Hey Keynsian/Marxist economic gurus

[Lance Murdoch]

I have been talking and sometimes debating with Von Miser loving, monetarist bourgeoisie investors on the Internet for a few months.  I need to learn more about economics.  I have a specific question or two, but I'm also curious of what books or web sites are good to expand my understanding of economics.  Sometimes I fall asleep reading economics books - even ones that don't make me as drowsy and are sometimes funny like Doug's "Wall Street".  Maybe Alan Abelson and Louis Rukeyeser are always making puns because everyone would fall right asleep if economic data and analysis were read in a droll, monotone voice without a ticker symbol scrolling by and news flashes.

So my first question is, what are good books to read to understand macro-economics better?  Marx, Keynes, Adam Smith, Doug Henwood?  Hayek, Nozick, Friedman, von Mises?  I know economics 101 to some extent - utility, supply meets demand, I have some notion of how fed funds rates affect things and so forth, I know more about fundamental stock analysis (Graham and Dodd) and certain areas more than other areas.  Sometimes I get too pissed off to read right-wing economists like Malthus but I guess I have to understand some of their arguments.  I'm very interested in left wing analysis, Marx and Keynes are important and I like Doug's book a lot.  Also I'm interested in sort of economics 101 or 202 books that go into supply and demand and so forth.  I watched that PBS show which seemed right-tilted by Yergin, "Climbing the Heights" or whatever which explained (one point of view of) the Asian financial crisis.  I guess supply side and monetarism and corporate (but not social) globa!
li!
zation are "in" now, Keynes and Marx are "out".

As far as my specific question which maybe someone can summarize what they think...I have been studying the Hershey strike a little bit, so a question came to my mind.  What effect does the historically high P/E ratio that the US stock market currently has, have on the economy and on companies?  Investors seem to be complaining about low dividend yields, so I guess the only two solutions to that, that they like, are increasing productivity of existing workers or expropriating more surplus labor value from the workers.  Why are P/E ratios so high right now - why have they been so high, while decades ago P/E ratios are much lower?  Has labor losing it's power meant earnings are more likely to increase since workers are more "flexible" and so forth?

Thanks...I'll be posting some information about the Hershey strike soon.

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