Clean Slate: New Ideas for Justice & Democracy

This is the audio version - you can read the original text here: -30- Dougald Lamont’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

For 50 years, governments have been doing exactly what conservatives wantThe reason the economy and the world are so incredibly messed up, and that people are so angry, and divided and desperate, and that nothing seems to change no matter who gets elected is not because governments haven’t listened to neoclassical rules, it’s because they have.The idea that the problem with the economy is the government’s fault for spending too much ignores the fact that for 50 f*****g years, politicians havebeen doing exactly what businesses, and conservative voters have been asking them to do.Governments have cut taxes.Governments have cut spending.Governments have reduced investments in infrastructure.Governments have eliminated regulations and laws.Governments have privatized and sold off government owned businesses, services.Governments have enacted austerity and laid off government workers.Economic decisions have been handed off to the private sector at the request of the private sector.Most governments did abandon Keynesian economics. Instead of having elected governments run deficits to stimulate the economy, independent central banks were supposed to manage the economy with interest rates instead.The same people who clamour for freedom of expression and decry government overreach have called for, and succeeded, in having Keynesian economics outlawed.Laws punishing politicians who don’t balance budgets have been passed. Constitutional balanced budget amendments have been proposed. In the Maastricht Treaty that created EU, Keynesian economics are outlawed. How libertarian! What freedom!The promise - the explicit promise - of economic propagandists like Milton Friedman - was that this would result in greater freedom and prosperity for all. Instead, we have the worst inequality and greatest concentration of wealth in history.There are housing and cost-of-living crises around the world. The majority people are making the same as they were years or decades ago, and people are everywhere deep, deep in debt.We are not working and investing for growth or to build savings. We are working and investing to finance the continually growing debt that underpins the entire economy.Every single one of these measures has driven greater and greater concentrations of wealth and income, mergers and acquisitions and less competition, and have fuelled an affordability crisis in real estate around the world.Because if we treat the last 50 years as a big economic and political experiment where Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas and some other Chicago Boys all convinced us to try doing it their way, that is what has been happening for the last 50 years.That is why we’re where we all are, right now.Here are some of the linksSNL: Theodoric of York, Medieval Barberhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edIi6hYpUoQ Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

Proponents of Modern Monetary Theory have predicted many of the crises that neoclassical economists completely whiffed on, because they actually measure and include data in their model that orthodox economics does not.What is even more egregious, however, are the superficial criticisms of MMT deployed to criticize it, which amount to not understanding it, because they can’t see how it fits in with their own view. That, however, is the point. It doesn’t “fit in” with their view, it replaces it with a different one.Links:Original article: https://open.substack.com/pub/dougaldlamont/p/if-mmt-is-wrong-why-is-it-so-much?r=9gk0j&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=falsehttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/07/28/imf-admits-disastrous-love-affair-with-euro-apologises-for-the-i/https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdfhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/business/bailout-money-goes-to-greece-only-to-flow-out-again.htmlhttps://www.3dpolicy.ca/node/459https://www.gmo.com/north-america/research-library/why-does-everyone-hate-mmt/ Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

