1. Monde et économie fermée.
Le monde est l'exemple même de l'économie fermée chère à certains
théoriciens et, à ce titre, humour..., on peut considérer que les gens qui s'y
trouvent, à savoir vous et moi, sont nécessairement ... protectionnistes et
se protègent naturellement de ... l'univers.
Dans les frontières de ce monde, ils peuvent, certes, faire montre de
laissez-faire et de laissez-passer, mais il y a toujours une protection
économique contre l'extérieur, de fait.
2. Monde et états.
Reste que le monde est composé d'états, aux mains d'hommes
plus ou moins libres.
Chaque état est censé représenter ces mêmes gens, un pays, une nation, une
société selon la préférence politique qu'on adopte.
Surtout depuis le XXème siècle, les hommes des états des pays ont des
actions plus ou moins coordonnées dans divers domaines économiques.
3. Monde et monnaies.
Le monde est ainsi composé de diverses monnaies, nationales ou
régionales, réglementées par les hommes des états d'une presque totalité
des pays.
Une chose est certaine : la cause d'existence des monnaies n'est
pas à leur initiative, mais à celles des gens, des ancêtres de vous et
moi, qui les ont inventées il y a donc bien longtemps et qui ont évolué.
a. Réglementations étatiques.
Malgré ce qu'ils disent, nos hommes des états ont décidé et mis en œuvre
des réglementations des monnaies sans raison, sans cause, tout au long de
l'histoire et, plus que jamais auparavant, au XXème siècle (cf. ce texte de
juillet 2014) ou celui-ci
de mai 2010).
Au prétexte de la prétendue contrefaçon à venir toujours possible d'une
monnaie et nuisible pour les gens, ils se les sont appropriés en privilège
dans le passé et ont obligé ces mêmes gens à les utiliser.
En dépit des innovations monétaires qui ont vu le jour depuis lors, là
encore à l'initiative des gens et non pas des actions des hommes de l'état,
ces derniers ont adopté la même méthode (protéger contre la "prétendue
contrefaçon") et le même remède (le privilège de monopole qu'ils donnent
à une entité étatique ou se donnent et l'obligation aux gens d'utiliser le
produit).
Et ils en sont arrivés à les dénaturer.
Exemplaires sont en effet les méfaits qu'ils ont commis au XXème siècle et
qui ont résulté de leurs actions dites de "politique monétaire"
(cf. par exemple ces textes :
1 - Le
monde entre crise et krach.
- Le
capitalisme financier : un merveilleux pléonasme.
- Ce
qui arrive devait-il arriver ?
- Le
"marché financier brisé"
5 - Le
retour à l'étalon-or est la solution libérale.
- Nouvelle
réflexion sur les ajustements financier et économique en cours.
- A
phénomène mondial, cause mondiale.
- Le
F.M.I. : pompier pyromane de notoriété pas encore publique.
- Il
fallait le trouver, le G20 l'a fait.
10 - Un
grand écart ? Non, une hyperinflation potentielle !
- Prêter
aux Etats nationaux ou prêter de l'or, "that is the only question".
- "G20
?"-"Dans l'eau !" .
- Le
refus de la fausse monnaie : un iceberg que le G20 n'aurait pas du ignorer.
- Yuan
et boule de gomme.
15 - "Euroïsme"
ou héroisme.
- Monnaie,
finance et hommes de l'Etat : derniers exploits en date.
- Le
G20, "C 20".
- "Plus
ça change, plus c'est pareil");
l'avant-dernier en date étant l’interdiction de la conversion des
"substituts de monnaie bancaires" en monnaie par les législateurs
des pays et, contre toute attente, la signification "monnaie" donnée
malgré tout par chacun, aux "substituts de monnaie bancaires",
désormais "néant habillé en monnaie", "pseudo monnaie"
(cf. ce texte
d'août 2013).
b. Changement de perspective réglementaire étatique.
Mais aujourd'hui, leur vivendi modus a changé.
A les écouter, s'ils prennent soin d'augmenter toujours plus les
réglementations des "pseudo monnaies", ce n'est plus pour protéger
les gens contre la contrefaçon du "machin monétaire".
Leur mutisme sur le sujet est d'ailleurs éloquent.
Ils le font pour ... le développement économique des pays.
Selon eux, leur gestion de la quantité de la "pseudo monnaie"
par leurs soins doit permettre d'accroître ce développement (idée développée
avec de la monnaie et des substituts de monnaie bancaires, depuis au moins
Irving Fisher, 1911, cf. ce texte
d'octobre 2012).
