Fighting Inflation – What Would A Democratic-Socialist Government Do?

Think Big: A democratic-socialist government could remove GST from basic food items. It could re-nationalise and centralise the generation and distribution of electric power, and then retail it to citizens at an affordable price. A democratic-socialist government could nationalise the public transportation system and make it free for everyone. A democratic-socialist government could even impose a “Carbon Footprint Tax” on imports. Only among neoliberals are “subsidy”, “tax”, and “tariff” dirty words.

CONFRONTED WITH THE CHALLENGE of a worsening cost-of-living crisis, what would a democratic-socialist government do? Right now, answering that question coherently and believably is the Left’s most important assignment.

The Right’s response to this challenge is relatively clear: throw the economy into recession, maintain strong downward pressure on aggregate demand; reduce public spending. The Centre-Left’s approach to the crisis differs in no serious respect from the Right’s. It hopes to achieve the same goals, using the same methods, but in such a way that their inherent social violence is masked by the rhetoric of “kindness”.

Unfortunately for Jacinda Ardern and her Cabinet, there is no “kind” way of bringing inflation under control while remaining within the ideological parameters of neoliberalism. The classical definition of inflation: too much money chasing too few goods; more or less writes the neoliberal government’s policy for it.

The first and most important objective is to reduce the amount of money in circulation. Neoliberals achieve this key goal by raising the cost of borrowing money. Those with mortgages are required to pay more, leaving households with less to spend. The price of capital also rises, applying the brakes to business expansion and investment. In the face of these developments the labour market contracts: raising the level of unemployment, increasing workers’ fear of “the sack”, and setting off a steady decline in real wages.

In short order, the problem of too much money in too many people’s pockets simply disappears – along with their cash and credit. But wait, there’s more. If a farmer cannot make a dollar by supplying the market with one cabbage, then he will supply it with two. There will be more cabbages to buy, and at a lower price.

And there you have it! The cost of living falls. The inflationary tide recedes. The problems confronting neoliberal economists and politicians are solved.

All well and good for the neoliberal economists and politicians, but not in any way good for the human-beings on the receiving end of their decisions. The great virtue of these macroeconomic measures, from the neoliberals’ perspective, is that they save them from having to deal with the devastating micro effects of their policies.

They don’t have to witness the expression on workers’ faces when they’re told that their employer is “letting them go”. They don’t hear the sobs of the young couple leaving the house they struggled so hard to buy, but whose mortgage they can no longer afford. The small businessman who cannot make the numbers add-up, no matter how hard he tries, suffers alone – a casualty of capitalism’s “creative destruction”. The real-world effects of a neoliberal government’s economic policies occur in places where the politicians who set them in motion seldom visit.

In the long run, though, everyone is better-off for having helped to beat inflation and bring the cost-of-living under control. Such is the refrain of the neoliberal decision-makers. It is a bleak sort of consolation, akin to that of the General who praises the sacrifice of thousands of conscript soldiers – all of them killed by the murderous ineptitude of his military tactics. There are ways to win battles that do not necessitate slaughter. There are ways to beat inflation that do not depend on simultaneously beating-up the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens.

But, what are these ways? How can inflation be beaten without inflicting economic pain on the weakest members of society?

For democratic-socialists, the answer lies in using the enormous power of the state to regulate the economy. Exactly the same power that neoliberalism currently uses to entrench the power and privilege of the capitalist elites.

Because the power of the state does not have to be used to keep the private sector profitable. The power of the state could just as easily be used to freeze mortgage rates, cap the prices of necessities, and control rents; to raise appreciably more revenue from its wealthiest citizens; and to levy “windfall” taxes on all those corporations guilty of racking-up excessive profits during the Covid-19 pandemic. (Even Boris Johnson’s Conservatives did that!)

At the same time, a democratic-socialist government could remove GST from basic food items. It could re-nationalise and centralise the generation and distribution of electric power, and then retail it to citizens at an affordable price. A democratic-socialist government could nationalise the public transportation system and make it free for everyone. A democratic-socialist government could even impose a “Carbon Footprint Tax” on imports. Only among neoliberals are “subsidy” “tax” and “tariff” dirty words.

To be fair to Jacinda and her Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, they have made a modest effort towards subsidising petroleum and public transport. They have also provided many New Zealanders with a “Winter Energy Payment”. These are good moves, but they are nowhere near enough.

Sadly, the full mobilisation of the state’s powers to bring down the cost-of-living, tax excess profit and  wealth out of circulation, and reconfigure the ownership of what are, in truth, “social” industries for the benefit of the many, not the few, is still beyond the range of this Government’s political imagination. Nearly 40 years of neoliberalism has robbed Labour of the courage and creativity that, in the 1930s and 40s, made New Zealand a model democratic-socialist state.

Conservatives reading this post will shriek “Muldoonism!” And, they will be right. But there is another way to look at Rob Muldoon’s economic management, apart from using it as shorthand for everything that was wrong with New Zealand in the 1970s and 80s.

It is possible to recast Muldoon’s policies as proof of how deeply ingrained the determination to look after the interests of ordinary people had become in the New Zealand political system. Muldoon subsidised and regulated and controlled because the alternative – letting “market forces” rip – would leave far too many casualties in its wake. When Rob Muldoon promised “New Zealand the way YOU want it” – he meant it.

That the Labour Party was willing to inflict those casualties; that to keep the good opinion of Treasury and The Business Roundtable it was willing to abandon its democratic-socialist principles; and that, to this very day, its political creativity remains stunted by the neoliberal dogma it cannot seem to abandon; strikes me as a far greater crime than any Rob Muldoon may have committed. In the end, even the Springbok Tour made New Zealand a stronger country.

But, neoliberalism has not made New Zealand a stronger country, it has made it weaker. When the instinct of both its major parties is to use the nation’s weakest citizens as economic cannon-fodder, then surely it is time New Zealanders made “neoliberalism” a dirty word? Imposing cruelty in the name of kindness has only ever left humanity with more that is cruel, and less that is kind. It is not what democratic-socialists do.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 22 July 2022.

The Recession New Zealand Has To Have?

Going Down? Governments also suffer in recessions and depressions – just like their citizens. Slowing economic activity means fewer companies making profits, fewer people in paid employment, fewer dollars being spent, and much less revenue being collected. With its own “income” shrinking, the instinct of most government’s is to sharply reduce spending. 

CONVENTIONAL ECONOMIC WISDOM insists that the only effective cure for rising inflationary expectations is a short, sharp recession. Easy to say, but much, much harder to accomplish – especially if you are at least nominally a party of the Left. The ghost of John Maynard Keynes is forever whispering in the ears of Labour parties – even those which long ago embraced the precepts of Neoliberalism – and his message is always the same: Spend, spend, spend.

The problem with spending in an inflationary environment is that it does nothing to discourage the notion that the price of basic items in six months’ time will be appreciably higher than they are now. In such circumstances, simple logic dictates that it is better to make a substantial purchase today, than tomorrow. They also encourage the idee fixe that one’s income must be increased to match, at the very least, the rate of inflation. Understanding this expectation, employers budget to recover the cost of increased wages and salaries by increasing the price of their goods and services.

Once stimulated, inflationary expectations, and the upward spiral in wages and prices they set in motion, are very difficult to suppress.

Essentially, a government is required to make it a lot more expensive for people to borrow money. At the macro level, sharply rising interest rates have the effect of slowing economic growth. At the micro level, employers stop hiring and start firing. Those forced onto the dole face a dramatic loss of income and all discretionary spending ceases abruptly. The rest of the workforce, fearful of losing their jobs, stop demanding wage and salary increases. They also stop spending on non-essentials and start saving. Retailers now have the strongest of incentives to keep their prices stable.

Pretty soon, economic growth stalls, and then shifts into reverse. Pessimism reigns supreme. Inflationary expectations, along with inflation itself, come to a shuddering halt.

The trick, of course, is in knowing how long to keep the interest rates going up, when to hold them steady, and when to let them drop. Keep them high for too long and the economy risks transitioning from recession to depression. Those with money, ill disposed to risk it, satisfy themselves with government-guaranteed returns. Unable to borrow, or meet their higher interest payments, businesspeople go bust, and property-owners with mortgages lose their homes. Unemployment rises, spending decreases still further, and retailers are forced to contemplate lowering their prices.