There is plenty of hand-wringing, and not much else, about the rise of far-right extremism in “the West”. Of course, there have always been such elements, but there is genuine and bitter hatred as societies splinter into tribal factions, some of them blatantantly lawless violent criminals. Authorities like police are often unable to cope with these disturbances, because from a practical point of view, they are not equipped to. Governments and police forces in Canada are not prepared for massive surges in protestors who are also breaking the law.While the factions blame each other, or government, the real problem is that the private economy is falling apart, after a series of massive shocks over many years, where the repairs to the economy kept setting us up for bigger crises down the road.Dougald Lamont’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber today! Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve done a video about Residential Schools and Residential School denialism, because it's becoming a bigger issue.Angus Reid, who's a pollster, ended up leaving Twitter, talking about churches being burned and about claims around Residential schools.And it's really important because the sad - the really tragic part about this is that we're not actually fighting about history. The history is actually not in question.In, 1907 Dr. Peter Bryce, Canada’s First Chief Medical Officer issued a report detailed the fact that First Nations students at Residential schools were dying in appalling numbers of Tuberculosis, when the deaths could be prevented. He wrote:“I believe the conditions are being deliberately created in our residential schools to spread infectious diseases […] The mortality rate in the schools often exceeds fifty percent. This is a national crime.”There's still more to be discovered, but when you actually look at the records, at people's letters, the stuff that was compiled in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there's no question, that Residential schools were not well-intended, that they were horribly run, that thousands of children died. And it was because of neglect.Uou have people who you might call the usual suspects on the right have been playing down and minimizing the harms of Residential schools.And these articles are being pushed out by Right-wing think-tanks.The Fraser Institute has published them, media outlets like True North.And they're not backed up by facts.It's really, really distressing because the reality is we are nowhere close to accepting the history of how First Nations and Indigenouspeople were treated in the past, or how they continue to be treated right now in Canada.Indigenous children being taken by child and family services in Canada is every bit the catastrophe that Residential schools were.It's being completely ignored, as if it never happened.And as if it is not happening when thousands and thousands of First Nations and Indigenous children have been seized over decades, taken from their families, and it's still happening now.And it is almost impossible to express the damage that's happened. Just this year, there was a family and children in CFS who died, who were murdered.There have been hundreds of deaths in the last 20 years in Manitoba.Missing and murdered women and girls and two-spirit are overwhelmingly people who were in CFS systems.Manitoba has twice the national incarceration rate, and many of them were in CFS. The vast majority of our prison population in Manitoba is Indigenous.And there is a basically a pipeline CFS to prison because of the way the entire system has been structured and never properly reformed since the 1950s.The Manitoba government doubled the number of children they were taking from First Nations families, from 5500, in about 2005 to 11,000 just a few years later.And then they also took the federal funding that was intended for those children.The apology for that just happened this week.And no one, no person has ever been named as being responsible for any of it, for any of it.And this is ongoing.So part of the problem with Residential school denialism is that people are denying what really happened in the past and fighting over that, while also completely ignoring everything that's happening right now.Images: Thompson Ferrier* 30Thanks for reading Dougald Lamont’s Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it.Dougald Lamont’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

Read the original post here: https://dougaldlamont.substack.com/publish/post/143346997 Canada has a housing crisis - a private market crises. Builders, lenders, investors. We have a debt crisis attached to the housing crisis. But it’s all private sector. So why is the Federal Government being asked to intervene? Because the private market is broken. Canada also has a productivity problem - a private sector problem, often solved by investing in new capital machinery that makes employees more productive, with higher wages and greater output. That hasn’t happened, because private banks loaned trillions for real estate instead. Canada is not the communist or socialist place people claim and believe it to be. It is profoundly economically conservative. Quite frankly, you must be on the extreme right-wing to think that Canada is that far left when it comes to economic beliefs. Most governments in Canada right now have much lower taxes than in the 1950s under Progressive Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. And there are plenty of extreme-right libertarians in Canada, and there are prominent think tanks that try to normalize their radical views, which are, quite frankly, a combination of dystopian power fantasy and long confidence scheme, and increasingly delusional theories that are divorced from reality.     Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

Things don’t have prices, people do. When we buy something : we are paying people to release it to us.It's easy enough to chalk up problems to and prices to "supply and demand" - when the actual interaction between buyer and seller has one more, really important dimension: control. Prices are affected by how much control over supply, and control over demand that each side has. To show the difference - we look at the real-world famous case of the economy of a Prisoner of War Camp. There, prices moved up and down smoothly - because no one had control. In contrast, there are people who can take such large stakes, or afford to bear such great losses, that that can take over whole markets.This is important - critically important - because while people may assume that price hikes are due to supply shortages - they may be due to something else entirely - price gouging, monopolies, oligopolies, and profiteering. Here's the link to Radford's original article. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/robertdriskill/files/2011/08/POWCampRadford.pdf Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

Larry Wilmore is a complete genius. I like him for lots of reasons - he is a truly brilliant and hilarious award-winning writer, producer, comedianHe has some of the most incredible insights you have ever heard into communication, and politics.On Larry’s podcast - Black on the Air - from January 16, 2021 - just ten days after the January 6 assault on the US Capitol, he helped explain communications and even political propaganda in a way that was incredibly powerful and perceptive, based on insights derived from the deliberate deception that is crafted as part of being a stage magician.It helped me - as someone who has been in politics and dealt with communications for a long time - gain incredible new insight into how we are deceived - between lies, truth - and something more insidious - paltering.Here's Larry Wilmore's webpage - http://thelarrywilmore.comHere's the link to his original podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/sam-pollard-on-mlk-fbi/id1234429850?i=1000505504716Here's his appearance at the White House Correspondents' Dinnerhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IDFt3BL7FAHere's the link to the book, Performing Deceptionhttps://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9781800646902/brian-rappert/performing-deception?blnBKM=1The 90's Book of Listshttps://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Almanac-Presents-Book-Lists/dp/0316920797From Open Culture:How Propaganda uses lies to erode all truth and morality -https://www.openculture.com/2017/01/hannah-arendt-explains-how-propaganda-uses-lies-to-erode-all-truth-morality.html Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

