>I'm not an adept in the Levy moneyline,
>but I do find it interesting. My comments
>preceded with 'mbs':
>
>James Baird wrote:
>>mattress, or a loan, or what have you. When the
>>government wants to spend money, it just does it - the
>>money doesn't "come from" anywhere.
>
>DH: A government, or its central bank, can create money out of the air.
>But if it does too much of that - creates money more rapidly than an
>economy's capacity to deliver goods & services - it creates
>inflation. Just because right-wingers say this doesn't mean it isn't
>true.
>
>mbs: The fact that the Gov's money creation capacities
>are limited doesn't mean they are not real. Just because
>I can't fill up Lake Erie doesn't mean I can't pee.
And it would be kind of hard to measure the presence of even several bladdersful of Sawicky pee in Lake Erie. Which is another way of saying that while the government can create money out of thin air, its prospects for doing so are quite limited if you want the money to retain any value.
> >Do corporations dominate the world? To support this claim, Hertz
>>cites an analysis which concludes that "51 of the 100 biggest
>>economies of the world are now corporations. The sales of GM and
>>Ford are greater than the GDP of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa."
>>This is gross abuse of statistics. The study measures the size of
>>companies by sales. But national economies are measured by GDP.
>>Since GDP is a measure of value added, one must compare it with the
>
>mbs: GDP includes capital consumption, which is not value added.
>NDP is value added.
NNP is about 87% of GNP, so the diff isn't that big. The point about comparing the sales of individual corps with the final sales concept behind national income accounting stands unscathed.
> The separation between a corporation and its
>sub-contractors is arguably thin and mostly legal.
That depends. GM buys from all kinds of suppliers. Firms that make steel, glass, and microprocessors are pretty big guys all on thir own, and would be quite surprised to hear that they're only fictiously different from GM.
Doug