James, Welcome to the Lake.

Dean, Thank you for Hosting today’s Book Salon.

Professor Baker, Prof. Galbraith, thank you both so much for all your efforts to educate Americans about the croneism that has replaced capitalism.

Glad to be here and looking forward to the discussion. I will post a thought on Dean’s remarks momentarily. JG

Jamie,

do you think that there any principled economic conservatives in prominent positions in the Republican party, and if so, who?

welcome to the lake Professor Baker and Prof. Galbraith, I know you’ll enjoy your stay and will even look forward to future visits

anyway, the “free market” has always been a sore point for me;

there is NO such thing as a “free market”, it cannot possibly exist, it’s a marketing concept created from whole cloth, it’s a manufactured myth, it’s propaganda.

the very concept of a monetary system IS a set of regulations, once you use money you are NO LONGER a “free market

the very concept of ownership, of property, on sellng that property IS a set of regulations, once you claim ownership you are NO LONGER a free market

the very concept of “the sanctity of a contract” is OF COURSE a set of regulations, you are NO LONGER a “free marketeer” once you even make the claim that contracts have a sanctity

I get really peeved when people claim there is even such thing as a “free market”

here’s another sore spot for me;

this country was FOUNDED on the principles of protecting local economy

while a convoluted story overall, the origian “boston tea party” was in fact a revolt againt the king for removing taxes not for raising taxes

the kings homeys, a company called something like “the east india import company” couldn’t compete in the colonies so the king removed tariffs for his pals

the colonies went balisitc and REFUSED entry this tea BECAUSE it did not face tariff

interesting minutia there, of course corporate media would never bring up the fact that our country was founded on the principles of “taxation with representation”, it was NOT founded on the principles of government without tax revenue

Jamie’s book does an excellent job chronicling how the conservative doctrines of the 70s and 80s, monetarism and supply-side economics, were twisted into their opposites by the “conservatives”

The so called free market Conservatives talked free markets but they were really all about corporate welfare for big business

In The Predator State I’m somewhat more generous than Dean allows to the economic conservatives of the Reagan era, at least some of whom — the Bill Niskanens, Jude Wanniskis and Bruce Bartletts — believed in good faith that their agenda was a coherent alternative, serving public purpose, to the then-discredited neo-Keynesianism of mainstream policy.

I thought they were wrong, but there is a big difference between error, on one side, and hypocrisy and fraud on the other. I place the Bush II regime entirely in the realm of hypocrisy and fraud, and on this point many of the Reagan conservatives fully agree.

In TPS I also argue that the academic economics of that era bore a heavy responsibility for the Reagan experiment, providing the cover of authority at a time when academic economists still had some authority to spare. This was something that a number of reputable figures were later at pains to deny. But the Reagan policies at the time were not so disreputable, in high academic circles, as to prevent a number of up-and-coming Democrats, including notably Larry Summers, Paul Krugman and Jeff Frankel, from going to work for the Council of Economic Advisers at that time.

It wasn’t something I would have done. I was Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee at the time, and for me the fight against Reagan’s economics was a black-and-white proposition.

I’ll be back momentarily with a further response on some of Dean’s policy points.

I am concerned with our inability to drive this narrative to Joe and Jane Sixpack.

I know the Traditional Media has been terrible. I doubt either the New York Times or the WaPo will lead the way in this important fight.

My hope is that the remaining business sections in the remaining big dailies in the rust belt will share resources to investigate banks-in-name-only and the other issues you two strive to make accessible. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Detroit Free Press, Chicago Tribune, and some of the Ohio papers, all have a vested interest in stopping the 12 trillion dollar looting of the FED and the Treasury via loans and guarantees.

FWIW, the otherwise very conservative business section gave Elizabeth Warren excellent coverage in her recent visit to Milwaukee (in this and other articles).

Banks making far fewer loans, report finds

yup, redistributing middle class wealth and asets to the those with more riches then they can possibly spend

Sorry Jamie, I was referring to the political figures not the economists, when I was questioning the commitment to the market. I agree completely that the people on your list genuinely believed in market principles and small government as a way to better society.

But before I do that, on Dean’s question about principled figures in the Republican leadership at present: no. The academic economists who served GWB were largely serving time, advancing their careers, and in some cases responding pragmatically to the problems that came up. They were embedded in an administration run by lobbyists and political hacks.

Prof Galbraith, I have only just bought a copy of TPS and look forward to reading it when arrives next week.

I doubt the bailouts will work. In consumer driven economies, when the consumers don’t have jobs or money the economy can’t go anyplace. People getting the bailouts are hypocrites. They should not allow the government to interfere in free markets. They should eagerly suck up their losses like good capitalists. What do you see happening next?

Boo,

I think the narrative is easy for the Sixpack family to understand. It’s called “they’re ripping you off.” I think the Sixpack family already pretty much gets it. The problem is that most of the people they see in political life fall into a faction of ripping off crew.

This history has unhinged conservatism. Principled conservatives no longer want to be associated with the political practitioners, recognizing the corruption of the doctrine in practice

Principled Conservatives in business name some?
The corrupt business practice I agree I stay away from anything government like military contracts because doing stock research on the best companies and product can’t help me choose who will win in a marketplace where lobbyist bribe people to get contracts for connected rather than best product.
Without transparency I’m to small, unconnected and thus uninformed to invest in these companies until after they get a contract and then the day traders have the advantage as the connected guys cash out.

This upward redistribution can best be reversed by simply changing these structures.

And how do you propose we get rid of the lobbyists?

Thank you. I appreciate you and Dean making your criticisms with such diplomacy. I was a Republican for many years, because I thought the party stood for honest government.

I think a key talking point that liberals/progressives fail to make is that nothing ever “trickled down.” Trickle down was the key selling point of supply side fantasies and whole generations of Americans bought it.

Thank you Prof. Galbraith and Dean Baker for providing this forum.

My own experience with copyright law proved that it doesn’t work for individual artists. I had copyrighted an original design, only later to discover that a major fabric manufacturer had used it for one of its fabrics on sale at fabric chain stores (a friend recognized it and alerted me). No one who was familiar with my design (including the editors of the magazine in which it had appeared), who viewed a sample of the fabric believed other than theft of my design. Yet, despite hiring a copyright lawyer, I was forced to settle for $5,000, and the existing stock of fabric was permitted to be sold….because my lawyer said it wasn’t worth it to him to litigate (after much correspondence, in which the fabric company revealed that it had purchased the design from a Japanese firm. My design had won an award at an Osaka competition.) Needless to say I couldn’t afford to pay my lawyer up front; it was a contingency case.