Some years ago, I stumbled across a post by a man named Maciej Ceglowski, where he told the story of how the world forgot the cure to a deadly disease.Ceglowski was re-reading The Worst Journey in the World, the account of Robert Falcon Scott’s failed 1911 expedition to the South Pole. You can read Ceglowski's excellent post here: https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htmLearning the right lessons has always been the challenge of all human knowledge, and especially of scientific endeavour. We can defy reason, and gravity, but only for so long. As was once said “you can drive nature out with a pitchfork - it always comes back in.” Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

The hyperinflation in Germany is one of the best known such episodes in history. To give an indication of the level of inflation, a loaf of bread that cost 160 marks at the end of 1922 cost 200,000,000,000 (200 billion) marks a year later.Many economists, historians and news articles will seek to explain the dangers of hyperinflation by citing the German government, but the history is almost entirely wrong. The Nazis did not come to power until more than half a decade after the hyperinflation had come to an end. The explosion in money-printing in Germany in 1922 and 1923 was not by the government at all.https://www.bundesbank.de/en/press/contributions/the-economic-and-currency-reform-of-1948-the-basis-for-stable-money-915302Check out Mark Blyth's incredible book "Austerity - History of a Dangerous Idea". A must-read. https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9780199389445/mark-blyth/austerity?blnBKM=1 Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

“The middle-class society I grew up in didn’t evolve gradually or automatically. It was created, in a remarkably short period of time, by FDR and the New Deal. As the chart shows, income inequality declined drastically from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, with the rich losing ground while working Americans saw unprecedented gains. Economic historians call what happened the Great Compression, and it’s a seminal episode in American history.”How it happened is even more remarkable - during a period of scarcity, inflation, recycling, rationing, regulation and high government spending had the result of marking the only major decrease in inequality in  U.S. history, with people making more money and saving much more. What’s more, trade was severely disrupted (to say the least) as supply lines to countries who supplied raw materials as well as manufactured goods were cut off, and there was no free movement of people across borders. The result was the creation of the middle class - and it happened in Canada, too.https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/message-congress-curbing-monopolieshttps://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9780143117636/ellen-ruppel-shell/cheap?blnBKM=1 Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to our first podcast! Sorry about any issues with audio quality. This is the audio version of our first printed article - The Single Most Important Thing We Can do to Address Canada’s Economic Challenges, in podcast format for your convenience. While some economic indicators in Canada are ripping higher, the struggles Canadians are facing are undeniable, and the current policies of the Bank of Canada massively adding stress to Canadian businesses and families alike, in the name of fighting inflation.The Bank of Canada is punishing Canadian borrowers who are being crushed by inflation that’s being driven by international factors like energy and supply chains, as well as by an asset bubble and a domestic debt crisis here in Canada.One of the first steps we need to take to deal with the issue is to immediately reform of the Bank of Canada’s monetary policy, because the current practice of cranking interest rates up and down is not only ineffective, it is actively harmful.It's this policy - more than two decades worth - that is driving Canada's economic turmoil and housing crisis. Unwinding it is a massive challenge - but it starts with taking White's advice, and having central banks change their monetary policy. Here's William White's Paper from August, 2023: https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/WP_210-White-Monetary-Policy.pdfHere's Edward Chancellor, in 2022, saying «It Will Turn Out to be Largely Impossible to Normalize Interest Rates Without Collapsing the Economy»https://themarket.ch/interview/edward-chancellor-central-banks-delayed-the-day-of-reckoning-ld.7051Here's the story of how William White predicted the Global Financial Crisis - and was ignored. https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/the-man-nobody-wanted-to-hear-global-banking-economist-warned-of-coming-crisis-a-635051.htmlHere's Paul Romer's blistering critique of macroeconomics from 2016 https://paulromer.net/the-trouble-with-macro/WP-Trouble.pdf Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe