On Canada’s single payer health care system. Spoken by Trump in 2011 in the video below.
Yes, I know he didn’t commit himself to such a system, but as late as last year he was saying very un-Republican things on health care. Again, see the videos below.
Now look: I have no idea whether he sincerely believed those earlier positions, and I know his actual health care plan seems very confused and pro-free market. But what Republican presidential candidate has ever made statements like this?
And, of course, I imagine he will retreat from these positions as the Republican establishment paints as a big government “socialist.” So, no, I doubt a president Trump would ever deliver on anything substantive on health care.
I showed some of these videos to an American Democratic friend of mine. “Doesn’t Trump get any credit on this issue?,” I asked. But my Democrat friend was indifferent. That opened my eyes somewhat.
Saturday, March 5, 2016
Friday, March 4, 2016
The US Profit Rate was Abnormally High in WWII and Immediately Afterwards
And so immediately we must ask: why do so many Marxists seem to ignore this fact and assault us with data on profit rates from c. 1945 to today, when their starting point was a period with abnormally and unusually high profit rates and this skews their data?
Robert Brenner’s data for the US non-financial profit rate from 1929 to 2007 is in the graph below, as taken from this post here. I am unsure where the data actually comes from, but perhaps Brenner (2002) or (2006).
Notice the spike in profit rates from 1940 until about 1946/47. During the war, wages were held down but significant price inflation did occur, and so the business profit rate rose. I suspect you would find the same phenomenon in Canada, the UK, Australia or New Zealand in these years too.
So therefore a Marxist graph of profit rates from c. 1945 to 2016 – even if it did show a fall in the average rate of profit – does not prove that capitalism has a long-run tendency to a falling rate of profit, because such data would start out from a time when profit rates were abnormally high in the first place. In reality, we would need good, accurate and consistent data from the early 1800s to today in a large sample of capitalist countries to draw any legitimate conclusions about the long-run tendency of the rate of profit in real world capitalism.
Addendum: I’m on Twitter Now
I want to see what all the fuss is about, but I suspect I’m several years too late:
Brenner, Robert. 2002. The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy. Verso, London.
Brenner, Robert. 2006. The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005. Verso, London and New York.
Robert Brenner’s data for the US non-financial profit rate from 1929 to 2007 is in the graph below, as taken from this post here. I am unsure where the data actually comes from, but perhaps Brenner (2002) or (2006).
Notice the spike in profit rates from 1940 until about 1946/47. During the war, wages were held down but significant price inflation did occur, and so the business profit rate rose. I suspect you would find the same phenomenon in Canada, the UK, Australia or New Zealand in these years too.
So therefore a Marxist graph of profit rates from c. 1945 to 2016 – even if it did show a fall in the average rate of profit – does not prove that capitalism has a long-run tendency to a falling rate of profit, because such data would start out from a time when profit rates were abnormally high in the first place. In reality, we would need good, accurate and consistent data from the early 1800s to today in a large sample of capitalist countries to draw any legitimate conclusions about the long-run tendency of the rate of profit in real world capitalism.
Addendum: I’m on Twitter Now
I want to see what all the fuss is about, but I suspect I’m several years too late:
https://twitter.com/Lord_Keynes2BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brenner, Robert. 2002. The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy. Verso, London.
Brenner, Robert. 2006. The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005. Verso, London and New York.
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