what do y’all think of this? It makes some good points and Micheal Hudson is probably not right, but I have one criticism to make. One of his arguments that the richest people are still industrial capitalists (because they started businesses that do stuff), not finance capitalists, but as Cory Doctorow points out, those companies are basically just rentiers at this point. Amazon makes most of its money hosting other businesses on their site, “Meta” makes most of its money hosting being a middleman connecting advertisers and unpaid content creators poorly. Thus, it seems at least the emperial core has increased rentierism. This doesn’t mean it’s not built on peripheral industry and that reindustrializing the west would benefit average people, but it does seem to be good news about the decline of empire. Other thoughts?
Well that is fundamentally wrong on its face. The people that own the highest valued companies didn’t make shit. They bought or inherited it. (Obvious example being Elon Musk).
As for criticizing rentiers without any broader examination of the system the produces and enables rentiers is just trying to reapply Adam Smith to modern economics.
I’m not very smart but this all sounds very stupid.
He says they took advantage of new production processes, but doesn’t consider that those processes don’t do much productive.
lol in musks case okay yeah if you count carbon tax credit loopholes that allow you to basically print money as a “new production process”
Roderic/Mason has a bad analysis, yeah.
lol I’m at least well enough read that I have a decent bullshit detector.