That piece was confused to the point of actually being confusing. Granted I stopped reading and started skimming about halfway through, I could not find a real thesis in the article. The only one I can come up with is “the fruits of increased productivity have been siphoned off by ‘finance’ because people go into debt to buy the products they make.” One of the main problems I have with this is he doesn’t make it very clear what exactly it is he’s claiming in the specifics…much less what he’s saying should be done about it or why any of this occurred. It’s possible I missed it, but I didn’t really see any explanation offered as to a “why” or a “what to do”.
And I would be interested to hear his explanation of where all this money came from to put all these people in the debt that forces them to “have to work so much harder than before, even when wages rise […] to carry [their] debt overhead”.
He states:
"You’re unable to buy the goods you produce because you need to pay your bankers. And the only way that you can barely maintain your living standards is to borrow even more. This means having to pay back even more in years to come.
That is the Eurozone plan in a nutshell for its economic future. It is a financial plan that is replacing industrial capitalism – with finance capitalism.
Industrial capitalism was based on increasing production and expanding markets. Industrialists were supposed to use their profits to build more factories, buy more machinery and hire more labor. But this is not what happens under finance capitalism. Banks lend out their receipt of interest, fees and penalties (which now yield credit card companies as much as interest) in new loans."
Again, maybe I missed something, but I didn’t see where he explained how there could be all this production and still so much debt. He basically does like Keynesians and progressives do and just starts the story in the middle, kind of like this “balance sheet recession” guy does.
He mentions nothing of money supply or the Federal Reserve. Indeed the only mention of the central bank is in a quick passing comment about how “Overseas military spending obliged the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to borrow abroad to prevent the dollar’s exchange rate from declining.”
My only guess as to why this might be is because he’s an MMTer, and sees money manipulation as a tool for prosperity as opposed to the engine of destruction that it actually is.
The piece is not 100% fallacy, there are some things that are correct, but there are so many landmines that could not only confuse the reader, but actually mislead him and give him false understandings, it’s really not worth reading.