The neoliberal model promotes profits, not investments (cf. Nicolaus Kowall, a critical Austrian economist). The financial sector must be shriveled and the public sector expanded. Those are two lessons from the 2008 financial meltdown. Speculation and investment must not be confounded. Otherwise nothing is learned from history. As Albert Einstein warned, the only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. The bomb changed everything except the way we think.
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. (Oscar Wilde). What is good for Volvo may not be good for Sweden. Economics should be pluralistic, not a monolith. Once 90% of investment was productive and 10% speculative; now that is reversed (cf. Noam Chomsky, Richard Wolff, Naomi Klein and Henry Giroux). GE Capital is more exciting than GE refrigerators! Is the economy part of life or a steamroller crushing self-determination and creativity? Is Canada only a bitumen staple, a void to be filled with pipelines and oil trains, the next stage without alternative after “hunting and gathering” as in Stephen Harper’s dystopia? (cf. www.progressive-economics.ca)
Unlike a chair, an idea can be shared by a whole people. The time is right for alternative economics, for qualitative growth instead of quantitative growth, access instead of excess and enough instead of more!
– See more at: http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2014/07/speculation-kills-supply-demand#comment-274681