Ils affirment ainsi l'absurdité nouvelle du XXème siècle.
c. Un peu d'histoire.
Relisons ce qu'en écrivait David Laidler dans une conférence
de 2001 pour préciser une partie de ses sources.
5. The inter-war years.
The international gold standard, whose
piecemeal creation in the 1870s had prompted the bimetallic controversy,
survived until the beginning of World War I, but not because of any
intellectual victory on the part of its supporters.
Rather the discovery of the cyanide process made it
possible economically to exploit South African gold deposits from the
mid-1890s onwards, and this, along with gold discoveries in the Yukon at
about the same time, was enough to set the world's supply of monetary
gold growing more rapidly than real output.
Two decades of deflation came to an end, a mild inflation
which would persist until 1914 began, and bimetallism lost its main political
rationale.
It is also worth noting that the leading monetary
economists of the era, Marshall, Fisher and Wicksell, each according to his
own lights a quantity theorist, had supported neither side in the bimetallic
controversy.
All three favoured price-level stability as a policy
goal,
but all three thought it possible to improve upon both
gold and bimetallic standards to provide it.19)
19). Marshall (1887) favoured symetallism supplemented by
widespread voluntary indexation of capital and labour market contracts,
Fisher (1911) suggested indexing money itself by way of
his compensated dollar scheme, while
Wicksell (1898) proposed an international paper money
whose value would be stabilised by interest rate movements coordinated among
the world's central banks.
I have discussed these matters in more detail in Laidler
(1991).
Thus, despite the failure of the bimetallic cause with
which it had been intimately associated, the quantity theory remained
associated
- with scepticism about the gold-standard policy rule,
and hence
- with what it is fair to call 'progressive' thought on
economic policy.
It continued to occupy such a position after World War I.
This is quite evident, for example, in the well-known
role it played as the intellectual foundation for Keynes's discussion, in the
Tract on Monetary Reform, of the potential for conflict between the
pursuit of domestic price stability and exchange rate stability, and his
preference for the former in the event that a choice here should become
necessary.
And a monetary approach to the analysis of macroeconomic
stability that started from the quantity theory also underpinned Hawtrey's
less radical, but nevertheless novel, proposals for re-establishing an
international gold standard under which monetary measures would be
co-ordinated among countries with a view to giving the stabilisation of
prices, income, and employment pride of place on the policy agenda.20)
20). These were embodied in the Genoa Resolutions of
1923, but came to nothing.
Even so, in Europe in particular, the quantity theory was
beginning to lose intellectual ground in the 1920s.
Though Wicksell (1898) might have intended to do no more
than extend the quantity theory to cope with contemporary institutional
realities when he developed his famous 'cumulative process' analysis, the longer-run
effect of his efforts on monetary economics was to shift its emphasis
- from the quintessential concern of the quantity theory
with the relationship between money and the price level,
- towards the influence of the rate of interest
on saving and investment, and hence to questions about the
inter-temporal allocation of resources.
This theme was, as Leijonhufvud (1981) emphasised, to
become central to what we now call macroeconomics in the
interwar years.
And the element in Wicksell's work that proved seminal
here was the 'pure credit economy model' of Chapter 9 of Interest and
Prices in which bank liabilities adjusted endogenously, even passively,
to prices.
In the hands
- of both Austrians such as Hayek and
- of the Stockholm School,
Wicksell's work became the starting point for competing
non-even anti-quantity theory analyses of the fundamental causes of
cyclical fluctuations which were associated with opposite ends of
the political spectrum.21)
21) For a discussion of the contributions of these two
groups, and the relation of their work to Wicksell's, see Laidler (1999, Chs
2 and 3).
Interacting with this powerful internal dynamic element
in the development of economic theory, moreover, was the fact that, once the
postwar hyperinflations had come to an end, chronically high unemployment
became the key policy question in Europe; and by its very nature as a theory
of the price level, the quantity theory had nothing direct to say about this
matter.
Matters were somewhat different in American monetary economics.22)
22). I have discussed the role of American monetary
economics in the interwar years, and its relationship to the development of
macroeconomics more generally, in Laidler (1999, Chs 9 and 10).
In (1998) Mehrling proposed a more complex classification
for analysing the development of American monetary economics than that which
I adopt in this section of the current paper, in which advocates of the
quantity theory and Banking School positions are further subdivided according
to whether they supported
- policy rules or discretion and/or
- active or passive approaches to monetary policy.
