1. “I identify three distinct classes that are actively involved in production. I call these (from top to bottom) financiers, proprietors and wage-earners.”You certainly pick good classes for that list. To me, though, financiers are not so much “actively involved in production”. It is more like they are sitting on a park bench, tossing crumbs to pigeons. “Tossing crumbs” occurred to me after reading your hierarchy of kissing up, which is so funny and so right at the same time.2. “I have adopted the view that the role of money in present-day American society is to function as permission slips“Okay, but permission slips that always come at a cost. It’s not like in grammar school where you can get one just by asking for it. To me, the whole principle of money is that it IS used for exchange, not only when we spend it but also when we receive it. I see the Robert Anton Wilson quote refers to money as “tickets”. He is not alone. John Stuart Mill wrote:”The pounds or shillings which a person receives weekly or yearly, are not what constitutes his income; they are a sort of tickets or orders which he can present for payment at any shop he pleases, and which entitle him to receive a certain value of any commodity that he makes choice of.”In a single sentence, Mill casually dismisses the value of money received but praises the value of money one can spend. His argument is garbage. The MMT view as expressed by Warren Mosler amplifies the flaw that J.S. Mill created. In his Dallas address, Mosler says”All government spending is simply a matter of changing numbers upward in our bank accounts. It doesn’t come from anywhere. Just like when you kick a field goal and get 3 points. Where does the stadium get those points? Right, they don’t come from anywhere. It’s just scorekeeping.”But spending isn’t just a matter of scorekeeping. If it was, no one would worry about income inequality.3. “… there is a chronically if not perpetually unemployed underclass. Most
leftists identify this as a subset of the working class, which consists
of people who are not independently wealthy and therefore don’t have the
option of not working.”People who “don’t have the option of not working”, but are unemployed, seem to me meet Keynes’ definition of “involuntary unemployment” in Chapter Two. At Economics Help, a short version:”Voluntary unemployment is defined as a situation where the unemployed choose not to accept a job at the going wage rate.”And this doubletalk is an example of what’s wrong with econ today. 4. “The key difference between the proprietor/entrepreneur class and the
waged working class as I understand them is not a difference in income,
but in function, or role in the economy.”For Adam Smith, not a difference in income, but in how a satisfactory income is figured:”In that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land, the proportion between the quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects seems to be the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them for one another… In this state of things, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer”.”As soon as stock has accumulated in the hands of particular persons, some of them will naturally employ it in setting to work industrious people, whom they will supply with materials and subsistence, in order to make a profit by the sale of their work… In exchanging the complete manufacture either for money, for labour, or for other goods, over and above what may be sufficient to pay the price of the materials, and the wages of the workmen, something must be given for the profits of the undertaker of the work who hazards his stock in this adventure…””The profits of stock, it may perhaps be thought, are only a different name for the wages of a particular sort of labour, the labour of inspection and direction. They are, however, altogether different, are regulated by quite different principles, and bear no proportion to the quantity, the hardship, or the ingenuity of this supposed labour of inspection and direction. They are regulated altogether by the value of the stock employed, and are greater or smaller in proportion to the extent of this stock.”