My conclusion: Government has been thoroughly coopted by big money interests as an enforcer of their ability to enslave us to their interests, whether it be through debt, threat of loss of health ’insurance’, price-gouging, or the means to feed ourselves wholesome food, rather than corn and soy by-products.

Copyright only protects the big guys. It is a joke for the creative talent out here in the real world.

It is indeed a predator state. How do we relearn real values without the means to support ourselves honestly?

Hi Dean, this is “Lady Di” from Montana’s radio show. And Hi to Prof. Galbraith who I would love to call “Jamie” having read his book twice. I also read Dean’s “Plunder and Blunder”.

The Predator State made crystal clear what I have come to regard as the great truth; It’s the inequality, Stupid! Companies should put their profits back into worker’s wages and research and development, not into CEO pay. With all that “funny money”, the CEOs just went out and after their third house, began to gamble with it. Rather than build their companies, they tore them apart.
The example of Denmark being rich and having decent equality really stuck with me.

And how do you propose we get rid of the lobbyists?

by rescinding personhood for corporations so they do not have the right to petition for redress

then add a separate right for “not for profit” organizations to enjoy certain rights, such as that to petition government for redress

I believe that would be a nice start

. If the compensation packages of the top five paid employees of corporations were sent out for approval by shareholders in elections where only returned proxies counted (management generally has the right to count unreturned proxies as supporting its position), it is likely that executive compensation would be brought back down to earth.

Forget the free market approach we need laws limiting executive pay. Just how many pension fund managers were compensated/bribed to put their cash in hedgefunds which control large amounts of stock proxies?

On some policy points: I lack Dean’s inner Hayek, and my enthusiasm for his market-friendly progressivism is tempered by a deep skepticism. For example, I’d be willing to try his experiment with the rules governing shareholder proxies so as to put the brakes on predatory compensation schemes, but without a lot of confidence that it would work.

I would trace the rise of predatory pay packets to the movement of the 70s/80s that linked CEO pay to the stock market, precisely in order to tie the interest of the top managers to the “owners.” The problem is that ownership in a joint stock company is not like ownership in a family firm: the “owner” has an immediate exit option at all times, s/he can sell her stock. So I don’t think that making the link of the CEO to the stock market even tighter is the effective way to go.

Managers’ pay needs to be linked to the pay of those below them in the organization, to encourage the promotion of talent from within, and not the looting of companies by people whose only constituency is the Wall Street analyst. Or so, anyway, says the old Galbraithian in me.

JG

We need more

Welcome to you both. First, how do you account for how the “legitimate” economic theories got hijacked to serve the predator state?

And wrt to the recent meeting of economists at the WH – (not the Volker group). It was off the record, but from that meeting, or since, have you seen any signs that the WH economic team listened to your views and made/are making adjustments?

And finally, whatever happened to the Volker group. Do you think it can/will serve a useful role?

Interesting that you would mention Denmark. I was just at a dinner with a group of libertarians and one them actually touted the virtues of Denmark. He knew about their high taxes, but for him the great virtue was that it was very easy for someone to open up a business. I’m not sure how representative this person was of libertarians more generally, but it was interesting to see.

What is wrong with tariffs to protect our local business?
What is wrong with protecting American jobs by incentive’s to keep them HERE?

For most of American history that was how we protected out economy….. DO NOT out source ….. today we have NO steel industries, all our major companies have had their factories uprooted and shipped overseas…. You cannot buy anything made here and unless you work hard in your search…… it is all made in China

How about CEO’s get 20, 30 times what their lowest paid employee gets paid and that includes subcontractors.
Plus they all get the same benefits and no more delayed stock where you can buy company stock at the current price years from now.

Seconded your on fire today Katymine:)

Thanks.

What I should have said is that I don’t think liberals/progressives are being effective in pushing the narrative of unmasking who the deficit hawks really are, as opposed to who they claim to be.

I don’t think moving to a third party is anything liberals/progressives can ever take off the table. At the same time, I am heavily influenced by Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond in my thinking about a third party. I think Helms and Thurmond were much more effective in advancing the agenda of white supremacists than was George Wallace. I think a move to a third party would unite Democrats and the GOP against our candidates, who we would have serious trouble getting on the ballot. I doubt what’s left of the unions and the Black Caucus would follow us. They have too much to lose. Without them, we lack any GOTV and even less access to the TRAD Med than we currently have.

I agree the Sixpacks know they are getting ripped off.

And wouldn’t stronger unions as a countervailing force help to keep companies strong? And Companies don’t really need shareholders, do they?

I let Jamie speculate on how the theories got hijacked. As far as the White House meeting, I think that the bank folks still have the inside hand. It is encouraging that Obama feels the need to give the appearance to listening to his progressive critics, even though I’m skeptical about the reality.

The Volcker group seems to be for show. They have not formally met yet and as best i can tell they have had no influence on policy.

Another example: it’s all very well to push for a reduction of patent protection on pharmaceuticals — this is a good argument going back to Adam Smith, and I make the case in TPS against trade agreements whose purpose is to force poor countries to pay monopoly prices for medicine beyond all reason. But the pharmaceuticals wouldn’t be there in the first place if the US didn’t have a big R&D sector, largely government-funded in many cases, so there is no free-market solution to the problem of medical research.

JG

I believe a better idea is to tariff those businesses that do not allow for a living wage and collective bargaining

this way there would be no international repercussions and we can pressure local business to pay their own social bills as well as foreign companies

we are the family of man, if we protect that family rather then the strategies for corporate wealth, then those that create the product will enjoy the profits of those goods

I’m adding my poinst of view too much on this book salon, will shut my mouth for a while

I actually put this precise proposal in an earlier book (Created Unequal), pegging the ratio at 30X and suggesting that everything the CEO got (golden parachutes and other perks) be scaled down and made available to other employees. The major drawback, apart from the political unrealism, would be how to handle out-sourcing.

JG

The same is true of patent protection for prescription drugs. Drugs that would sell for a few dollars per prescription in a competitive market instead sell for several hundred dollars or even several thousand dollars because the government grants patent monopolies. As a result of these monopolies, Pfizer, Merck and the rest make enormous profits, while hundreds of millions of people around the world have difficulty paying for their health care.