I intend no criticism of Mehrling's taxonomy in
expressing the hope that the simpler one adopted here is adequate for the
purposes of this chapter.
There, gold convertibility had been maintained during the
War and the 1920s were, overall, a decade of prosperity.
There was also a relative lack of explicit interest in
intertemporal allocative questions in general, and a slowness to appreciate
the importance of Wicksell's ideas in particular, among mainstream American
economists.
After the bimetallic controversy, their discussions had
turned to issues of central banking, and the Federal Reserve system had been
established in 1913.
It was natural enough, then, that the 1920s would find
American monetary economists debating the role of this new institution, and
that the quantity theory would play a part in their discussions.
Furthermore, at its onset after 1929, the Great
Depression looked to most American observers like a particularly bad cyclical
downturn, and monetary theories of the cycle of which the quantity theory
formed a key component, not to mention policy nostrums derived from them,
figured prominently in the literature it prompted.
On the whole, however, even though the quantity theory
was still not associated with conservative causes in the United States, its
connection with the radical left that has been so close in the 1880s and
1890s had been weakened.
That was because the boundaries within American economics
and politics had shifted.
The quantity theory continued to occupy an important
position in neoclassical monetary theory, but in America in the 1920s,
neoclassical economics was challenged from the left
- by institutionalism, in particular
- by the radical version thereof originally developed and
propagated by Thorstein Veblen (e.g. 1904) and later
- by such advocates of wholesale economic planning as
Rexford Tugwell (eg. Tugwell, Munro and Stryker 1925).
In the monetary field, moreover, the under consumptionism
of Foster and Catchings (e.g. 1923) had taken over as the preferred
intellectual basis for inflationist policy proposals.23)
23). It is worth noting that Paul Douglas's 1932 book The
Coming of a New Party embraced both planning and underconsumptionist
arguments for fiscal and monetary expansion.
I suspect that Simons' (1934) A Positive Program for
Laissez Faire should be read as an attack on Douglas, though I have no
direct evidence to support this conjecture.
When compared to these doctrines, even Irving Fisher's
quantity theory-based campaign to subject the Federal Reserve system to a
legislated price stability mandate, let alone Allyn Young's support for
cautiously activist stabilisation policy based on his own adaptation of
Hawtrey's ideas to American conditions, were very much in the middle of the
road.
The word 'middle' is not used lightly here, however, for
the same body of economics that had underpinned the conservative case for
gold monometallism in the 1890s had also provided much of the intellectual
basis for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and it remained extremely
influential throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, not least at the Federal
Reserve Board in Washington.24)
24). Note that when Mehrling (1997) discussed Young's work
as seeking a 'middle ground' in monetary economics, the two extremes that he
had in mind were represented by this conservative group's Banking School
ideas, and Fisher's quantity theory.
From the point of view of analysing the development of
competing strands in what was to become American neoclassical monetary
economics, this classification seems to me to be absolutely appropriate, but
when the economic basis of inflationist and more generally interventionist
politics is the subject of discussion, as it is in this chapter, it is
necessary to recall the existence of radical institutionalism and under
consumptionism.
The early 1930s in the United States are sometimes
thought of as being a time when financial interests, supported by influential
neoclassical economists, opposed any attempts to stabilise the 'Great
Contraction', but finally met their political nemesis with the coming of the
Roosevelt administration and its 'New Deal'.
This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of events,
but like most such oversimplifications there is a core of truth lying behind
it.
There was indeed much opposition to policy activism from
the financial community in the early 1930s, and it did find support among
economists.
These were not, however, neoclassical adherents of the
quantity theory, but the anti-quantity theory supporters of the gold standard
and the 'Real Bills' Doctrine such as Benjamin Anderson, Henry Parker Willis,
and indeed their mentor Laughlin himself who remained intellectually active
until his death in the early 1930s.25)
25). As I have noted in Laidler (1999, Ch. 10) there is a
loose relationship between
- the views of this group and
- those of such 'Austrian' theorists based at the London
School of Economics, as Friedrich von Hayek (1931) and Lionel Robbins (1934).
However, these Americans lacked the well-worked-out
theory of the cycle, deeply rooted in capital theory from which the Austrians
derived their policy conclusions.
It is worth noting in passing here, that Friedman (1974)
singled out the London group as exponents of an atrophied version of the
quantity theory to which he contrasted favourably the version in circulation
in Chicago at that time.
