold, or to paper money convertible on demand into gold. Marx explicitly pointed out that the exchange-value of inconvertible paper money would be regulated entirely by its quantity. Marx held that the price of gold, like all commodity prices, was governed by the labour-time required to produce it. This theory obviously could not be applied to inconvertible paper money. The division of monetary theory in this way is a fallacy of the labour theory of value. But it was what Marx held.

All major Marxist writers, insofar as they have paid any attention to the determination of the purchasing power of money, have been Monetarists. The same goes for all Marxist-Leninist regimes, including Russia and China. China's Monetarism is not an innovation of the recent liberalization: they were just as Monetarist under the Gang of Four. Prior to the Communist Party takeover, there was runaway inflation in China, which has left an indelible mark. (See the Peking pamphlet Why China Has No Inflation.) Where Communist Party regimes abandoned Monetarism for Keynesian policies, as in Yugoslavia, they have suffered from Western-style rising prices.

Leon Trotsky was not only a Monetarist, but a "hard" Monetarist and gold bug, who thought that commercial calculation would be devastated unless gold was employed as money. He called for the Soviet Union to go onto a gold standard, and predicted dire consequences if it did not. (Although a gold standard does guarantee that the money supply cannot be increased beyond a point, it is purely the regulation of the quantity which matters, and gold is not essential for that).

Ghs

As you are no doubt aware D R Steele was a member of the SPGB in the 1960’s. He became acquainted with the US Libertarianism of the Austrian School of Economics, particularly a student of von Mises called Murray Rothbard.

D R Steele took on board Mises’s Rational Economic Calculation thesis and claimed the SPGB had no answer to it. He then disappeared to the US to a Libertairian anarchist sect and wrote From Marx to Mises.

Like all opponents of Marx’s theory of value he only asserts it is a fallacy but does not prove it. When defenders of the market are pushed they claim their refutation of Marx rests with Bohm Bawerk although they ignore the Marxist response.

We (the SPGB) debated with the Libertarian alliance twice and found it a waste of time because they claim the society in which we live is not capitalist because the state and national boundaries exist. There are as many positions (libertarian) as there are anarchists.

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Like all opponents of Marx’s theory of value he only asserts it is a fallacy but does not prove it. When defenders of the market are pushed they claim their refutation of Marx rests with Bohm Bawerk although they ignore the Marxist response.

Nonsense.

Would you care to defend the labor theory of value? Go ahead; make make my day. After that we can debate the merits of Ptolemaic astronomy.

Ghs

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Popcorn-popcorn-5283362-75-75.jpg

OK! I even got my Brewer's Yeast out for the popcorn!

This will be worth watching!

Michael should lift Steven's post ban for this one!

Go George!

Adam

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From :

QUESTIONS OF THE DAY

No.3 MARX-MODERN HISTORY AND ECONOMICS

It is characteristic of the new attacks on the labour theory of value, as it was of the older ones, that few of the critics have understood what the theory is. For example the latest of them, in The Times (2nd June 1992) charges Marxism with having said:

“Workers were being cheated of the value of their labour by conniving profiteers. Only when theory turned to practice did it become clear that the value of people’s labour was a pure abstraction that did not exist outside of the conspiracy to rob them of it”.

No-one reading this will appreciate that it was Marx who showed that:-

“…the value of people’s labour was a pure abstraction”.

For it was Marx who realised that his predecessors had been wrong in supposing that wages are paid for the “workers’ labour”. He put forward the quite different explanation that what the capitalist buys is the “workers’ labour power”.

With his labour theory of value Marx showed that commodities that is articles and services produced for sale, have values proportionate to the amount of labour socially necessary to produce them; one needing ten hours having twice the value of one needing only five hours. He showed that Adam Smith and others who regarded wages as what the employer pays for the hours of labour the worker puts in were wrong. What the employer buys is the use of the workers’ mental and physical energies for the day or the week. This Marx called the workers’ “labour power” or “labouring-power”.

Like other commodities the value of labour power is determined by the hours of labour required to produce it, that is to say, the amount of labour needed to provide for the maintenance of the worker and his family and to provide him with the skill appropriate to his occupation.

The employer is able to make profit because the workers he employs create more value than the value equivalent to their wages. If, say, the workers create in three days of a five day week the equivalent of these, the remaining two days of unpaid labour yield to the employer what Marx called surplus value. Out of surplus value payment is made to the landlord for rented land and interest to the money-lending capitalist (Bankers) for borrowed money, leaving the remainder as industrial or commercial profit for the employer.

Marx emphasised that the capitalist makes profit though he pays for labour power at its value.

Marx also dealt with the relationship of value and price and in the text of Volume I of Capital, price and value are treated as being equal (more about this later). In earlier times, including the beginning of capitalist production, price and value were approximately the same, but with the development of techniques of production a new factor had to be taken into account, called by Marx changes in the composition of capital. Capitalists had to devote relatively less and less of their capital to buying labour-power (employing workers0 called by Marx “variable capital” because it is value creating, and more and more to plant and machinery, called “constant capital” because it merely transfers its value, the labour embodied in it, to the commodity; it does not add additional value, as does “variable capital”.

Marx, in Capital Volume I (page 355 in the Kerr edition) gave an example relating to two businesses: a bakery, which, at that time, needed little plant and machinery and a relatively large number of workers compared with a textile business needing much plant and machinery and relatively few of workers. The bakery workers being more numerous than the textile workers would create more value.

