Category Archives: Michael Hoexter

Without an Effective Macroethics, Our Civilization is Doomed

Posted on March 14, 2013 by | 31 comments

By Michael Hoexter

In a previous post, I outlined how leaders in positions of political power, especially at the national level, are chosen to fulfill a unique ethical role, that differs from that which is appropriate for private individuals and business leaders.  Because of the power that accrues to political leaders and the hopes attached to them by their constituents, politicians’ actions in office have much greater repercussions than, for the most part, the actions of individuals and individual businesses in the private sector.  Once elected or appointed, political leaders have choices to make, often with room for their own discretion, which draw upon values they hold, values that are in part conditioned by, though not entirely reducible to their political and political-economic ideology.   These decisions most often are concerned with policymaking, budgeting, and legislation that impact an entire nation or the international system of nations. Continue reading →

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Via Government’s Fiscal Policy and Regulatory Oversight, Ethical Values Shape Monetary Value

Posted on February 18, 2013 by | 32 comments

By Michael Hoexter

There is no unified theory in our popular understanding of value: there are the market values of goods and then there are our “values” which we consider to be some of the most personal and even sacred aspects of ourselves.   Once people emerge from the realm of necessity or being driven by what seems to them to be compulsions of various kinds, they may feel that they are then making decisions which draw to some degree on their ethical or personal values.   People often have the impression that most of their financial dealings have little to do with their personal ethics; the realm of market interaction is viewed for the most part as an area of life controlled by forces outside the self or motivated by our insistent drives for self-preservation and pleasure.  There are exceptions: people of often modest means give money to religious organizations, as a way to express something of their ethical values or at least the ethical values that are expected of them by their religious community of reference.  And wealthy people will tend to use some of their substantial discretionary income to make an ethical statement directed by some combination of personal commitments and the desire to make a public statement about themselves.  Alternatively, if someone controls a business or a portion of a business, they may express personal values by the way they conduct themselves in that business or by strategic decisions they may make, with the important proviso that the business must maintain its solvency.

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Austerity: the Political Struggle over Who Controls the Economy’s Liquidity

Posted on February 4, 2013 by | 25 comments

By Michael Hoexter

The austerity campaign, a favorite for the last four years of politicians and financial tycoons, remains a seemingly self-contradictory and baffling phenomenon for those who know that it goes against at least 80 years of economic wisdom regarding management of the economy.  The campaign draws on irrational strains and inconsistencies in our economic self-understanding to turn politicians against the welfare of society and the economy as a whole as well as against their own interests as political leaders.  Austerity appears to serve the perceived short-term interests of some sectors of the wealthy and the financial industry but the long-term interests of no one. 

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Our Leaders Are Mistaking the Modern Money System for a Fistful of Dollars – Part 2

Posted on January 21, 2013 by | 26 comments

By Michael Hoexter

An Adjustable Liquidity Source and Liquidity Sink

While it may seem obvious and a tautology to treat money as a “liquidity source”, sometimes, especially in an area of life where there are many unexamined assumptions, it makes sense to rehearse the obvious.  “High-powered” state-issued money is treated within accounting as an individual’s or a businesses “most liquid” asset but anything that functions as money confers “liquidity” on any individual who possesses that instrument or thing.  Liquidity means that that object or instrument can be readily traded for wished-for goods and services.  This liquidity can extend to “money-objects” other than state issued currency but the latter is in most contexts the most liquid money technology that we have.

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Our Leaders Are Mistaking the Modern Money System for a Fistful of Dollars – Part 1

Posted on January 20, 2013 by | 36 comments

By Michael Hoexter

When looking down at earth from space, you would be able to see the shapes of continents and even, if you are aware of geological history, the way, for instance that Africa and South America fit together as they were once part of the same mega-continent.    When living on the surface of the earth, as we most often experience it, one gets an entirely different perspective in which the individual contours of the land, vegetation, buildings, and coastlines look much larger and have different proportions relative to the viewer.  Both perspectives are real and equally valid but in each, different information is revealed or becomes salient to the viewer/participant.