It is, of course, quite erroneous to attribute any shape
or form of quantity theory to this group.
They were totally and explicitly opposed to it.
Setting out this group's position in 1933, Laughlin
criticised 'the English writers of today' for being
'imbued with a strong belief in the quantity theory' (p.
229).
Here he singled out Keynes as someone who
'had . . . gone to extremes in supporting inflation and
the abandonment of the English gold standard' (p. 231).26)
26. But he explicitly excepted TE Gregory, then at the
London School of Economics, who was deeply influenced by Austrian ideas,
without being entirely under their influence.
It is not, perhaps, coincidental that Gregory was an
authority on the work of Thomas Tooke, the leading figure in the Banking
School.
I am grateful to Robert Leeson for drawing my attention
to Laughlin (1933) from which this and other quotations used here are drawn.
For Laughlin, the Depression was the
result of
'a debauch in credit and overspeculation' (p. 275)
and recovery depended upon a revival of
'production of saleable goods which is the only way of
developing purchasing power' (p. 273).
'In reality, demand comes from other goods before money
or credit enters on the scene' (p. 220)
and
'to increase the medium of exchange as a remedy when
there are less goods to be exchanged is fatuous' (p. 285).
This all too influential viewpoint was opposed by many,
perhaps most, American academic economists at the time.
The early 1930s were a time of widespread support among
them for activist expansionary monetary, and indeed fiscal, policies, much of
it based, if not directly on the quantity theory, then at least on an
analysis of the cycle that derived from that doctrine.
Lauchlin Currie (1934) was one of the most coherent
advocates of such measures, and his analysis was essentially Hawtreyan at
this juncture, yielding views on the causes of and remedies for the Great
Contraction largely anticipating those later set out by Friedman and Schwartz
(1963a).27)
27. I have discussed the interconnections here in some
detail in Laidler (1993).
His characterisation of the place of the quantity theory
in all this was as follows:
- In the past an altogether disproportionate amount of
importance was attached to variations in the supply of money.
- In consequence of the almost universal abandonment of
the quantity theory of money, however, there is a danger that the pendulum
may swing too far in the opposite direction so that the effect of variations
in the supply of money may be unduly minimized (p. 3).
Currie was more than just a quantity theorist then, he
was also a vigorous and explicit critic of the 'Real Bills' Doctrine in
general.
More specifically, he deplored the role it had played in
both the Federal Reserve system's policies of 1927–28, which were aimed
- at curbing the supply of bank credit for speculative
purposes but had resulted in slowdown in money growth to which Currie
attributed the onset of the contraction, and
- in creating what he termed the system's 'almost
complete passivity' thereafter.
Small wonder, then, that his book was the subject of a
scathing review by Anderson (in the New York Times Annalist, May 3,
1935) which began by branding Currie as
'the uncompromising advocate of an extremely tight and
inflexible version of the quantity theory' (p. 662)
and went on, among other things, to criticise him for
holding a
'[t]heory opposed to all accepted principles of banking'
(p. 662),
for displaying a
'complete misunderstanding of 1927–29 developments' (p.
662)
and
'inadequate knowledge of actual banking practices' (p.
670),
while indulging in
'the fallacy of cheap money as a substitute for economic
readjustment' (p. 670);
and so on in this vein..
The important point about Currie in the context of this chapter is
not only that he attracted an attack from Anderson for having offered a
critique of Federal Reserve Policy that derived from a version of the
quantity theory, albeit a much more subtle one than Anderson gave him credit
for.
It is also that his work attracted the attention of Jacob Viner of the
University of Chicago, who invited Currie to join his 'Freshman brains trust'
in Washington, thus setting in motion a career that quickly saw him become
economic advisor to Marriner Eccles at the Federal Reserve Board, and then to
President Roosevelt himself.
To the extent that association with the inner councils of the 'New Deal'
confers progressive credentials on an economic theory, the quantity theory
was still well endowed with them in the mid-1930s.
The landscape of both economic policy and economic theory was, however,
changing rapidly at that time, and this would soon affect the location of the
quantity theory in the political spectrum.
To begin with, the influence of Laughlin and his associates waned quickly
as the decade progressed.
As with the intellectually related, albeit more rigorously based, policy
pessimism of Austrian business cycle theorists, there were few takers in the
intellectual market place for economic ideas that implied that a policy of
waiting out the depression was the only viable option.
Second, as the Depression continued in the United States, an ongoing
build-up of free reserves in the banking system convinced many who would
earlier have given pride of place to expansionary monetary measures that
these were no longer likely to be effective.
