The value of the Socratic method is not that participants will come to agreement--they seldom will--but that arguments can be sharpened and better understood by all, including observers.
I left the Post Keynesian Thought list because it had degenerated, in my opinion, into being a propaganda vehicle for a resurrected fascism that is not significantly unlike the Italian Fascist program of the 1920's, and that of capitalist-Communist China today--in the manifestation of Warren Mosler's and Bill Mitchell's similar "buffer stock" full-employment models. See: http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pkt/jun98/0489.html. To advance that propaganda, I believe that subsidies were paid by Mosler to certain elements associated with the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, the New School and the Levy Institute. Currency trader Mosler admitted as much: http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pkt/jun98/0172.html, see last paragraph.
Some of our discussion issues were left unresolved, which I intend to address soon in a suitable public forum:
1. From David Gleicher, the consumption function, which I contend is a meaningful concept only within the context of an underconsumptionist economy in hypothetical circular flow.
2. From Gleicher and Per Gunnar Berglund, the relevance of a "real" rate of interest to the world of endogenous money, and the social impact of accumulating government debt. What is the "opportunity cost" to the person who loans you funds which he has created by bookkeeping entry?
3. From Trond Andresen, Gesellist concerns about financial accumulation, which, again, I contend are relevant only within a Gesell-Hobson-Keynes circular flow model.
4. And from Gleicher and Bruce McFarling, the meaning and validity of the Keynesian multiplier.
Bill Ryan
http://www.apfc.org/ http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7018/douglas2.html
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