:\'(

Galbraith was one of the most brilliant economic minds of the past 100 years, and he was a proud liberal. Galbraith's work lives on. It is the antidote to the lies of Milton Friedman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith

I salute Dr. Galbraith for his contributions to humanity.
:\'( :\'( :\'(

The saddest part is the 90.9% who read this and thought "who!?"

Galbraith was one of the most brilliant economic minds of the past 100 years, and he was a proud liberal. Galbraith's work lives on. It is the antidote to the lies of Milton Friedman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith

I salute Dr. Galbraith for his contributions to humanity.
:\'( :\'( :\'(


You mean that inflation is NOT a function of money supply? 

So you want to pick soundbites?  Well you have a wealth of places to go. 


  * Modern Competition and Business Policy, 1938.
    * A Theory of Price Control, 1952.
    * American Capitalism: The concept of countervailing power, 1952.
    * The Great Crash, 1929, 1954.
    * Economics and the Art of Controversy, 1955.
    * The Affluent Society, 1958.
    * Perspectives on conservation, 1958. (Editor)
    * The Liberal Hour, 1960
    * Economic Development in Perspective, 1962.
    * The Scotch, 1963
    * Economic Development, 1964.
    * The New Industrial State, 1967.
    * Beginner's Guide to American Studies, 1967.
    * How to get out of Vietnam, 1967.
    * The Triumph (a novel), 1968.
    * Ambassador's Journal, 1969.
    * How to control the military, 1969.
    * Indian Painting (with Mohinder Singh Randhawa), 1969.
    * Who needs democrats, and what it takes to be needed, 1970.
    * American Left and Some British Comparisons, 1971.
    * Economics, Peace and Laughter, 1972.
    * Power and the Useful Economist, 1973, AER
    * Economics and the Public Purpose, 1973
    * A China Passage, 1973.
    * John Kenneth Galbraith introduces India, 1974. (Editor)
    * Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, 1975.
    * Socialism in rich countries and poor, 1975.
    * The Economic effects of the Federal public works expenditures, 1933-38, (with G. Johnson) 1975.
    * The Age of Uncertainty (also a BBC 13 part television series), 1977.

    * The Galbraith Reader, 1977.
    * Annals of an Abiding Liberal, 1979.
    * The Nature of Mass Poverty, 1979.
    * Almost Everyone's Guide to Economics, 1979.
    * A Life in Our Times, 1981.
    * The Voice of the Poor, 1983.
    * The Anatomy of Power, 1983.
    * Essays from the Poor to the Rich, 1983.
    * Reaganomics: Meaning, Means and Ends, (with Paul McCracken)1983.
    * A View from the Stands, 1986.
    * Economics in Perspective: A Critical History, 1987.
    * Capitalism, Communism and Coexistence (with Stanislav Menshikov), 1988.
    * Unconventional Wisdom: Essays on Economics in Honour of John Kenneth Galbraith, 1989. (Editor)
    * A Tenured Professor, 1990.
    * A History of Economics: The Past as the Present, 1991.
    * The Culture of Contentment, 1992.
    * Recollections of the New Deal: When People Mattered, 1992. (Editor)
    * A Journey Through Economic Time, 1994.
    * The World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View, 1994.
    * A Short History of Financial Euphoria, 1994.
    * The Good Society: the humane agenda, 1996.
    * Letters to Kennedy, 1998.
    * The socially concerned today, 1998.
    * Name-Dropping: From F.D.R. On, 1999.
    * The Essential Galbraith, 2001.
    * The Economics of Innocent Fraud, 2004.
* John Kenneth Galbraith and the future of economics

You mean that inflation is NOT a function of money supply? 

Inflation is, yes.

BUT

Selfishness doesn't work,
not every tax cut is a good tax cut,
and
if government does not regulate the "free market," corporate monopolies will devour the competitive nature that makes the market free.

You can hitch your cart to Uncle Miltie if you want, but you're just ridin' blind!
::)


So you want to pick soundbites?  Well you have a wealth of places to go. 


In a toe-to-toe debate with Galbratith, LB woulda kicked azz!
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JKG?  R.I.P.  You made your own case a lot better than any of your intellectual descendants ever did.


You can hitch your cart to Uncle Miltie if you want, but you're just ridin' blind!


Harrumph!  As a Chicago school drone, I disagreed with about (heh, at *LEAST!*) half of what Galbraith stood for.  And if I'd been placed in the position of Emperor, I'd have appointed him to the Federal Reserve Board - for no other reason than to keep myself from believing my own BS.  (While we're on the subject, dagnabbit, MaxwellSmart, don't make me hunt you down and hire you during the post-apocalypse... for precisely the same reason!)

Everyone's silly question for the day:  Why did gold stay down (relative to the $USD and other fiat currencies) during Alan Greenspan's term as FRB chair -- and only rise materially after he'd left office? 

Bonus points:  Reconcile your answer in terms of Alan Greenspan's essay on the subject in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" -- a collection of essays published by none other than you-know-who (Ayn Rand) herself.  Yup, the Maestro was at one time, her protege.

JKG?  R.I.P.  You made your own case a lot better than any of your intellectual descendants ever did.

Harrumph!   As a Chicago school drone, I disagreed with about (heh, at *LEAST!*) half of what Galbraith stood for.  And if I'd been placed in the position of Emperor, I'd have appointed him to the Federal Reserve Board - for no other reason than to keep myself from believing my own BS.   (While we're on the subject, dagnabbit, MaxwellSmart, don't make me hunt you down and hire you during the post-apocalypse... for precisely the same reason!)

Everyone's silly question for the day:  Why did gold stay down (relative to the $USD and other fiat currencies) during Alan Greenspan's term as FRB chair -- and only rise materially after he'd left office? 

