Economic Code Words
From dKosopedia
The Republican Party has put forward an "economic" platform consisting of the fantasies of Market Fundamentalism and Supply-Side Economics, also known as Voodoo Economics. Since none of the language used by Republicans means what it says in any dictionary, it is necessary to provide a glossary of the terms, and explanations of the fundamental concepts of genuine economics.
Basic Concepts
The most fundamental idea in economics is that both buyer and seller must profit in any uncoerced free exchange. The profit is not always in money, but in the usefulness of what is received. What they get and give up has the same price, but buyer and seller have better uses for what they get than what they give. One cannot eat money, which is therefore worth less than enough food. One equally cannot eat very much surplus food, which is thus worth less at that moment for that person than the money needed to buy other things. It is easy to be confused by the fact that people will exchange items that have the same price, but different uses. The exchange of a dollar bill for a dollar's worth of coins is a clear example, for anybody faced with an old-style vending machine that does not take bills or credit/debit cards.
The principles of Supply and Demand and the resulting Market Equilibrium follow directly from this first principle, with the addition of a few straightforward conditions. Basically, these conditions define what we mean by freedom or lack of coercion. They are collectively known under the technical term Perfect Competition. Competition does not in fact have to be perfect to be useful, just as balls used in sports and other games, or ball bearings in mechanical devices, do not have to be perfect spheres.
The requirements of Perfect Competition define the role of government and the public in regulating economic affairs. They include participation in markets on an equal footing by all, with complete access to economic and financial information, and the inability of any participant to game the economy or coercively set prices.
The above is the essence of economic theory. The rest of economics is an attempt to extend the mathematics of these simple cases to others, and apply this theory to cases that do not meet the requirements all that well. In that sense, it is like geometry, with a short list of definitions and axioms (common notions and postulates in the case of Euclid), and a great body of theorems that result. Both are like Newtonian mechanics, with three Laws, and the Newtonian System of the World, which added one Law of Gravity to deduce all of the known motions of the planets successfully for two and a half centuries.
The field of economics, like many others, has pretensions to be a science, or even a branch of mathematics. But it deals not only with money and goods in the abstract. Its subject matter is just as much human behavior (psychology) and the rules for a society of humans (politics), as reflected in the older name Political Economy.
Glossary
The purpose of this glossary is not to tell you what these words and phrases really mean, but what Republicans mean to convey to some portion of their base when they say them. For most of the terms given here, the audience is the rich, including owners of corporate stocks, bonds, and real estate, and executives of corporations, especially Wall Street financial institutions. In a few cases, Republicans say these things explicitly, but most is in code. You can find the real meanings in the account above, and in the pages it links to. In every case, the idea of using this code is Plausible Deniability for what they really mean. Cross references to other translations on this page are in bold.
- Anti-poverty program
- Waste, fraud, and abuse
- Bubble
- The last time the markets rose under a Democrat
- Business cycle
- Making tons of money in a rising market and shedding liabilities to the government in a falling market. See also Too big to fail.
- Communism
- State ownership of all companies; the opposite of Capitalism
- Competition
- for subsidies and government preferences, not
- Corporate responsibility
- Profit—Milton Friedman
- Credit Default Swaps
- I'm sorry, that's too complicated to explain. You can't understand it. (It's actually just insurance.)
- Day trader
- We've got a live one!
- Derivative
- Bill of goods
- Economist
- Corporate shill
- Economic Theory
- Have I got a bridge for you!
- Energy policy
- Subsidies to big oil and big coal
- Federal Reserve Board
- Free money—Ben Bernanke; keeping a lid on inflation
- Fiscal responsibility
- Trillions for defense, but not one penny for social programs
- Free Market
- Laissez-Faire; Free for corporations, but not for you
- Free Speech
- Money talks
- Free Trade
- Monopoly pricing
- Government Health Care
- Unfair competition with insurance companies
- Globalization
- Corporate Imperialism
- Human rights
- According to the US Supreme Court, corporate rights
- Inflation
- Rising wages—Alan Greenspan
- Intellectual property regime
- Corporate/government conspiracy to grant monopolies, perpetual if possible&mdash:Mickey Mouse
- Investment
- Speculation
- Investment Adviser
- A Post-Modern gangster who makes you an offer you can't understand
- Keynes, John Maynard
- Author of the discredited theory that governments should borrow and spend more during recessions to stimulate the economy, whereas any fool knows now that only tax cuts can stimulate the economy.
- Living, A
- A killing--U. Utah Phillips
- Market efficiency
- At extracting profit
- Market regulation
- The work of the Devil; Communism; Fascism; the tyranny of the poor over the rich
- Mortgage-backed security
- Bill of goods
- Oversight
- We pretend to tell you what we have been doing, and you pretend to understand
- Policy
- Selfishness
- Principles
- Greed, racism, and intolerance
- Public Interest, The
- Corporate interests
- Public Option, Health Care
- Unfair competition
- Reaganomics
- Voodoo politics
- Republic
- the arena in which corporate profits and managerial compensation are to be maximized
- Rising market
- Bubble
- Road to Serfdom, The
- In the tradition of the book of that name by F. A. Hayek, anything proposed by Social Liberals or Progressives
- Single Payer Health Care
- Theft of legitimate corporate profits
- Socialism
- Any concern for actual people
- Special interests
- The public interest
- Supply-Side Economics
- Concern for the interests of producers, especially large corporations, not consumers
- Taxation
- Tyranny of the poor over the rich
- Tax and Spend Liberal
- Edmund Burke, once the Father of Conservatism
- Too big to fail
- Big enough to demand favors from the government; bigger than Lehman Brothers
- Treasury Department
- Goldman-Sachs Executive Committee
- Trickle-down
- In Voodoo Economics, gusher up for the rich, pie in the sky for the middle class
- Unfair competition
- Competition
- Washington Consensus
- Agreement among the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the US Treasury Department that other countries should let in our corporations to plunder their economies—Joseph Stiglitz
See Also
- Code Words on greed, racism, and intolerance