How about anyone can make the stuff but they must pay a 5% franchise fee on profits even if they improve the product to the creator Gates would still be rich but not as rich. A regulatory board would be needed to insure that nobody makes product worse than the creator’s to insure quality and that all the microsoft versions were compatible.

but now it’s the democrats who are ripping us off and i think we’re pulling our punches (for example on health care reform and addressing the climate crisis)

The “six packs” here in Montana are more libertarian and I make progress when I ask them if they are more corporatist or conservative. That’s a Jim Hightower way of putting it.

There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not, however, imho an exclusively win-win strategy. Other countries would slap tarrifs on things they import from us, Medical Technology for example.

I think you have to drill down to what jobs you want to save. That’s above my pay grade, so hopefully others will provide a more detailed response to an excellent question.

In principle, tariffs can and have played a useful role in promoting particular sectors. As a practical matter, if the U.S. were to suddenly impose high tariffs on a wide range of goods it would be an economic and political nightmare.

You would see a big jump in the price of a wide range of manufactured goods. This would get a lot of people very angry. In addition, there would be retaliation in other countries, which the media would constantly highlight.

Any political party that had to deal with this pressure would soon find itself incredibly unpopular and would likely lose power. We can’t just reverse the flow of history.

Thanks.

Welcome to both Dean and James. I’m enjoying watching the two of you debate and plan to “read” the book on audible.com the next time I take a road trip.

I’m pretty sympathetic to Dean’s point about IP. But isn’t part of our failure to fix IP problems the sense that that’s the only thing the US is competitive in globally (and don’t forget to add Ag science and Hollywood). That is, it sustains our hegemonic position globally. So even if people recognize the problem, the politicians can’t very well back down.

Mind you, ultimately we’re not going to be able to sustain it internationally. There’s no reason Brazil or China or India will continue to put up with it much longer. But that does seem to be one of the factors in IP.

Egalitarian countries have good records on social mobility. The reason is pretty simple: the closer the bottom is to the middle, the less social distance you have to cross to go up.

Egalitarian countries also do better on employment — they have systematically less unemployment than unequal countries. One reason: migration incentives are much less.

JG

I have not read that book (must read it now) your ideas are all over the Net Sir. As to outsourcing CEO pay must be 20, 30 times what their lowest outsourced employee’s is?

Hi Jamie, hi Dean, thank you both so much for being here today.

First of all, the book is fabulous. Anyone who hasn’t read it should get it:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/141656683X?tag=firedoglake-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=141656683X&adid=1KC1K2XVQ8CTD7RV1ZMG&

Secondy, with regard to IP law — wow, what a mess. There are huge lobbying expenditures being made right now over looming IP battles, and it is pure theft from the public sphere.

Did either of you happen to catch the straight-up wealth transfer from radio stations to record companies over “performance” copyright last week in the House? It was ridiculous.

In case anyone missed it, Jane really nailed how craven the blue dogs are in this post: “New Democrat Melissa Bean Helps Banks Gut Grayson Bill to Limit TARP Bonuses”

what’s wrong with just paying for the R&D unfront and getting rid of the patent and copyright protection altogether. These are relics from the middle ages, we don’t need them in the 21st century.

The House Committee bill (Waxman-Markey) on climate change awards 85% of allowances to various interests, with a huge amount going to coal-based utilities. The current health “reform” debate is about whether we get a public insurance plan or just some “exchange” without a public option where consumers can go to get efficiently fleeced, as they’re mandated to buy insurance. These seem examples of the Predator State in action — using the government to sustain the process of retaining/moving wealth to the privileged. Is that how you see it, and if so, what can we do to change the direction?

I’m confused by the statement that the medical professionals protect themselves from competition ”as a result of professional and licensing restrictions.” I just read this article by Conn Hallinan at Counterpunch: The Global Plunder of Doctors and Nurses which describes how countries and hospitals are saving millions by encouraging immigration of trained medical professionals to work at what is higher pay for them, but a great cost-saving for their employers. I think the healthcare industry has made it their mission to not only bilk the patients, but also to milk the doctors and hospitals for all they can get.

My MIL, who has several chronic health problems, is constantly being encouraged to get tests and treatments, or enroll in drug studies she doesn’t need, probably because she has Medicare and supplemental ( and the doc gets money for such referrals?). In one case it turned out that one word in the reading of a scan (lumpy) was misinterpreted in a way that resulted in another exam, which proved needless when the mix-up in vocabulary was resolved. Would this have happened if the patient’s welfare was the priority, rather than the profits to be milked out of her (the taxpayers, really)? [The scan was ’lumpy’, not her bladder. She must have moved during the scan. Why didn’t the doctor call the guy who read the scan for clarification, first, rather than referring MIL to a urologist, who told her that ’lumpy’ is not a term used with reference to a bladder condition?]

yes, this is absolutely right. China and India are the 800 pound gorillas in this story. There is no reason for them to adopt our rules on IP and if they don’t it is not clear what the U.S. can really do to them.

I know I’ll feel really stupid when someone tells me, but

IP?

Can someone help me out?

IP = Intellectual Property

The Bush regime didn’t really hijack anyone’s theory; it was a government that didn’t feel a need to justify itself and didn’t try very hard. For instance, Bush’s argument for his tax cuts was simplicity itself: “it’s your money.” On regulations, his minions simply gave the worst actors in business control of the agencies, and they preferred to work below radar on most things. Promoting the worst regulators of the S&L era to authority in Washington state and CA helped enable WaMu and IndyMac, for example, making a lot of money for favored businesses without trumpeting it.

It helped, of course, that the country’s attention was taken away by Iraq.

JG

The incentive for scams on tests flow directly from IP. If the scans were priced at their marginal cost (e.g. $50-$100) there would be no incentive to scam.

Hospitals do bring in foreign workers to work for less. This is far more often nurses than doctors. The professional restrictions make it very difficult. If we worked to eliminate all unnecessary barriers to foreign doctors then U.S. born doctors would be as common as U.S. born farm workers.

AFAIK, this is what Ben Franklin did when he invented the lightning rod. He did not seek a patent, because he wanted it to be available globaly at the lowest price possible.

That would be very difficult to enforce, since corporations buy from everywhere, and in effect the lowest-paid person selling services to any corporation is always the guy who earns minimum wage. So that rule would be a little bit too rigid. JG

Thank you.

