If the US government had a dollar every time someone proclaimed to learn the lessons of the Great Depression, we probably wouldn’t have a budget deficit. Usually, these debates turn on the question of fiscal policy and whether in fact, FDR’s New Deal had a discernable role in generating recovery. “Fiscal austerians” have done much to dismiss the economic achievements of the New Deal, some even suggesting that FDR’s fiscal policies worsened the crisis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w_UOwJhGHQo

Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were seminal conservative politicians who came to power in 1979 and 1980 at the end of a period of profound transformation in the Anglo-American world. A postwar system forged in war, and built on a broad foundation of industrial labor, rising middle class prosperity, and an active government hand in economic development was transforming itself socially and economically into something quite different.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow-_G26lpOk

The above link is to an interview with Peter Kingsley who is a scholar regarding what is usually referred to as Pre Socratic philosophy. Though Kinsley emphasizes the mystical interpretation of the philosophy typical of Parmenides, there is more of a philosophic metaphysical interpretation as well which has major implications for a commons centered economics

When you put this statement in both the historical context and under present circumstances it is utterly stunning to read such clarity of purpose and response. If the current duopoly now masking as the Democratic Leadership Council, with the take over of the RNC by the extremists, including the angry, the unhinged, the deeply naive, and unfortunately only the usual harvesting and occupation by the dys-functional.

In the United States, the real meaning of May Day has been largely forgotten. To be sure, there is a “Labor Day,” a time for picnics and various festivities, but May 1 has been converted—not without reason and not without malice—into “Law Day.” In 1921, following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, May Day was renamed “Americanization Day.” In 1958, May Day became “Loyalty Day,” and later that year, President Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 “Law Day.”

Readers, I can think of no better way to celebrate May 1st as International Labor Day, than to re-publish this article. In effect the economic and fiscal reforms were markedly post Keynesian-like but actually prior to Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in Feb. 1936, or Adolph Lowe, Abba Lerner, Hyman Minsky, or the rest of the authentic post-Keynesian lineage. Note Well that Milton Friedman and Paul Krugman et al are effectively bastard-Keynesians. for now, Tadit Anderson

“…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”

—Arthur Young; 1771

A longer version of the article will appear in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on December 5th, 2011

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

A historian and provocateur says the modern problem with debt is really a problem with how we see it. THE WORD ITSELF is one we find chilling: debt. On a personal level, the burden of debt can hang over our lives and choke off our options; at the national level, worry about the ballooning US debt has threatened to paralyze both Washington and the economy as a whole.