What the economists most fear now is not of inflation but deflation. The prospect of the economy not simply grinding to a halt – but shrinking.

At this point, all eyes turn to the government. Something must be done! But governments also suffer in recessions and depressions – just like their citizens. Slowing economic activity means fewer companies making profits, fewer people in paid employment, fewer dollars being spent, and much less revenue being collected. With its own “income” shrinking, the instinct of most government’s is to sharply reduce spending. Now it is the turn of those businesses, organisations and institutions dependent on government money to feel the pinch. Exactly the same contractionary spiral that wound down the private sector, now grips the state and its hangers-on.

But the trials and tribulations of the state do not stop there. The huge number of unemployed and otherwise impoverished people have nowhere else to turn for assistance but their government. Meeting that need from a dwindling treasury, however, is the stuff of political nightmares. Just keeping the education, health and transportation systems functioning is a huge drain on the state’s resources, feeding and housing the hungry and homeless threatens to render it insolvent.

But you can’t just let people starve – can you? The hungry and the homeless themselves are likely to answer that question, as they did in New Zealand’s hungry winter of 1932, when riots tore the main streets of Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin apart. Terrified, the conservative coalition government postponed the 1934 general election by 12 months and passed the draconian Public Safety Conservation Act. Not that it did them much good. On Tuesday, 26 November 1935, New Zealanders elected their first Labour Government.

And what did that government do? It spent, spent, spent.

So, what should Jacinda and Grant do? Continue to spend, spend, spend? Or allow Reserve Bank Governor, Adrian Orr, to push up the Official Cash Rate (OCR) to 5 percent and watch economic activity nosedive?

From a left-social-democratic perspective, at least part of the answer would be to embark on a massive political education campaign. Explain to Labour’s voters the havoc inflation wreaks upon the lives of ordinary people, and why it must be driven out of the New Zealand economy. Tell them defeating inflationary expectations will require the full co-operation of the whole population. Then announce a two-year wage, price and rent freeze. Further announce the state subsidisation of basic foodstuffs and energy supplies, to be paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy, the restoration of Death Duties and a Capital Gains Tax.

A return to the bad old days of Muldoonism? Damn straight! It certainly beats asking the poorest and most vulnerable New Zealanders to carry the full burden of eliminating inflation. Few people appreciate that the whole purpose of destroying Muldoonism – which was simply an eccentric form of Keynesianism – was to free the wealthy from their obligation to contribute their fair share towards the maintenance of a decent society. That was all Rogernomics and Ruthanasia were ever about: making the poor pay more so the rich didn’t have to.

Not that Jacinda and Grant are at all likely to adopt a left-social-democratic economic agenda to deal with the impending crisis. They will make the poor pay, pretend they’re not, fool nobody, and be bundled out of office in 2023.

Ironically, their policy choices may end up decisively reducing inflationary expectations. To the limited degree permitted by Neoliberal economics, the economy will recover, and the National Party will kick-off another nine year term on a thoroughly sunny note. Who knows, by the time the next election rolls around in 2026 they might even be in the mood to: Spend, spend, spend.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 10 June 2022.

Omicron and 6% Inflation – May The Saints Preserve Us!

Everything Is On The Up-And-Up: Right now, New Zealand is at the pre-crashing the economy stage of the battle against inflation. But, with annual inflation nudging 6 percent, a level New Zealand has not seen for more than a decade, the demands of the neoliberal economists for a series of quite sharp interest rate rises are becoming ever more strident. 

OMICRON HAS ARRIVED and, not unreasonably, its spread will monopolise the attention of our news media for weeks to come. But this latest variant of Covid-19 is very far from the only challenge facing New Zealanders. A highly disruptive economic phenomenon, not seen in this country for a whole generation, is making a disconcerting reappearance. An inflation rate significantly higher than the 1-2 percent per annum tolerated by the Reserve Bank since the late 1980s is threatening to further complicate an already fiendishly complex socio-economic equation.

The eradication of excessive inflation was the most important short-term objective of the neoliberal revolution. Squeezing constant price rises out of the system would be an achievement consumers were bound to notice. Indeed, the restoration of price stability would be presented – and largely accepted – as justification for the many other, often wrenching, upheavals of the reform period.

