This post originally appeared on stevebaker.info.
Today, Cobden Centre comrades and I are off to inject some Austrianism into the Positive Money conference. As you can tell from the Cobden Centre’s literature page, we are not afraid to work with other schools of thought — there are significant areas of overlap.
For example, from the conference home page:
Does the fundamental design of the banking system automatically lead to an unstable, unproductive, unfair and unsustainable economy and society? If the answer is yes, then should we take the opportunity to truly fix the problem now, or simply make superficial changes and start saving up for the next bailout?
This is, of course, very much where I am coming from. However, there is a hint of anti-capitalism about the conference page, something which I hope to contribute to overturning.
The fundamental problem is, after all, the state: state monopoly, state planning, legal privilege, the socialisation of risk and the privatisation of profit. What is wrong is that we have the appearance of capitalism without the correct institutional architecture.
What we have is corporatism.
Good luck! They apparently have a real bad case of cognitive dissonance.
I too am trying to figure out how to show progressives/greens why debt-based money is bad and wealth-based money is good, but getting them to understand that government is the problem and businesses aren’t necessarily evil is difficult. Converting a ton of new knowledge into bite-sized chunks, and combating a ton of assumed mis-knowledge at the same time is a big task.