Marx, Fiat Money and a Simple Business Card Economy.

Jehu: "LK gives what I think is incontrovertible evidence for this view: Fiat contains only a vanishingly small quantity of living human labor: 

Lord Keynes (?!): "[The] amount of labour needed to create $1 of fiat money is hardly different from that needed to create $1 million or $100 billion (namely, a few extra key strokes). Yet obviously one dollar of high-powered money and $1 million buy commodities with vastly different quantities of abstract socially necessary labour time in Marx's sense of this concept. You cannot explain the exchange value of fiat money by appealing to the abstract socially necessary labour time needed to create it."

A few years ago, to illustrate the logic of a fiat money economy, Prof. Bill Mitchell offered the following example ("A Simple Business Card Economy", Mar 31, 2009)

What if Capitalists Disappeared?

A few years ago my post "Krugman, Robots, and Exchange Value" gained some attention from the wise and good, and over time has kept on attracting hits.

In that post I explored a scenario: what if robots replaced all human labour? The conclusion was that market prices and GDP would drop to 0, because stuff would not be sold (after all, consumers no longer receive income from wages). There would be no exchange value, value would not be realised.

It's a situation so absurd that it constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the proposition "not all value comes from labour".

However, isn't there any credible alternative?

Was Keynes anti-Nazi?

What was Keynes' real attitude towards Nazism?

Well, it depends who you ask.

If you ask Lord Skidelsky, the answer is clear: Keynes was unambiguously opposed to Nazism, from the start.

Keynes may have been an anti-Semitic, virulently anti-Communist eugenicist, with a questionable attitude towards democracy -- rather like the Nazis -- but he would not give comfort to totalitarian enemies of liberal society, even to support his own theories.

Political Spectrum: a Metaphor.

So, you want to know how to tell Left, Centre, and Right apart, but you despair from reading the commentariat, with all their endless talk and weasel words.

I'll give you my take on this; you do with it whatever you feel like.