For the neoliberals, knocking inflation for six came with added benefits. At a stroke, the key justification for cost-of-living adjustments to wage rates would be removed. Back in the days when most wage-workers belonged to a trade union, rapid rises in the cost of goods and services was compensated for with corresponding rises in the cost of labour. This was the “wage-price spiral”, which most economists characterised as the fundamental explanation for inflation becoming economically “entrenched”. Their favourite metaphor was of a dog chasing its own tail.

It was absolutely crucial, they argued, not only to eliminate high inflation, but also to remove high “inflationary expectations” from the minds of wage- and salary-earners. So long as workers believed that prices were bound to rise over the period of their union-negotiated wage agreement, they would not only take care to secure an increase to cover the price rises that had already occurred, but also to secure an additional margin sufficient to cover future increases. Should the employers be prevailed upon to meet their employees’ wage demands, the standard response was to recover the additional wage costs by raising prices. Upwards and upwards inflation spiralled, to the general frustration of the whole population.

Particularly aggrieved were those on fixed incomes: pensions and benefits whose value, in almost every case, was progressively whittled away by excessive inflation rates. Even if adjusted to accommodate historic inflation, pensions and benefits were almost never adjusted to meet future increases in the cost of living. The inevitable loss of purchasing power meant that those on fixed incomes became poorer and poorer.

Not everybody living under high inflation was unhappy. People who borrowed heavily to purchase a house, for example, watched in glee as what had seemed a colossal mortgage continued to shrink, in a relative sense, until, after a few years of high inflation, it was reduced to a mere bagatelle. Thanks to the steady increases in their salaries, paying off the bank got easier and easier. What was not to like?

Plenty, if you were a coupon-clipping investor. If the rate of inflation exceeded the fixed rate of interest on a long-term investment, then your purchasing power was bound to suffer. The sum agreed for making your funds available to the borrower may have seemed generous when originally negotiated, but its value, in real terms, upon maturation could be much less so. Small wonder that the neoliberal economists’ recommended solution for excessive inflation – a sharp increase in the price of money – i.e. high interest rates – could always count on the vociferous support of the rentier class.

Jacking up interest rates, suddenly and substantially, certainly reduces inflation, but only at the deliberately incurred cost of crashing the economy.

Without easy access to credit, marginal businesses falter and fail. Workers are laid off in their thousands, and the consequent, often savage, reduction in overall purchasing power precipitates further waves of business failures and lay-offs. With demand for goods and services plummeting, any attempt to preserve a business’s income-stream by raising prices becomes commercially suicidal.

With unemployment rising steadily (along with the supply of labour) the ability of workers’ unions to extract pay rises from their bosses falls away to nothing. Increasingly, the individual worker’s purchasing power is maintained by his taking on of more and more debt. An indebted worker is a quiescent worker, so the wage-price spiral ceases as abruptly as the effectiveness of the unions which set it in motion. Such inflation as remains in the system now works against the income share of the workforce, who find themselves working longer and harder for what is, in real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) terms – less.

Right now, New Zealand is at the pre-crashing the economy stage of the battle against inflation. But, with annual inflation nudging 6 percent, a level New Zealand has not seen for more than a decade, the demands of the neoliberal economists for a series of quite sharp interest rate rises are becoming ever more strident. They are deeply concerned that the combination of supply-chain interruptions raising demand (and, hence, prices) and a serious labour shortage allowing workers to bid-up their wages, are embedding high inflationary expectations in the nation’s consciousness.

There is a great deal the neoliberal establishment will risk to eradicate those expectations – up to and including deliberately throwing the New Zealand economy into recession. As always, that will be very bad news for most of us, but quite encouraging news for some.

Any significant rise in interest rates will see thousands of mortgage holders default on their loans and lose their homes. The resulting surge in mortgagee sales, by expanding the supply of properties on the market, will precipitate a sharp fall in house prices across New Zealand.

While that is not an outcome likely to recommend itself to older home-owners accustomed to seeing the value of their property going up and up – not down and down – there will be many younger New Zealanders who are willing to admit, quietly and privately: “This anti-inflationary thing – it’s not so bad”.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 January 2022.