If the total capital of the two businesses were the same when their respective commodities each sold at value, then we would be in the impossible situation where, in Marx’s words, the textile company would “pocket less profit or surplus value than the bakery”. Marx was reminding readers that commodities do not sell at their value. In the real world the bakery’s commodities sold below value and the textile commodities sold above value.

We come now to what is known as the “Great Contradiction”.

After Marx’s death, Engels published Capital Vol. IIIwith its lengthy and detailed demonstration that in the developed capitalism of Marx’s day, commodities did not sell at value but at what Marx called “Price of Production”, so that some commodities sell permanently above value and the rest permanently below value. Price of Production (not to be confused with what the capitalists call their costs of production) was defined by Marx as being “equal to its cost price plus the average rate of profit” (Capital Vol. III Page 186). “Cost price” here means the value in Marx’s terms of the different ingredients which go into the production, i.e. the amount of socially necessary labour required. Marx showed that, taking into account the changed composition of capital, his “Price of Production” is strictly in accordance with his labour theory of value.

But Marx’s critics, failing to understand Marx’s argument, would have none of it. Bohm-Bawerk declared “Marx’s third volume contradicts the first”. Bohm-Bawerk’s case against Marx was answered by, among others, Engels in his 1894 Preface to Capital Vol. III, by L. Boudin in his Theoretical Systems of Karl Marx and by Kautsky in his Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx.

In addition to dealing with the arguments, Boudin neatly answered the charge that, between Volume I and Volume IIIof Capital, Marx changed his mind. Boudin pointed out (p. 133) that:

“…most of the third volume, and particularly those portions of it which are supposed to modify the first volume, were actually written down by Marx in its present formbefore the publication of the first volume”.

Politicians and economists have continued to attack Marx’s theory giving a variety of reasons for doing so. Some have gone on using the argument about the alleged “Great Contradiction”. One critic, Harold Laski, in his book Communism (Home University, 1926, pages 112 and 95) argued that the labour theory of value was “erroneous” and that what Marx was really trying to do was to “determine scientifically” how the workers “ought to be paid”. It is impossible to reconcile this with the fact that Marx stood for the abolition of the wages system.

Professor F. W. Paish in Benham’s Economics (Pitman’s Paperback 1967, page 289) uses the following argument against Marx:

“…how do we measure the quantity of labour? A Carot can dash off in a few hours a picture which will sell for much more than a picture that has taken a mediocre artist several months to produce. A working jeweller can earn two or three times as much in an hour as an unskilled worker. Why, simply because the products of a Corot or a working jeweller are more valuable”.

Paish appears to have been unaware that Marx took the degree or skill into account. Marx wrote (Capital Vol. 1. Page 51):

“…it is the expenditure of simple labour-power, i.e. of the labour power, which, on average, apart from any special development exists in the organism of every ordinary individual…Skilled labour counts only as simple labour intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labour, a given quantity of skilled labour being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labour”.

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Popcorn-popcorn-5283362-75-75.jpg

OK! I even got my Brewer's Yeast out for the popcorn!

This will be worth watching!

Michael should lift Steven's post ban for this one!

Go George!

Adam

If George goes for it, this is going to make for some succulent roadkill. I recommend Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce--it is among the best.

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From :

QUESTIONS OF THE DAY

No.3 MARX-MODERN HISTORY AND ECONOMICS

[text deleted]

All this is Marx 101. I'm not interested in a battle of links or passages written by other people. If you want to defend the Marxian labor theory of value (LTV), do so in your own words.

I have read a lot of Marx over the years, including the three volumes of Capital, the three volume of Theories of Surplus Value, and his Grundrisse, and I have read the standard defenses of Marx's LTV by Ronald Meek (most notably in Studies in the Labor Theory of Value), Maurice Dobb (e.g., Theories of Value and Distribution Since Adam Smith), and others. I am also familiar with the so-called "Ricardian Socialists" -- e.g., Thomas Hodgskin, who in fact was neither a Ricardian nor a socialist but a free-market disciple of Adam Smith -- who preceded Marx and who developed a theory of "surplus value" that influenced him.

In short, don't assume that I will commit the elementary blunders of the sort mentioned in the passage you quoted.

I have engaged in major debates on the LTV, as defended by both Ricardo and Marx, on elists over the years, and I would be happy to do so again. But you had better come prepared. Just because I like Ayn Rand doesn't mean that I haven't done my homework on Marx. I respect Marx as a historian but not as an economist. He was the last of the medieval scholastics in value theory -- and this isn't being entirely fair to the scholastics.

Perhaps you would like to begin by explaining how Böhm-Bawerk got it wrong in his critique of Marx's LTV. You can skip the problem of whether Marx effectively contradicted himself himself in volume 3 of Capital. I think he did, but this is a sidebar. Böhm-Bawerk's devastating critique of the LTV does not hinge on this point.

Ghs

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Here, George--I got it all cleaned up for you. Try to be more careful, OK? You really made a mess of it the last time.

spit.jpg

Wow Rich!

It must be made of Shayneless Steel!

26998207.winksmile.gif

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Those OL members who are unfamiliar with Böhm-Bawerk's critique of Marx may find this lecture useful. It is by the Austrian economist Richard Ebeling. Ebeling begins with an accurate summary of Marx's theory of value, surplus value, and exploitation, and this alone makes this lecture, which runs nearly 40 minutes, worth listening to. Ebeling's brief accounts of Böhm-Bawerk's criticisms are sketchy, but they may inspire you to read more.

This lecture cuts out at around 31:30, but it picks up again in a few seconds, so stay with it.

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk's Critique of Karl Marx

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGbxjiTjhQY

Ghs

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