Rambling on or through the trouble with statistics, MMM, Sanders.

The trouble with statistics...

Take the unemployment rate. Say it goes up a half a percent. Not such a big deal. But wait. Down at the granular level, so to speak, you've got actual living, breathing human beings who have lost jobs. From that position that slight uptick in the unemployment rate is a very big deal. A very. Big. Deal.

For them, for their families.

Losing a paycheck is a disaster for most people. This isn't the 1970s when (I came of age) and if you wanted work you could find it. (And maybe that was only true for me because I was young, white, and living in Los Angeles...)

Full Employment should be (and is supposed to be-- see the long forgotten other aim of the Fed) an object of great importance to a democratic government. "For the people." Get it?

MMM...

People have bought into the Myth of the Magical Marketplace: that if government would get out of the way of business we'd all have rainbows and ponies.

Nonsense. If a market isn't properly regulated, the unscrupulous will win, and you will get poverty, pollution, corruption, theft, usury, and so on.

It's having that Myth in the back of our minds that keeps us from demanding full employment, by government where necessary.

Sanders...

Democratic Socialism of the Sanders type isn't really socialism; it's capitalism with a human face. Sanders is right in many ways that no candidate has been right in generations. But he doesn't go far enough. (Besides Full Employment, see, for instance, the post directly below on this powerful blog's powerful call for a Military Repatriation Corps.)  ¶ 1:32 PM