Good Morning Friends,

Some of you might think my analysis of the economy bizarre. That's understandable.

But I would point out much about economic growth is unknown. Noam Chomsky cited economist Paul Krugman, from a publication of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, in which Krugman made five basic points (Chomsky, Noam. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Seven Stories Press. New York, Toronto, London, 1999. p.25).

Krugman's five basic points.

1) Knowledge about U.S. economic development is very limited. For the U.S., two-thirds of the rise of per capita income is unexplained..... (certainly as of 1999).

2) Conclusions with little basis are constantly being put forward to provide doctrinal support for policy.

3) "Conventional wisdom" is unstable, regularly shifting to something else, perhaps the opposite of the latest phase, though its proponents are again full of confidence as they impose the new orthodoxy.

4) In retrospect, it is commonly agreed that they economic development policies did not "serve their expressed goals and were based on "bad ideas."

5) "Bad ideas" flourish because they serve the interests of powerful groups.

So, again, there are limits to immediately available rationality. As we saw, for example, with the case study of Sara Lee in the late nineties, ".. Wall Street,..., is guided by spiritual goals as well as economic ones" (Klein, Naomi. NoLogo. 2000, 2002. p.199).

I want to say a word about dialectical materialism or dialectical determinism. Anyway, dm is an approach to studying history that gives primacy to the means of production and changing means of production. And this analysis sees the means of production as central to informing the political, economic, social, legal, philosophical, artistic, and perhaps even scientific life of a given society. Politics, economics, social customs, law, art, and science do not arise independently of the dominant means of production.

I imagine the main objection to this is that dialectical materialism seems to reduce human motives to the crass material, potentially offering a rather robotic view of humanity. This is a wrong path it can take. But as I have been trying to show: materialism is not just materialism; money is not just money; and wealth is not just wealth. These things are for us, all of us to greater and lesser degrees, symbolic in this respect, to our nearness to "God." Man is the desire to become God. Money has spiritual ideology bound up within it, which is the invisible or real "virtual" source of its value.

I'll say a little bit more about this later.

wingedcentaur