I’ll give you an example.

My BIL is a physical therapist from Ireland.

He worked in Louisiana, NC, and SC years ago–mostly doing the kind of medicaid PT that no one wants to do. He went home for some time, then came back, and they had changed the license rules. Now he can only work in states where he was previously licensed. The problem is that his entire undergrad degree was in PT; he can’t be licensed bc he doesn’t have a separate BS. He has more years of training than most US PTs, but that disqualifies him. The same thing happened to an Israeli friend of mine who has a highly skilled specialty working with certain kinds of disabled kids. We need more PTs like her, but she couldn’t work for years before getting a new BS.

The economic system that FDR installed in the 30’s was one that was popular throughout Europe at the time, it is called fascism, the merger of government and corporate interests.

Dean’s medical immigration policy would, of course, pose very serious problems for developing countries as it would deprive them of the doctors that they train, which they need rather more than we do. It would also promote outsourcing of medical education. So while I think it’s a pretty good rhetorical argument I’d have to think a bit more about it in practice.

JG

I don’t care about IP when it comes to building a better mousetrap.

Maybe around projects such as algae oil, battery technology, and enhanced geo thermal drilling, a less all or nothing funding than a patent, could be agreed upon for certain technologies within the processes?

Nothing just pay the researches more in corporate RD labs but guys like Gates who do it alone should have some patent protection to make it. A 5% franchise fee does not seem to much but I am open up and down to changing the number.

Intellectual property – copyright and patent law.

I’ve though about it quite a bit in practice. We tax the earnings of these folks and repatriate the taxes to the home countries so that they can train several professionals for everyone that comes here. As it is now, some professionals come here and they get no compensation. Under my proposal more professionals would come, but there would be compensation. it looks win-win to me (except for the doctors and lawyers).

The economic system that the GOP installed is called fascism, the merger of government and corporate interests.

Fixed it for you.

why the urge for patents? We don’t give autoworkers patents for building cars or school teachers patents for teaching classes. We can pay the money upfront, we can even have prizes for outstanding work, but what is the benefit for keeping this archaic interference with the market?

How would the two of you assess the overall approach/world view of the current Obama economic team, in contrast to the description of the Predator State? Are they extending it? Modifying it? Rejecting/replacing it?

Jamie,

have you seen any green shoots of recovery your way or do you still think we’re looking at a very long and severe downturn?

On the Bill Gates’s of the world, my favorite policy is the estate tax, which dissipates fortunes accumulated over a generation (and sometimes earlier) by giving the accumulators a strong incentive to put them into foundations, universities, hospitals, and churches. This is a huge strength for American society, and an important reason why our universities are so much better (as they incontestably are) than those in Europe or Japan.

Bush’s campaign against the estate tax was a campaign against the non-profit sector, on behalf of the for-profit sector.

The policy should however be tightened up, requiring donors to give up control of foundations, and requiring foundations to have higher pay-out ratios (so that they do not become perpetual institutions unless they can raise fresh money).

To me, however, recycling accumulated fortunes is more important than preventing them from developing, which strikes me anyway as a bit of a lost cause.

FWIW and imho, any discussion of physicians in the US has to account for the shortage. AMA through its Liasion Committee on Medical School Education controls the number of Medical school graduates in the US. Add to that physicians want to chase less competitive environments by specializing, we have too few primary care physicians.

Apologies to all the fine physicians here at FDL. No criticism of them intended.

please excuse my typos:

Liberals continue to behave as though they face a philosophically coherent adversary and as though the politics of the day require formulating a program that responds to that adversary. …This leads to a paralysis of thought and action and to programs doomed to futility and failure from the beginning.

Partly in consequence of their enthrallment with the frame created for them by the conservative worldview, the Left has been doing too little thinking of its own. Liberals have yet to develop a coherent post-Reagan theory of the world, let alone a policy program informed by the political revelations, world policy changes, and scientific realities emerging from the Age of Bush.

i don’t know if james meant it the way i read this bit, but my reaction was a sinking feeling and thoughts of profoundly stupid (in my opinion anyway) health care reform based on private insurance companies instead of some kind of single payer and the new climate bill that looks to be based on support for the coal industry and a carbon cap and trade that creates financial instruments based on give-a-way rights to pollute instead something like hansen’s tax and rebate proposal.

there are alternative ideas, but now it’s the democratic party that doesn’t want them discussed.

Not really GM buys stuff from who? Then we ask how much do they pay their lowest paid employee . Governments around the world do keep good Tax records my worry would be under the books employees.
But regular audits both private and public could cure that.
If the companies don’t like it then no contracts. Only connected companies with the pull to avoid taxes would suffer but connected companies do tend to have higher costs because they bribe/lobby people and that money must come from somewhere.
The savings of not lobbying/bribing gets passed down to the consumer. Any idea how much lobbying/bribbing to get a contract costs the economy both in cost of bribes paid and lesser or more costly product being produced?

I think the rhetoric has been too cautious for my taste and the policy far too cautious. They have eliminated or are trying to eliminate some of the worst abuses that Jamie points to, for example by cleaning up military contracting and cutting back on tax breaks for oil companies. However, they have taken part in bailing out the Wall Street banks, largely picking up where Bush left off.

Most importantly, on health care it remains to be seen whether Obama can really lay down the law to the insurance, pharmaceutical and medical supplies industries. We better hope so if health care reform is going to work.

The “Corporatists” (both parties) have turned the governments federal/local into their safety net. They have used the Military Industrial Complex as a gold mine.

The present “business plan” of Big Corporation is to use everything and every body as their tools. (lobbist serve the well connected corporate culture). Anyone not on this bandwagon is the enemy.

My question for you, Mr. Galbraith, is how do progressive construct an effective business plan to overcome these powerful forces for elitist profit?

I would like to ask to what degree you believe CEO compensation structure helped get us into the current mess.

With a major portion of their compensation being stock options, there was heavy pressure on CEO’s to maximize stock prices short term, with in some cases a careless disregard for how that would warp decisions. I have a lot of anecdotal evidence that this helped create a narrow focus on short term gains.

Thanks to both Dean Baker and Jamie Galbraith for taking the time to join us today – a great privilege.

thanks for the question. you beat me to it (and said it better).

In Galbraith’s recent Texas Observer article, “Causes of the Crisis,” (and in the phenomenal “No Return to Normal”), you identified as representative of the causes, an idea (market self-correction), a person (anti-regulator Phil Gramm) and a policy of lax government oversight.

