It's Wednesday, and as usual I scout around various issues that I have been thinking…
Travelling all day so blog is on holiday except for some beach music
Today I am travelling most of the day – yes, its back – and so, given I did the National Accounts yesterday, when I usually don’t write much for the blog, I am calling today Wednesday and a holiday. I really don’t have time to write much at all today, which is the real reason. So in my travel mode I am listening to Neil Young today from 1974. That is it.
Music – On the Beach
This is what I have been listening to this morning.
I bought this album – On the Beach – when it first came out in 1974 on Warner Brother Records and still go back to it on the odd occasion.
This is my favourite track from the album – very somnolent, which is just a big word for laid-back. That is how things were in 1974.
Rolling Stone magazine called it “One of the most despairing albums of the decade.” Sure but we were becoming introspective then, living down the coast, trying to work out what to do after the Vietnam chaos which had disrupted things.
It was the end of the hippy era and jazz rock was dying from its own gratuitous excesses. Things were giving way to more chilled-out thoughts. Everyone was mellow man!
And living down by the beach and the surf miles from the city, life seemed okay.
But under that haze, Monetarism took over. I was back onto a war footing soon after!
The musicians included people from various stages of Neil Young’s career to that point.
1. Ben Keith – on slide and percussion (from Neil Young’s Harvest days and onward).
2. Graham Nash on piano (from CSNY).
3. Tim Drummond on bass (first association with Neil Young).
4. Ralph Molina on drums (Crazy Horse era)
That is enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2020 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.
Neil Young was going through a very reflective, introspective phase of his life in 1974 because of the deaths, from drug overdoses, of his roadie and of Danny Whitten (original Crazy Horse member). Young reckoned he could not open up on guitar until Frank Sampedro joined Crazy Horse in 1975 (Zuma). Tonight’s The Night (1975, although quite a few songs recorded years earlier) includes a lot of songs about Young’s dislike of the drug culture in the late-60s and early-70s – not so much the drugs, but the way some people who profited from the scene quickly abandoned those in trouble and in need of help. Young took some time to get over the loss of Whitten. Young and Whitten together on guitar in Cowgirl in the Sand from 1969 is one of my favourite songs – the birth of what I consider to be grunge music (although I stand to be corrected on this last point).
As for On the Beach, I can tell a genuine Neil Young fan by whether or not they like this album – you’re not one if you don’t. I love it, especially the last song, Ambulance Blues.
Used to be my favourite Neil Young record. Been listening to Rust Never Sleeps and Comes a Time a lot more recently though, the production on the latter is fantastic
So today might be a good day to consider an article I saw on my mobile phone recently (didn’t save it unfortunately).
The author was examining why MMT has not gained more support among mainstream economists.
His thesis was based on the observation that *money is power*, despite the reality that money is created ‘ex nihilo’……whether in the public sector (in a national treasury and reserve bank) or the private sector (in private banks).
The MS economists don’t want to consider the implications of this, for political reasons (eg who will claim a greater share of the nation’s output) rather than economic reasons; ie the professed concern they have for MMT’s mis-management of the inflation issue, which is a smoke screen designed to hide the fact that money IS a political construct.
*money is power* until it isn’t.
Neil is quite correct IMHO. The barrier to mainstream acceptance of MMT is not intellectual but PURELY political. It is viewed or intuited (correctly, I hope) as a sliding slope to socialism. Yet as Bill and others have repeatedly pointed out, the political comes into play only when meta-economic values assert themselves. Standing alone, MMT, like all other economic frames, contains no such values. But what it does offer the left is an economic frame in which socialist values become intelligible and viable.