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WE ALL STRUCTURALISTS NOW? John Gelles July 23, 2010 at 10:17 am If the global economy is imagined as a system not radically different from the weather system, in that events take place and patterns appear when history is the subject, but predictions of the future are forever unreliable, we have a way to join empiricism to the logic of needs satisfaction versus the more formal logics applied in banking, accounting and law, especially corporate, commercial and property law. It is pleasing to imagine the day when every stomach signals its needs and it current condition. These would be on line–and the patterns of hunger, thirst, and, say, stomach cancer, while not being immediately predictable, would nevertheless be objective and not subject to dispute. The disciplines of economics and supply logistics could merge; and Keynesian monetary systems of production might become the powerhouses they were always capable of being. It is particularly gratifying to me to anticipate sovereign money as far superior to debt as the starting point for banking and accounting. Were this to happen, functional finance, a set of ideas that are a nearly forgotten foundation for structuralism, would dictate fully funded labor and capital markets in which necessities were subsidized, nothing was taxed, and private and public profit on sale of high margin luxuries, kept demand and supply of necessities in appropriate balance, and the pattern of stomach signals had a purpose where patterns of mere auction prices had none. |