Do the two of you see the current Congress and/or Administration has having internalized these lessons/points? Or are we still repeating the same mistakes?

yes, it is very discouraging that the Dems won’t even allow universal Medicare (i.e. single payer) from even being discussed. In fact, it really is bizarre. I fully understand the politics of not wanting to go this route, but i can’t believe that they won’t even advocates of universal Medicare testify before Congress.

On shoots of green, the thought crossed my mind that those who thought of that expression may be thinking of their lecture fees…

I do think that the automatic stabilizers — a Keynesian device, much beloved of my old teacher Jim Tobin — are powerful. If the deficit really does get to $1.8 trillion next year, it can’t help but restore both saving and spending in the household sector. (For those to whom the accounting isn’t automatic, think of it this way: for every dollar that the government does not collect in taxes, household have exactly one more dollar, than otherwise, in their bank accounts. Public deficits = private saving, exactly.)

A lot of progressive economists were simply skeptical that deficits would be allowed to go to such levels, but they’re on the way, and that’s a lot of cavalry riding to the rescue.

The expansion package also helps, and the liquidation of inventories means that new orders for production have to start being submitted soon.

The bad news is: (a) firms are not going to hire back the people they’ve laid off, at least not soon. (b) new demand will go to China, in the expansion, even more than before, and (c) new disasters, for example in credit default swaps, are still possible. So nothing’s completely sure and the news is definitely not going to look good for people looking for work.

Also, there’s the bank plan, which will leave the financial system unreformed, and promises enormous headaches down the road.

Another great book on how much accumulated knowledge plays in today’s creation of wealth is Alperovitz and Daly’s “Unjust Deserts”. They make a strong case for sharing more of the wealth than we do now. If we as a society have inherited all this technological knowledge, shouldn’t the wealth be distributed more generously. Barbara Ehrenreich commented on the book this way “Our celebrated entrepreneurs and moneymen are hoisting the cherry to the top of an already existing sundae–and then laying claim to the entire ice cream parlor.”

That makes a very strong case for estate taxes until we get back to a more equitable wage system.

there are alternative ideas, but now it’s the democratic party that doesn’t want them discussed.

Yeah single payer National Healthcare I want what the French have, Free fuel
Green Energy, Electric and Hybrid cars, Financial reform no bank should ever get big enough that a government bailout threatens the whole economy. Credit Default Swaps gone! A limit placed on credit interest. A strong dollar.
Green tech less pollution better health. I want food regulated Mad Cow, Swine Flu I’m sivk of watching the news to wonder whats safe to eat.
I’m sure I could come up with more ideas for our agenda give me a day or two.

Yes, health care and climate are very good examples of liberals not pushing the envelope very far.

I’m also very worried about the deficit-terrorists who seem to have the President’s ear. We are already hearing about how we spent so much saving “our financial system” that we don’t have money for anything much else.

As if it does “us” any good to keep Citigroup out of the hands of Sheila Bair, who would run it much more sanely than it was run by the existing leadership.

JG

I would go beyond CEO comp to say that management more generally has seized control of the firm away from shareholders. This has been true in some ways for decades. The actual running of the firm has long been outside of the control of shareholders.

However, the norms that held executive compensation in check have evaporated in the last three decades. Executives now use their control of the firm to hand themselves enormous pay packages. Interestingly this has not happened in Europe and Japan where top-paid management tends to get close one-tenth of what their counterparts here receive. In these countries, the shareholders have enough power to prevent absurd pay packages.

btw, I don’t think the issue is primarily one of the structure of pay in terms of being too short-term. These people are not dumber than rocks. They understood the nature of the incentives when they designed them. If we want the execs to get less pay then it will require some serious countervailing force to use a phrase from the senior Galabraith.

Thank you, an important fact and well stated.

Insurance firms sold disability insurance. When policy holders filed claims, they told them they had to apply for Social Security first. Only after Social Security passed judgement, would their claim be considered.
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.

Nobody really does it alone.

Quick bonus question: How could we have given Citigroup $45 billion (not counting guarantees on $300 billion of bad assets) and still only own 36 percent of a company with a market capitalization of $4 billion?

On the other hand, you do NOT want “single-payer” higher education. In France (where I was just paying a visit to a provincial campus last week), the effect of having universities entirely dependent on state budgets is just disastrous: almost no new building in maybe 40 years, no money for books, no administrative help for faculty members, no A/V in the classrooms.

It’s really quite an eye-opener. I make the argument in TPS: American higher-ed benefits from having multiple income streams, so that universities can decide on their spending programs first and then figure out how to fund them. Medicine is similar, but the larger presence of private for-profit firms (hospitals, drug companies…) gives medicine a larger predatory element.

Someone who was on the admission board at a medical school told me that they accept more foreign born medical students because the school gets more money. So very deserving Americans are being denied admission…

As a RN…. the average age of our nurses is around 50 years old. Instead of increasing the number of colleges and slots to accommodate the eventual retirement ….no they keep importing them….. As a patient I have seen medical errors because of the language issues……. This is scary and stupid.

The next factor is pay for nurses…… we lived on slave wages, worked long hours, became injured because of short staffing…… and the HB1 visa is another way to keep the pay low and treating nurses like crap still

re the “deficit terrorists,” should we view the current claims that the US is about to go bankrupt, etc as part of this theme?

What is the next shoe likely to drop in the economy another bank bailout? The insurance industry having to pay for another Katrina? Credit Default swaps? More Bad Homeloans, Slower consumer spending.
And what are the side effects for example if the economy gets worse for any reason I expect the Dollar to drop and interest rates to go up.

Supporting your argument is Einstein’s Nobel prize for physics. That’s really all he received in terms of a lump sum payment.

Because there was no money, it took years for astronomers to validate Einstein’s work.

I’m not sure you want to eliminate patents everywhere and always. I think in some markets they might still be necessary.

The short answer is: regulation and countervailing power (e.g., unions and consumer organizations). But recognizing that there are very few “market short-cuts” is really the key here. We’re talking about systems that run through the state, and the fact that the looters have grasped this gives them an enormous advantage.

Prosecution, by the way, is key to regulation. The criminologist Bill Black suggests that every regulatory agency be staffed with criminologists, and not just economists, and this seems to me to be a very sensible, long overdue reform.

