bouncing Japan

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Feb 9 18:21:38 PST 2000


Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 21:09:24 -0500 (EST) From: bhandari at mmp.Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari) Subject: Re: Japan's growing debt could wreck the world economy

OK Christian, Japan has lotsa more room to a mongo stimulus package--if you say so. Yet why one might ask why have past fiscal stimuli petered out so damn quickly? Even if the fiscal stimulus is only 1/3rd of what is claimed, why no lasting effect even commensurate with that? Perhaps the non effect stands in the way of an even bigger fiscal boom, which could raise interest rates or cause destabilizing inflationary trends that lead to all kinds of perverse corporate behavior

E.g., huge conglomerations that would internalize the market to fend off all the price uncertainty and volatility that comes from inflation or massive corporate relocation to transfer profits out in expectation of the taxes that must follow a debt financed government expansion.

You seem to overlook any such negative effects from even more massive deficits, your faith in them as panacea almost religious?

Perhaps we have unfounded faith in state interventions into a fetishistic economy that leave the underlying relations of production in tact. To me the undermining of such faith is what Marxism is all about, beginning with the critique of Proudhon.

Let me quote Karl Korsch here from his Karl Marx, 1938:

...an apparently new attempt is made to 'control,' to 'correct', and to'steer' the existing economic system. Such measures serve at the utmost to weaken temporarily or even merely to disguise some of the most obstructive results of capitalistic production...In trying to escape from the periodical crises which threaten more and more the existence of bourgeois society, and in a desperate attempt to overcome the existing acute crisis of the whole capitalist system, the bourgeoisie is compelled, by continually fresh and deeper 'interference' with the inner laws of its own mode of production, and continually greater changes in its own social and political organization, to prepare more violent and more universal crises, and at the same time, to diminish the means of overcoming future crises. ___________________

yrs, rakesh



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