Kondratiev Comes Full-Cycle

TO hear the business reporters tell it, this "credit crunch", while serious, is not beyond the wit of the world’s economists to fix. With just a few billion – or trillion – more dollars, the financial markets will begin to free-up, and then, quite quickly, life will return to normal.

Our own Treasury officials confidently predict that New Zealand’s current recession will be shallow and short.

By 2010 – 2011 at the latest – we should all be out of the woods.

Let’s hope so.

Personally, I’m not quite so optimistic.

Why? Because earlier today I was reading about an economist who discovered the secret to predicting the economic future. And I’m not referring here to the immediate future – what’s going to happen to the stockmarket next week, or next month. No. I’m referencing a guy who was able to accurately predict what the global economy would look like ten, fifty, even a hundred years into the future.

His name was Nikolai Kondratiev.

In a saner, less bloodthirsty 20th Century, Kondratiev would have been celebrated as one of the Soviet Union’s greatest economists, and hailed throughout the world as the scholar who first discerned the long waves of economic expansion and contraction that periodicize the history of capitalism.

In the 20th century that actually happened, Kondratiev enjoyed only a few years of productive endeavour before falling victim to the political pathologies of Stalinism, dying in 1938, at the age of just 46, in front of an NKVD firing-squad.

His immediate offence was being too closely associated with the "New Economic Policy" (NEP) – an essentially social-democratic response to the abject failure of Lenin’s "war communism", which had brought the Soviet economy to its knees. Kondratiev believed that the development of heavy industry in the Soviet Union should only be attempted after the successful modernisation of its agriculture. Only when all Russians had enough to eat, and only upon the base of a thriving light industrial sector, producing agricultural equipment and consumer goods, should the growth of heavy industries be encouraged. Such thinking was anathema to Stalin and his henchmen, and Kondratiev was driven from his post as head of the Institute of Conjuncture and hauled off to the gulag.

His real crime, however, was to call into question the whole notion that economies could be made to perform according to the conscious interventions of human planners.

In his studies of capitalism he had discerned patterns of development that contradicted the linear notions of economic growth then favoured by his Soviet colleagues. Rather than progressing in a straight line, the evolution of the global capitalist economy appeared to describe a regular wave pattern, with a cycle of approximately fifty years.

For a detailed description of Kondratiev’s theories, follow the links here and here. Suffice to say that he and his followers, which included the great Czech-American economist Joseph Schumpeter, broke down the development of the global capitalist economy into five distinct waves of development.

The first wave, beginning in the late 18th Century was generated by the invention of the steam engine and the growth of factory-spun textiles.

The second wave commenced in the 1830s with the worldwide expansion of steam-powered transportation – especially railways.

The third wave got underway in the 1880s, driven by the growth of the steel, electricity, chemical and heavy-engineering industries.

The fourth wave witnessed the rise of the petrochemical, automobile manufacturing, and other mass production industries, which gathered momentum in the years immediately prior to World War I.

The fifth wave (our present) began in the 1970s with the revolution in telecommunications and information technology – giving birth to the age of the personal computer, cellphones, and the Internet.

Kondratiev’s waves have four distinct phases: Improvement – when the new inventions revolutionise the way people work and live. Prosperity – when the new technology has had time to bed-in and the wealth it is generating flows in all directions. Recession – when innovation slows and growth begins to falter. Depression – when wealth generation ceases and the economy collapses.

Kondratiev’s seminal work, The Major Economic Cycles, was published in 1925 – at the height of the Roaring Twenties – but working from his basic premises he was able to predict the Great Depression a full five years before it happened.

And Kondratiev’s foresight didn’t end with his prediction of the Slump. By plotting his fifty-year cycles along an axis divided into years, his disciples were confident of another steep slide into recession and depression in the late-1970s and 80s, and yet another big crash, timed for, yes, you guessed it, the start of the second decade of the 21st Century.

Historically, the contractionary phase of the Kondratiev Cycle tends to last not just for one or two years, but for anything from ten to fifteen years.

Kondratiev’s theory would suggest that times are about to get a whole lot worse before they get better.

Hence my pessimism.