On restraining executive pay, I have thought for some time that a tax rate solution might deal with the issue. Suppose you calculate the multiple that the executive compensation of the highest paid executive is compared to the minimum wage. Then the tax rate for corporate income taxes is some multiplier of that value. That would put intense pressure on reducing the multiple.

Nurses should be paid to go to school as well as doctors by the government.

Absolutely. The U.S. is not a private company, has all of its debt in currency it controls, and cannot go bankrupt in any sense of that term. It’s stuff and nonsense, intended to scare people.

JG

Do tell us!

Thanks Dean – much appreciated.

Thank you

Of course, the government does not need to buy Citigroup in order to take it over. The FDIC has that authority already, at least with respect to the bank. Taking over troubled banks — even if they are not actually insolvent — is what the law expects the FDIC to do.

I heard there was talk in Treasury of the problem of what happens to the rest of Citigroup, but it’s very hard to argue that a bankruptcy of the non-bank part of the firm poses some kind of systemic danger.

You can have money without patents. The government spends $30 billion a year on biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health. But I’ll agree that patents are not everywhere as pernicious as with prescription drugs.

I don’t understand how this keeps us from joining the list of countries like Argentina, unless you mean we have greater control over the dollar than they did over the peso.

If our economy gets too far out of whack no one in other countries has to buy our debt or our products. The dollar can become nearly worthless. What am I missing here?

Can’t other countries decide we are never going to pay them back in full, or if we do, it is at the cost of very high inflation which will destroy us anyway?

I think what it requires is a structure of public law, reestablishing the broken norms. This is not about punishment, by the way. It’s about getting a system of corporate governance that works.

I like that.

I would also like to see some consideration of a flat tax for corporate salaries over a certain amount. That could be in addition to the progressive tax.

yes, you’re right about the FDIC authority and I am not especially anxious for the government to buy Citi, it just seems as though we already have, except other folks still control the bulk of the stock.

Greg Mankiw has a NYT op ed today about how the econ intro course needs to change as a result of the crisis. Dean Baker commented on one point but I wonder how each of you would answer the core question: what do economists needs to understand (and tell us) that they didn’t before (or, per Krugman forgot).

Putting workers and the community into any economic equation would be a start. And making economists study psychology, philosophy, and take a Shakespeare course.

The U.S. has a massive economy. If you envision the bankruptcy scare story, where suddenly our dollar becomes nearly worthless then the u.S. would be hugely competitive in all areas of the economy. Our goods would be hugely undercutting the goods of Japan, Europe and everyone else. This would cause our exports to explode and imports to plunge.

I don’t think we have to seriously worry about the dollar becoming a worthless currency, but if we did, the U.S. economy would be flying.

FWIW, just a data point from the Wall Street Journal on executive pay and avoiding taxes:

Banks Use Life Insurance to Fund Bonuses
Controversial Policies on Employees Pay for Executive Benefits, Help Companies With Taxes

I’m a little fearful of what conservative economists would do with MacBeth.

I’m not sure you want to eliminate patents everywhere and always. I think in some markets they might still be necessary.

i vote for eliminating them entirely in basic scientific research. it’s not the desire for future profits that drive most scientific discovery. support and research funding is what is needed – not IP laws, which i think do more to impede than advance scientific progress.

and when it comes to big pharma, they are in my opinion just plain evil.

Yes, exactly so. Argentina’s debt was in dollars, so they had to earn dollars via exports in order to service it. We have no such need.

The interesting question is in your second paragraph: why does the rest of the world hold the dollar?

The answer is, having a big stock of dollars is a defense against international speculative attacks on your currency, and after 1997 most countries (especially in Asia) realized that this was worth the trouble to acquire. China also has other reasons: the export factories provide a place for a lot of young women from the countryside to go, on their way to lives in the cities. So they get something out of it even if they never spend the dollars (which they never will).

Why the dollar and not the euro? Because the U.S. is a big country, with a government that will never default. The EU is actually a mess, and the debt you buy in euros is actually the debt of particular national governments. So it’s Uncle Sam vs. Uncle Berlusconi.

No Beijing bureaucrat has trouble figuring out which one is safer for his career.

JG

Aren’t we dealing though with two different entities – i. e., Citibank, subject to all the banking regulation including dealing with the FDIC and Citigroup, the bank holding company with problems that are outside the FDIC control?

Or am I an idiot?

Wow, I had not heard that before.

Since we couldn’t import oil, we would burn more coal for electricity to run transportation, but I see your point.

The biggest failure was in recognizing an asset bubble and that bubbles could be destructive. The official view in the profession, as explicitly stated by Greenspan, was that it was best to just let bubbles run their course and then pick up the pieces after they burst.

This was ungodly stupid and it should have been obvious at the time, but i suspect that the vast majority of economists adhered to a view like this, insofar as they gave the issue of bubbles any thought at all.

I really would like to see many economists (e.g. those at the Fed) fired. They f**ked up big time. Millions of people have lost their jobs and their life’s savings because of their incompetence. Why shouldn’t these people be fired? Furthermore, if they don’t get fired, then they will have no incentive to get it right in the future.

Progressives can help promote both equality and economic efficiency by removing these barriers. Making it as easy as possible for smart kids from Mexico, India, and China to work in the United States as doctors and lawyers would substantially lower pay for those at the top and also substantially reduce the cost of health care and other services where the pay of these professionals is a substantial part of the cost.

I have two specialist. My pulmonary doctor is Iraqi (I checked and his diploma is from the University of Baghdad); the cardiologist is Indian. During a recent stay in the hospital, I noticed that my nurses were from China, the Philipines, Viet Nam, and Korea, with a few other minority groups I could not pinpoint and a few that seemed to be born American thrown in for good measure. This is not the first time I’ve noticed this. Sounds like your recommendations are already in practice.

There needs to be a whole new syllabus, beginning with some actual history of economic thought, and an entirely new mathematical foundation for economic reasoning.

On my ideal syllabus, I’d include Smith, Veblen, Keynes, JKGalbraith and Minsky.

The math needs are harder to describe, but I find fractal geometry, non-linear dynamics and cellular automata extremely useful as way to orient students toward how to think abstractly about economic problems.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with something really quite racy, which my coauthor and I call a “biophysical approach.” Check it out here, at working paper 54: http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/papers.html

JG

that’s right.

Just wondered if either Professors Galbraith or Baker (or anyone else) wanted to comment on

Jack Welch’s shareholder value bombshell

[…]“On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world,” he declared to a stunned world.