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Austerity’s Irrationality: The Age of Economic Anorexia

Posted on January 2, 2013 by | 14 comments

By Michael Hoexter

Rational public debate about the economy and government’s role in the economy is currently in extremely short supply.  In a debt-deflation, a weak economy saved from Great Depression-level misery by half-way, inadequate government action, government spending is now blamed categorically for the ills of the economy by the aggressive austerity campaign that has captured the political discussion in major capitals.  Previous flaws in the economic theory of the state and theory of money, typically consigned to the realm of different economic “tastes” or moral persuasions, are now revealed to be catastrophic gaps in most economists’ and the public’s understanding of the basics of the capitalist economy.  The predatory austerity campaigners, many originating from within the financial industry, have turned what should have been an era of greater clarity about government’s critical role in the economy into a scapegoating of government for ills perpetrated for the most part by components of the financial sector or by the subservience of the public sector to the financial sector.  Austerity policies when implemented are the equivalent of ‘economicide’ as they strangle government’s ability to spur lagging demand for real goods and services as well as government’s role in steering the economy to deal with challenges that the private sector can’t or doesn’t want to face on its own.

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Fueled by Deficit Hysteria, Obama and the Republicans Are Choosing the Path of “Economicide”

Posted on December 25, 2012 by | 27 comments

By Michael Hoexter

In the “fiscal cliff” negotiations and the subsequent debt limit talks between Obama and the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives, it appears that there will be no “good guys” because the talks and policy framework within which they are operating are at odds with the welfare of the American people.  Set up by a series of interactions over the last four years between Obama and his nominal opponents in the Republican Party, the framework of the negotiations ignores the way that the US government finances itself as well as the only known economic policy orientation which will allow our economy to thrive; the proposed policies and negotiations have been to date economically illiterate.  The biggest losers in these talks if they “succeed” according to the self-evaluations of the Republican and Democratic leaderships will be the American people and politically the Democrats who go along with a framework that demands cuts in federal budget deficits at all costs.  Continue reading →

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“Deficit” is the Wrong Word and Concept

Posted on December 21, 2012 by | 44 comments

By Michael Hoexter

The hour is late and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are attempting to shrink the social welfare state in the name of a lack of funds.  Barack Obama has made it now abundantly clear that he is no friend to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, after years of signaling overtly and covertly that cutting social programs was his intention.   Obama is as beholden as any right-wing politician, a group among which some might count him, to the notion that the government is running out of money, as if our money was still backed by a limited supply of gold bullion.  According to Obama and his fiscal advisors, the government’s supposedly limited funds must be conserved by cutting the activities of government while also raising taxes to, in the “hard-money” telling of the story, “increase revenue” from the private sector for the remaining government programs.  The former activity of cutting social welfare spending seems in Washington DC to take political precedence over the latter, in part because the wealthy in the private sector are a powerful lobby for their monetary holdings and income.  Meanwhile the poor and middle class have not been, over the past 40 years, a powerful lobby for the social safety net which puts a “floor” under their standards of living. Continue reading →

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Obama and Boehner’s Grand Bargain: Gullible Democrats are Falling for the Ol’ “Good Cop, Bad Cop” Routine

Posted on December 10, 2012 by | 11 comments

By Michael Hoexter

Generally political analyses of the last four years suffer from two main faults:  they either describe an almost undifferentiated environment of complete political corruption or they pinpoint a single main source of our political downfall and attribute most “evil” to that source.  Both of these approaches can at times illuminate but ultimately they leave activists and citizens with prescriptions for a campaign of either unimaginative partisanship or ultimately exhausting efforts to joust at every powerful actor and institution on the political scene.  In other words, we are often left with either on the one hand “they’re all evil” and on the other “evil emanates mostly from this person/institution/party”. Continue reading →

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The Austerity Campaign Turns Ambivalence about Our Own Nature Against Us

Posted on December 3, 2012 by | 36 comments

By Michael Hoexter

The success of the austerity campaign in capturing the American and European political process is remarkable considering that it prescribes exactly the opposite of what factually grounded economic analyses would recommend.  Leading politicians and their advisors are pushing governments to curtail spending at a time of economic weakness and doing so in the post gold-standard monetary era where currency-issuing governments have no affordability constraint on spending.   The focus on public debt is leading the political process away from economic growth and full employment, despite the fact that all major actors in this process claim that their preferred policies are the way to lasting growth.  In the current American “fiscal cliff” negotiations, the leadership of both sides of the negotiation are pushing for different forms of austerity, with no effective organized force in government working against this economic madness. Continue reading →

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