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| Gahan's okay with money as we know it. |
Just about the first lesson any philosophy student learns is to question all the premises. Do the things one takes for granted survive scrutiny? I became a philosophy student at IU Southeast in the fall of 1978, it got real very quickly: Do grades mean what we think they do?
We gathered at a classroom in Hillside Hall, and Prof. McCarthy greeted us with a warning, which I now paraphrase:
“Welcome to Philosophy 101. If you’ve chosen the university experience as a means of compiling a perfect 4.0 GPA, then I recommend you drop this class and choose another, because I do not award perfect scores. There is no such thing as perfection, and if you disagree with me, be prepared to argue your case logically. It won’t matter, because you’ll still not receive an A for this class. Would anyone like to discuss the nature of perfection?”
Does money mean what we think it does?
Neoliberalism has tricked us into believing a fairytale about where money comes from, by Mary Mellor (The Conversation)
There is nothing natural about money. There is no link to some scarce essential form of money that sets a limit to its creation. It can be composed of base metal, paper or electronic data – none of which is in short supply. Similarly – despite what you may have heard about the need for austerity and a lack of certain cash-generating trees – there is no “natural” level of public expenditure. The size and reach of the public sector is a matter of political choice.
Which puts austerity, the culling of expenditure in the public economy, under some question. For some countries, such as Greece, the impact of austerity has been devastating. Austerity policies still persist despite numerous studies arguing that they were entirely misconceived, based on political choice rather than economic logic. But the economic case for austerity is equally mistaken: it is based on what can best be described as fairytale economics ...
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