In recent days Mr Welch has tried to finesse his position a little, but he has not withdrawn the orginal comment.[…]

context?

just on the way by, the so-called “Nobel” prize in economics has been an embarrassment, and especially to scientists who realized long ago that economists get it for nothing.

Our system of universities helps thats why the UW gets so much of Gate’s cash. He crashed their computer lab as a kid.
I sneaked into the library at lunch during high school when I was not supposed to and I’m doing alright now I wish now the computer lab was not so well guarded.
Society benefits if we open up more opportunity to all.
But to do that government must give us opportunity to do that we must tax the rich.
Gate’s Dad got him to private school with computers in the 70’s? we need public schools to give kids more opportunity.
My dad went to public schools in Chicago before the Korean war he later helped design the Structure of Nuclear plants in Illinois that is the kind of opportunity I want public school kids in the inner city to have.
We need better schools and we need better jobs.
My Dad lectured me once about how he paid for college working the steel mills in the summer.
I pointed out McDonalds their was no way I could do that even working full time all year and overtime. In the burbs I needed a car the last FDL post looked at a little how the bubs expanded and created fake wealth by not supporting city type infrastructure like buses for example. No car, no job in the bubs its a hidden cost.
In the city my grandfather took his wheelbarrow on the trolley to work to save for my dad’s education my Dad paid tuition but he had free room and board because my Grandfather did not need a car.
My Dad bought his father his first car after graduation and getting a job.

yes, but as Jamie said and I would agree, the problems lie with the bank which the FDIC absolutely can seize. Who cares what happens to the rest of the holding company?

After a severe devaluation, and assuming the rest of the developed world does not try to compete with us on that, agreed that the US economy would be flying…eventually. Am concerned for the dislocations that could take place in the interim. And sometimes countries get lost along the way – Russia, Germany. I’ve worked in Russia and observed what it is like to live in a place where most people have nothing. Hope this won’t be us.

Yeah, it was your fine comment that caused me to remember Jack Welch’s comment. I see the industry driven by the need to increase shareholder value. In order to survive, those are the rules of the game. If we would change the rules, we’d get less bad results.

The “barriers to entry” in pharmaceutical development are very high. Taking patents away imho will not be a complete panacea. You’ll get into tough arguments about whose research to fund. Plenty of researchers will graze at the public trough for research that adds little or takes away from more important work. Still, however, those losses seem a lot less than what we’re paying now.

Thank you very much for answering my earlier questions.

Is it your position that other countries have no alternative to holding massive dollar reserves?

This is as much context as I could find.

March 18, 2009 4:59pm by Stefan Stern
My colleague Francesco Guerrera pulled off a wonderful scoop the other day when he asked Jack Welch, former chief executive of GE, for his views on how business leaders should be running their companies in these chaotic times.

Thanks for your observation on the Nobel process.

Wiping coffee off the monitor.

I think you have a future in stand-up comedy.

One big advantage of publicly funded research is that all the results would be public. This eliminate unnecessary duplication, prevent the withholding of information about the safety of drugs to increase profits and also allow for more much more extensive analysis. For example, it would be possible for researchers to determine which drugs are best for a patient who is overweight and has artithritis based on the clinical trial results. that is not generally possible now unless a drug company chooses to release this information.

I love those stories. My dad was the first to grad college, then put thru 2 sisters…would be mostly impossible now.

Yes, you’re really convincing me on this.

It also allows a much longer paper/research trail on individual researchers. That allows them and their employers to make better decision about who are the best in a given field and to adjust their compensation accordingly.

It also strikes me that with your suggestions, there is not such a boom bust cycle on both the product side and the employment side.

Yes, no real alternative exists at present. From time to time we hear that the Chinese are thinking about adding more euro, or building up stockpiles of steel and oil, but euro are risky and stockpiles are costly.

And the Chinese can’t really get out of their trade surplus: even though demand for exports collapsed last year, import prices collapsed just as much, and the surplus was pretty much unaffected.

From a world standpoint, the system is very asymmetric — we’re the consumer country, and others send us lots of goods that we don’t earn by the sweat of anyone’s brow over here. But it’s not necessarily unstable in the short run, and the costs of trying to go over to something else could be enormous.

In the middle 2000s I worried that an attack on Iran could wreck the system, or a war in the Taiwan Strait, but the former seems increasingly unlikely and the latter is now off the table completely.

So, the country that’s willing to run the big deficits ends up on top, and it appears that God still looks after children, small dogs and the USA, at least in this matter, and at least for now.

JG

I do too but in America today I’m not likely to do as well as my Dad at the end of his life and before he died he said I was smarter than him. Granted I don’t work as hard but then again I don’t have Steel mill pay incentive and I have a B.A now.

before i forget, i want to thank JG for his book. i thought it was fun to read and gave me lots of interesting ideas – which is my favorite reason to read a new book: to expose me to new ideas and make me think in different ways.

I should call him Uncle Silvio, it makes for a better line.

thank you very much!

Thanks. This really explains a lot.

Precisely what is neede is new thinking…we have reached a point where economics does not solve but perpetuates social problems. It is after all a social science, Competition drives actions over the line of usefilness. Rewards do not have to all be monetary. “Financial products” are tools to transfer wealth not create it.
Dean or Jamie?

My Aunt finished college my Uncle went but did not finish but it was not for lack of cash. How many College grads would we have now if Cash wasn’t a factor? Is cheaper college giving the french an advantage that will pay off in the future despite their lesser college resources?

I had a lot of advantages in developing ideas over a long period of time, but one of them was that growing up I already knew that if I ever became an economist I would be cross-wise with the field. So I never went through that period of true-believing followed by disillusion that marks so many careers. I think the most important thing for the future of economics right now is for people to stop talking about the problems of the so-called neoclassical mainstream – all the disastrous ideas of the past generation – and get along with the business of building something different.

JG

Agreed that no real alternative to dollar reserves exists at present, but how long might it take other countries to figure out an alternative? Or do the dynamics continue indefinitely? [sounds rather bubble-like]

From a world standpoint, the system is very asymmetric — we’re the consumer country, and others send us lots of goods that we don’t earn by the sweat of anyone’s brow over here. But it’s not necessarily unstable in the short run, and the costs of trying to go over to something else could be enormous.

one of the problems i have with the current system is that it make the usa a predator on poorer weaker countries. or at least so it seems to me to have done.