Homely comparisons of such policies to 'pushing on a string' came into
vogue, and the emphasis among policy activists shifted to the fiscal side.
Here it is significant that Currie himself was one of the architects of
the increases in required reserve ratios that were instituted in 1937 with
the aim of mopping up excess liquidity in the banking system that, it was
feared, might at some future time provide the basis for excessive and
inflationary money creation.
Though Currie would hardly have entertained such fears had he not retained
some residual belief in a version of the quantity theory, it is equally clear
that he had come to believe that, by 1937, the monetary authorities no longer
retained control over the supply of money, independently of factors affecting
the demand for it.28)
28). At this point, then, Currie's interpretation of monetary factors in
the 1930s diverges sharply from that of Friedman and Schwartz (1963a), for
they held the slowdown in money growth that followed these measures
responsible for the economy's sharp contraction in 1938.
Currie blamed this contraction on an inadvertent tightening of fiscal
policy.
But other exponents of the quantity theory had also given up on it before
1937, crucially that bête noire of Laughlin and his associates, John Maynard
Keynes.
The Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) had rested on a
straightforward and quite unoriginal exposition of the Cambridge version of
the quantity theory,
but in the Treatise on Money (1930) its author had sought to
integrate that theory with a Wicksellian analysis of the influence of the
rate of interest on savings and investment.
Though this (not altogether successful, but that is another story) effort
had left Keynes a firm advocate of expansionary monetary policy based on open
market operations as a remedy for unemployment, and hence as anathema to
Laughlin et al. as ever, the critical variable which he sought to affect was
no longer the quantity of money,
nor its rate of growth,
but rather the level of the long run rate of interest.
By 1930, Keynes's view of monetary policy's transmission mechanism had
thus shifted away from anything that could be associated with the quantity
theory towards a Wicksellian mechanism whose critical linkages ran through
bank rate
to the long interest rate and thence to investment spending,
with the supply of money adjusting passively to maintain equilibrium with
its demand.
Given associated changes in the total quantity of money and in the
effective level of bank rate respectively, it is via the latter that the
ultimate modification in the purchasing power of money is generated, looking
at the problem dynamically.
The order of events is not that a change in bank rate affects the price
level because, in order to make a new bank rate effective, the quantity of
money has to be altered.
It is, rather, the other way around.
A change in the quantity of money affects the price level in the first
instance because . . . this means a bank rate which will change the market
rate of interest relatively to the natural rate . . .
If we start from a position of equilibrium, then – provided that
efficiency earnings are stable – the condition for the continued stability of
price levels is that the total volume of money should vary in such a way that
the effect of the corresponding volume of bank lending on the market rate of
interest is to keep the volume of new investment at an equality with current
saving (1930, I, p. 197, Keynes's italics).
Dennis Robertson (1931) suggested that Keynes was here dealing with a 'hen
and egg' situation of no importance, but this is surely not so.
To emphasise the rate of interest and volume of bank lending as the
critical variables for monetary policy, and
to treat the quantity of money as passively adjusting to validate their
consequences, is to adopt exactly the view of the working of monetary policy
that later appeared in the Radcliffe Report, which, as I have
already noted, could trace its ancestry to the anti quantity theory position
of the Banking School and
of the gold monometallists of the 1880s and 1890s.
Given Keynes's earlier credentials as a quantity theorist, this was a step
of great significance in the development of monetary thought, and one of
lasting importance, the use of an exogenous money supply assumption at
certain points in the General Theory, notwithstanding.29)
29). The latter is most conspicuous in the General Theory where
the efficacy of money-wage cuts is discussed as an hypothetical rather than a
practical policy, and as has often been noted, discussions of the monetary
system are conspicuous by their absence from the General Theory.
That is why I am one of those who believe that, overall, the treatment of
this topic in the Treatise was in no way superseded in the later book.
And, it should be recalled, the Radcliffe Committee explicitly invoked Richard
Kahn's evidence as the immediate authority for their own views on the issue.
And it should be noted that Keynes's version of this theory, just as
surely as Laughlin's, can be traced to the Banking School, this time by way
of Wicksell who had, like Laughlin, been deeply influenced, though in a very
different direction, by Thomas Tooke, perhaps the leading exponent of Banking
School ideas in the 1830s and 1840s.
Now what has been described here was a migration from the political right
to the left on the part of the quantity theory's rival, the endogenous money
doctrine of the Banking School.
