The Real News Network has posted the documentary Lost in Las Vegas from Paul Jay.

On the day of the Nevada primaries, a special presentation of the feature length documentary by Paul Jay reveals Las Vegas as a model of neoliberalism, a tale of the shape of things to come. It’s all told through the eyes of a Canadian Blues Brothers act deciding whether they want to move their families to Vegas. It’s two performers portraying two actors playing two fictitious characters in a town where everything is a replica of something else.

There is a life lesson for two people, Kieron Lafferty and Wayne Catania, in the Canadian Blues Brothers act that finds themselves trapped in a corporate entertainment world. The lesson that they miss by a hair starts in a conversation at 1 hour 26 minutes into the documentary. Wayne Catania, the John Belushi of the act, delivers the punchline about 45 seconds later.

That’s how you get control. Be able to go without. I think that’s it, is to be able to say no. I’m going to put my daughter above the money, and if I have to say no, and walk away and change my life style so it’s like you know “No, you can’t have those shoes. They’re a little too expensive, we’re going to go with with this pair.”, then that’s the way it’ll be.

The point Wayne miss is that you have to have the conversation with the members of your family about doing with less way before you change your lifestyle to make less money. You have to cut back, and live beneath your means. The money you save, you use to build that nest-egg that gives you the freedom to say no, walk away, and not even disrupt your lifestyle very much. Not doing that is what makes you a wage slave, a slave to your wages. Investing your money so that you become an owner, not just a worker is the only way to get free.

As I remember it, the concept is embodied in the title of the book, Get Rich Slowly: Building Your Financial Future Through Common Sense.

The solution for individuals is laid out in the book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren (yes, that Elizabeth Warren) and Amelia Warren Tyagi.

Naked Capitalism has this fabulous article Did Money Evolve? You Might (Not) Be Surprised. If Ron or Rand Paul would read this and understand it, it would blow their minds. Now that is something I would pay “money” to see.

This conflation of “money” with currency-like financial securities reveals a basic misunderstanding of money that pervades the economics profession. That misunderstanding is based on a fairly tale.

In the golden days of yore, it is told, all exchange was barter. Think: Adam Smith’s imagined bucolic butcher and baker village. This worked fine, except that your milk wasn’t necessarily ready and to hand when my corn came ripe. And moving all those physical commodities around was arduous. This inserted large quantities of sand and mud into the gears and wheels of trade.

But then some innovator came up with a great invention — physical currency! Coins. “Money.” This invention launched humanity forward into its manifest destiny of friction-free exchange and the glories of market capitalism.

Except, that’s not how it happened. No known economy was ever based on barter. And coins were a very late arrival.

Later on in the article, the author posits this definition.

At this point you’re probably drumming your fingers impatiently: “So give: what is money?” Here, a bloodless and technical term-of-art definition:

The value of assets, as designated in a unit of account.

Ironically, one thing that even this article misses is the slipperyness of the concept of “value”. Some times the unit of account is given its “value” by the assets it will buy. In times of inflation and deflation, the “value” of the unit of account changes drastically. So it is rather circular to say that the value of assets is designated by the unit of account whose value is designated by the amount of assets it represents. In truth, there is no such think as a constant that represents value.

Naked Capitalism has posted the article The ECB’s Original Sin and Franco Modigliani’s Long View.

However, unemployment is not a potent instrument to control inflation when there is plenty of slack, while it has a considerable impact on social welfare.

Note the emphasis above that I have added. Too often people seem to think that a prescription to cure a particular ailment should be used to cure every ailment. Decent economists always tell you the specific circumstances that call for a specific remedy.

Even for me, some of the terminology of the article was a bit confusing. The section below explains how central banks could stimulate investment when the only power they seem to have is to control monetary policy. Monetary policy is weak to completely ineffective in stimulating investment when there is plenty of slack in the economy.

As the manifesto itself recognised, the proposed reinterpretation of the ECB role would meet with serious objections. One was that central banks are unable to stimulate investment.
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The ECB has proven unable to raise inflation through its QE programme. Higher price dynamics cannot be achieved if the monetary stimulus fails to reach the real economy. When the latter is in deep recession or deflation, and fiscal space is limited, only monetary finance can be effective as it allows newly created money to be transformed into additional (public or private sector) spending without raising public debt. One way to apply money finance at the whole EZ level would be through an initiative whereby the European Investment Bank would issue bonds to finance a large investment plan for the area, and the ECB would purchase the EIB bonds with newly created money. Through such initiative, money finance would pursue the inflation target by stimulating demand and reducing unemployment. The new investment financed would strengthen the output potential of the Eurozone.

When people wonder why their is no private investment in more production capacity, I like to frame it as “What part of no freakin’ customers do you not understand?”