You forgot ideas to post on the Lake:). On the economy Galbraith seems to have influenced many of us like me and I swear I have not read his stuff yet.
Still I must admit he is a Major Influence to many of us here.

Yes, I think our financial sector is a complete mess. If it weren’t for the incredible corruption of the economics profession, economists would be deploring its inefficiency. The narrow construed financial sector (investment banking and commodity trading) has nearly quadrupled as a share of the economy over the last 3 decades. What have we gotten for this growth.

Finance is an intermediate good, it is not directly provide utility. Imagine that the trucking sector had quadrupled in size over this period? Economists would be screaming bloody murder.

At the least we should tax these boys and girls, a modest set of financial transactions taxes, like the ones they already have on stock transfers in the UK, could easily raise more than $100 billion a year.

Professors, at FDL we discuss frequently the absence of self-policing in the law.

We’re seeing a little progress against some of the worst offendors of the Bush administration.

Is there any value in your opinion to economists attempting to set minimum ethical standards? Or might that backfire or be otherwise counterproductive?

Also is there a group/foundation who could offer an alternative to the Nobel for Economics, that might provide some competition and clean up that process?

As we come to the end of this great Book Salon,

Jamie, Thank you for stopping by the Lake and spending your holiday afternoon with is discussing your new book and economics.

Dean, Thank you very much for Hosting this great Book Salon.

Everyone, if you haven’t bought this must read, must have, book, here is a link.

Thanks all.

btw, the elimination of patents and copyrights would be an enormous boon to the developing world since there is a huge outflow of money in the form of royalties and licensing fees.

Seconded strongly. Taxing the transactions makes sense, because the wingnuts won’t be able to say we’re trying to increase taxes on the middle class.

Many thanks, a great discussion.

Agree on Galbraith’s influence. His No Return to Normal is still one of the best explanations of where we are, how we get here, and how we move forward.

If you haven’t read the book yet, it’s available here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/141656683X?tag=firedoglake-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=141656683X&adid=1KC1K2XVQ8CTD7RV1ZMG&

Much thanks for the book, Dean’s hosting, and their willingness to take our questions.

Appreciate the link.

Wouldn’t transaction taxes tend to push things even more offshore?

How many countries are disinking themselves to the Dollar China, is buying Euros now and Iran wants to price their oil in a mixed bag of world money rather than the dollar.

yes, many thanks to both dean and JG.

Jamie and Dean, thank you so much for coming to Firedoglake – terrific insights for us. This comments section will be open for 24 hours, we encourage you to stop by later if you want to read or write more.

And as always, we hope you will join us at the Lake again very soon.

Thanks for the good discussion.

There are I think a lot of fresh ways of thinking and a number of people doing excellent work; the problem is to pull them together into a coherent force and to provide some way for the ideas to get about. The structure of academic economics departments is just a huge obstacle here: self-perpetuating and hermetically sealed off from the world.

So what is really needed is more intellectual havens — like public policy schools — with the capacity to host people for their careers. It’s a very difficult problem, and the world will not bring us back to the age of Keynes anytime soon.

One very useful thing would be to break the oligopoly of academic journals in economics, which is a huge obstacle to fresh ideas in the field. If you have a new idea that is not “mainstream,” it is very difficult to publish it in a refereed mainstream journal, and without that practically impossible to defend an academic record.

Good places for this kind of work include the Levy Economics Institute at http://www.levy.org

JG

And Dean Baker’s Beat the Press is a must read every day. Clear, accessible; much appreciated by those of us without formal economic training.

Its shocking to me how much he seems to be the entire Lake’s economic policy.

So any opinion’s on how big the stimulus package should be?

Nothing goes on forever, and monetary systems have historically changed every 30-50 years since the 1870s. But this one could run somewhat longer.

I do worry about the effect of taking on the bad debts of the banks, which is bound to make the balance sheet of the US government look weaker, without having any positive effect on the economy.

This is one big danger of the Geithner bank plan, in my view: it kicks the bank losses, which could have been handled at the level of the banks, up to the level of the government as a whole. The government is very big, so maybe realizing the losses won’t matter that much. But it’s really hard to be sure about that.

Since we don’t need all the banks we have, it would be much better for everyone, including the financial industry, to knock one or two big ones out and get them downsized and under control at this stage of the crisis.

JG

Many thanks to all for the comments and questions. I greatly enjoyed the exchange.

JG

Same here :)

Thanks here as well. great exchange.

dean

Ideas are the fuel of the future…a new age of econimic concepts could move the human condition and our planet in a healthy direction.
This is great thread and I am now sold on your book as food for thought. Thanks Dean and Jamie. I think I’ll have a danish.

Thanks Scare, didn’t even know about it.

I’m relatively unconvinced of this position. Following Brad Setser’s work on moves with China’s reserves, and their import/export markets, coupled with their new willingness to broker direct trade deals in the RMB (a move that makes absolutely no sense at all unless there is at least some consideration to widen the band on the Dollar peg, or float the RMB completely); the Dollar as a stable value-store in perpetuity seems like a more risky argument to make than the conventional wisdom has lead on.

First, before responding to anybody else’s response, let me say I Luvvvvvv this post. But, I have a hard time believing it’s written by Dean Baker about a book written by Galbraith.

Predator State! Excellent title.

so there is no free-market solution to the problem of medical research.

There was a data encryption program developed jointly by the gov’t and a private company. The government considered it’s ROI to simply be the development of the software. But, the problem was that the company didn’t release it to the public — it was classified. Why didn’t the gov’t at least get a share of ROI for the general treasury or to return to the taxpayer?

Same with gov’t research on medicines or Green technologies.

Also, with MS-Windows they have a patent (or is it copyright) and they get a new one each time they change the software. It still has the same name, but the patent/copyright seems to indicate it’s new. This allows them to keep it forever. How wrong is that?

Pharma has tried something similar with their drugs. Are we going to let them abuse patent law?

Also, wrt the leasing of oil lands which are then NOT developed, there was an energy bill my rep tried to put out requiring “use it or lose it”. Isn’t it also true of patents that oil companies can buy up battery technology and hold it to prevent anyone from building battery cars to compete with the gas guzzlers?

Isn’t “use it or lose it” something we need on patents?

We do need more Constructive Capitalism and less Predator State.

Don’t forget that all important course on Kabuki!