This idea's links to the political right had mainly been derived from its
affiliation with the gold standard during the bimetallic controversy, and
they persisted into the 1930s in American monetary thought.
The combination of Wicksell's espousal of what amounted to endogenous
money in his 'pure credit economy' model, however, along with his
simultaneous advocacy of managed inconvertible currencies had already put this
alliance under stress in the 1890s, and a clear-cut break came when Keynes,
who had always been sceptical of the gold standard, embraced the Wicksellian
viewpoint in 1930 just prior to Britain's abandonment of gold
convertibility in 1931.
Even so, the story of the shifting political associations of monetary
theories in the 1930s also involves a more or less simultaneous journey
towards the right on the part of the quantity theory.
In the 1920s, the quantity theory had provided the underpinnings of Irving
Fisher's campaigns for imposing by act of Congress a price-stability rule on
the Federal Reserve system and a crucial step in the quantity theory's
rightward move was taken when this idea of subjecting monetary policy to a
legislated rule was adopted by members of the economics department of the
University of Chicago in the early 1930s, and in particular by Henry
Simons.30)
30). Initially Simons had opted for a constant money-supply rule, but
shifted to a price-level rule in 1936.
His failure to refer to Fisher as an earlier exponent of this idea in the
latter paper was surely not as reprehensible as it might now look, for the
simple reason that Fisher's advocacy of it would have been common knowledge
to Simons' intended readership.
The association of a distinctive 'Chicago Tradition' with the quantity
theory in the early 1930s,
the alleged imperviousness of that tradition to 'Keynesian' ideas later in
the decade, as well as
its influence on Friedman's monetarism,
have been much debated in recent years, so suffice it here simply to state
those of my own views on these matters that are relevant to the current
discussion:
there was little in the way of positive analysis that was unique to
Chicago in the early 1930s;
Simons' statement of the case for a legislated monetary policy rule as an
integral component of his 1934 Positive Program for Laissez Faire,
however, established the quantity theory in a distinct and novel ideological
context;
and finally, Simons' work was influential in shaping the ideas of the later
Chicago School of which Friedman's monetarism would in due course become an
important component. 31)
31). I have developed and defended these positions at greater length in
Laidler (1993, 1997 and 1999, Ch. 10).
Even so, the populist, as opposed to conservative in the traditional
sense, characteristics of Simons' (1934) Program must be noted.
There was much in it that would have appealed to the progressives of an
earlier era, and which even perhaps derived from their agenda, but which was missing
from the body of doctrine with which Friedman's monetarism would later be
associated.
Simons favoured, for example, the vigorous pursuit of antitrust policies,
as well as serious income redistribution through a tax transfer system.32)
32). Tobin (1981) noted these differences between Simons' agenda and
Friedman's.
Perry Mehrling first drew my attention to the relationship of Simons'
policy programme to populist ideas.
I also owe to him the caveat that Simons' populism should be explicitly
distinguished from altogether darker, even proto-fascist, versions of such
doctrine, associated, for example, with the likes of Father Charles Coughlin.
These attracted much support in the 1930s.
Reeve (1943) is a useful source of information on these matters.
And this is not to mention the fact that another element in his Program,
which did find its way into Friedman's postwar work, was the institution of
100 per cent reserve requirements against chequable bank deposits, a measure
which would have had the effect of transferring the prerogative to create
money from the banks to the government, just as those earlier progressives
had also advocated.
If Simons' agenda was no longer classifiable as leftist in the 1930s and
thereafter, that was more
- because a large segment of the left had adopted new goals and analytic
tools by them than
- because Simons was opposed to all of the populist ideas with which the
quantity theory had been associated forty years earlier." (Laidler,
2001)
4. Dernière absurdité en date.
Aujourd'hui, des socialistes (style "Hamon") laissent entendre
qu'il leur serait possible de donner aux gens des quantités de "pseudo
monnaie" - qu'ils dénomment "revenu universel" - pour
consommer un "minimum..." de ce dont ils auraient besoin ou
désireraient.
Le propos est effarant et effrayant.
Un minimum de connaissances en économie politique devrait pourtant leur
interdire d'avancer de telles absurdités, sauf à vouloir dénommer d'une
nouvelle expression, ce dont ils continuent à rêver malgré l'esclavage à quoi
il a donné lieu dans le passé, à savoir le communisme.
Mais personne ne leur oppose l'absurdité, à commencer par les trop fameux
"journalistes" !
