Stumbled across the article Plato: The Republic on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The dialogue explores two central questions. The first question is “what is justice?” Socrates addresses this question both in terms of political communities and in terms of the individual person or soul. He does this to address the second and driving question of the dialogue: “is the just person happier than the unjust person?” or “what is the relation of justice to happiness?” Given the two central questions of the discussion, Plato’s philosophical concerns in the dialogue are ethical and political.

I haven’t had the time to read this whole article, yet. Perhaps if I had read this back in my college freshman course in humanities, I might have actually passed the course. Of course, there was no internet back then. More’s the pity.

RT has the Keiser Report episode Give us this day, our daily billions (E1461)

Max and Stacy discuss the crybabies on Wall Street begging for billions and living in constant fear while the rest of the economy continues to live and thrive in the real world without non-stop free money.

Max just hates the USA dollar because it is backed by nothing, but he loves crypto-currency because it is backed by —— real nothing. I have yet to understand why crypto-currency nothing is better than USA dollar nothing. Built into the mathematics of bit-coin is a limit on how much can be produced. This all came into being from someone’s imagination. I suppose that when we run out of new bit-coin nobody will be able to imagine what comes next. If you know the history of computers it might be byte-coin which is 8 times as powerful as bit-coin. Maybe it will be quantum-coin.

As a devotee of Modern Money Theory (MMT), it sometimes bothers me how much ignoring of reality can come from the people who claim to be just explaining reality.

The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies has the article Gilts and Bonds. In their Facebook intro to this article, they write the following:

The only place that net financial assets or financial wealth can come from is the government. The currency-issuing government, via its own central bank, uses its taxing and spending powers to create and destroy (spend and tax) net financial assets into and out of the non-government sector.

My response to that comment is

How about the trillions and trillions of dollars of notional money that disappeared when the real estate derivative market crashed? Notional money may not be real, but it has a giant impact on the economy.

Investopedia has an article Notional Value that explains this concept of notional value.

YouTube has the video Stephanie Kelton: The Public Purse.

As part of the lecture series between UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) and the British Library, Stephanie Kelton speaks on why a government budget should not be looked at in the same way as a household budget

Stephanie Kelton always does such a good job of explaining this. Elect Bernie Sanders, and you may find Stephanie Kelton explaining more of the way the world really works than she has managed so far.

I have now seen the whole video, and it is even better than I had hoped for. She got a range of questions and she gave answers on topics that I had not heard her speak about before. She talked about the job guarantee verses universal basic income. She talked about the need to change the political reality from the bottom up. A whole range of good stuff.

Democracy Now! has the discussion One Million Take to Streets of Chile in the “Largest Mobilization Since the End of Dictatorship”

Chilean President Sebastián Piñera has announced a major cabinet shuffle after more than one million people flooded the streets Friday in massive peaceful demonstrations over inequality, high cost of living and privatization. The protest drew more than 5% of Chile’s population and followed days of widespread civil unrest that sparked a violent police and military crackdown across the country. At least 18 people have been killed and hundreds more have been shot and wounded since protests erupted Oct. 19. The protests in Chile began in response to a subway fare hike and have grown into a mass uprising against the government. We speak with Professor Macarena Gómez-Barris, founder and director of the Global South Center and chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute, and Alondra Carrillo Vidal, a spokesperson for Chile’s largest feminist advocacy group, Coordinadora Feminista 8M

The second part of the discussion is in the article A Fight Against Neoliberalism: Over A Million Chileans Protest Amid Violent Crackdown.

What is going on in Chile is an example of what can happen in the bottom up revolution that Bernie Sanders talks about. These changes won’t be instigated from the top down in Chile nor in the USA. However, 5% of the population can move a country. In the USA that would be more than 17 Million people. We have a long way to go from the 1 million donors that Bernie already has.