Bonus points:  Reconcile your answer in terms of Alan Greenspan's essay on the subject in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" -- a collection of essays published by none other than you-know-who (Ayn Rand) herself.  Yup, the Maestro was at one time, her protege.

I will have to do some homework on your specs here.
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I do know right now gold is at an all time high because a lot of folks fear the rest of the world--especially China--is going to start trading in Euros instead of dollars. That's what happens when you have madmen running your country. Uh, correction, madmen who cannot hide their madness behind a good swindle and slick diplomacy.  Ronald Reagan versus Geroge W. Bush is like a sociopath versus a disorganized-type schizophrenic!
I did know Greasepan was a protoge of Ayn Rand. Pretty creepy.
The ideas that Reagan and the conservatives sold so successfully to America sound decent, righteous, and commonsensical. The problem is, they don't work. It reminds me of the Marxist-Leninist scholars on the other side of the debate.  They can be extremely cogent, but you hafta wanna believe! When I was nineteen, I wanted to believe we could burn the banks down, demolish the stock exchange, hang Alan Greenspan, and set in motion a worker's utopia BUT I knew deep inside it was not that simple and not entirely true.
Americans wanted to believe Reagan when he said we could make the American economy boom by cutting revenues by two-thirds and tripling the defense budget. We'd had enough of "tax-and-spend" liberals, it was time to set free "the magic of the marketplace," as Reagan called it. However, all the Reaganistas did was replace "tax-and-spend" with "borrow-and-spend." Dubya started that all over again, and now we're at end-stage Reagan disease. We'll either go on economic dialysis or DIE!
Back to Reagan, what folks liked so much was he seemed to give us something for nothing. He had simple answers to complex questions. It didn't matter whether the answers made sense or not, what mattered was the warm feeling we got in our bellies when Reagan said them.
Walter Mondale whining "Reagan doubled the national debt in under four years!," stood not a chance against the Gipper's silky "Well, I can't help it, there you go again!"
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I did know Greasepan was a protoge of Ayn Rand. Pretty creepy. 

Puts you ahead of about 99% of the rest of the world.  To this day, I'm still puzzling out whether or not Al betrayed his mentor when he became the Maestro, or whether he was just doing her work through other means.

And from the right (let's be clear, the Reaganite right, not the guys who won the war for control of the Party :), I've very little argument with the rest of your post. 

The only nit I'd pick is that cut-tax-and-spend-anyways is a calculated risk.  It works if you know enough about your opponent's finances that you're confident you can spend him into the ground.  Which Reagan's intel folks did, about Russia.  And which doesn't apply to the current crop of Bad Guys facing down the States.

Your real homework isn't googling what I'm talking about in a post on a message board, since you already seem to have have a pretty decent grasp of the Greenspan/Rand/hard currency crowd.  It's gonna be the six hours (!) of free (as in beer as well as in speech - you can save the .mov files to your drive and play 'em at your leisure) video in the form of the PBS documentary "Commanding Heights".

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/lo/story/index.html

I won't go so far as to say it's apolitical - but I will say it's (relative to today) nonpartisan.  (Depending on  how far to the left you are, you may have to _really_ grit your teeth at a few points.  Hey, I warned ya :) 

Let's just say that at the time it was made (just after a  bit of well-known unpleasantness in fall 2001), it's about as balanced a view of the past 100 years of economics as you're ever likely to get from ~mumble~3-4 years ago until long after we're both dead, hopefully of old age.

Puts you ahead of about 99% of the rest of the world.  To this day, I'm still puzzling out whether or not Al betrayed his mentor when he became the Maestro, or whether he was just doing her work through other means.

And from the right (let's be clear, the Reaganite right, not the guys who won the war for control of the Party :), I've very little argument with the rest of your post. 

The only nit I'd pick is that cut-tax-and-spend-anyways is a calculated risk.  It works if you know enough about your opponent's finances that you're confident you can spend him into the ground.  Which Reagan's intel folks did, about Russia.  And which doesn't apply to the current crop of Bad Guys facing down the States.

Your real homework isn't googling what I'm talking about in a post on a message board, since you already seem to have have a pretty decent grasp of the Greenspan/Rand/hard currency crowd.  It's gonna be the six hours (!) of free (as in beer as well as in speech - you can save the .mov files to your drive and play 'em at your leisure) video in the form of the PBS documentary "Commanding Heights".

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/lo/story/index.html

I won't go so far as to say it's apolitical - but I will say it's (relative to today) nonpartisan.   (Depending on  how far to the left you are, you may have to _really_ grit your teeth at a few points.  Hey, I warned ya :) 

Let's just say that at the time it was made (just after a  bit of well-known unpleasantness in fall 2001), it's about as balanced a view of the past 100 years of economics as you're ever likely to get from ~mumble~3-4 years ago until long after we're both dead, hopefully of old age.

Hmm..I'll try to download that documentary at some point. Of course the real REAL reason Reagan inflated defense spending to an obscene degree has nothing to do with "winning the cold war" and everything to do with pork barrel hand-outs to military and petro-chemical contractors. The SDI defense initiative (aka "Star Wars) was a joke. It was never going to work, nor was it intended to work. It was intended to make a few people obscenely rich. That has been the Republican agenda for the past quarter century ("Never have so few done so much for so few," as Jim Hightower put it). Right now, in end-stage Reagan disease, we see KBR/Halliburton raking it in via military outsourcing while our groundtroops are asking for cans of tuna and bottled water from home!
If ending the atomic cold war was so important to the Republicans, why are the heirs to Reagan doing their damnedest to start World War III over Iranian nukes?

BTW, to his credit, George Lucas DID try to get politicians to stop referring to the SDI program as "Star Wars," but he was too late. The nickname was already in the pop culture vernacular.
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