Amitai Etzioni:  "You don't need to buy this"  The "curse" of consumerism.


He's right about one thing:   I don't buy it.  Tell it to poor people anywhere...hey, guy, you don't need that car, that bicycle, that refrigerator.

Typical rich guy view of "consumerism."  What a santimonious goofball.

Private investment is irrelevant for growth....who knew?

Grand Game time, folks! James Livingston, "economic historian" at Rutgers, goes off in the Obama Admin Daily Newsletter:

As an economic historian who has been studying American capitalism for 35 years, I'm going to let you in on the best-kept secret of the last century: private investment - that is, using business profits to increase productivity and output - doesn't actually drive economic growth. Consumer debt and government spending do. Private investment isn't even necessary to promote growth...A big part of the problem is that we doubt the moral worth of consumer culture...Consumer spending is not only the key to economic recovery in the short term; it's also necessary for balanced growth in the long term. If our goal is to repair our damaged economy, we should bank on consumer culture - and that entails a redistribution of income away from profits toward wages, enabled by tax policy and enforced by government spending.

I wonder if he wrote that on his government-invented iPad? F*****g idiot. He apparently thinks that if you write about stuff you don't understand, that makes you an "economic" historian. Yes, sure, I'm a snob. But the guy has a PhD in History from Northern Illinois U. A two-time loser.*

Please do share your thoughts....

(Nod to Kevin Lewis, who as always is in no way complicit with my surly "analysis"; he just sent the link)

*A clarification:  Northern Illinois has a number of quite good departments, including econ.  But the history department is a doctrinaire marxist ideological chop shop.