A few fundamental truths about economics and economists from a formerly practicing now retired capitalist, entrepreneur, angel investor and active options and forex trader:
1. Economics used to be called Political Economy. Economists, suffering from a severe case of hard science physics envy, changed the name of their profession to the more neutral-sounding apolitical "economics".
2. #1 changed nothing and G.B. Shaw's aphorism remained true: "if you laid every economist end to end around the world, you'd never reach a conclusion. This is economics' political function, to remove all discussions about political power from economics.
3. Talk about political economy and you'll get branded with the dreaded "class warfare" label. But Warren Buffett has the best reply: "There's class warfare and my class is winning."
4. Capitalism saws off the tree branch upon which it sits. It needs a TR or FDR every generation to cure itself of the free market and EMH (efficient market hypothesis) fable that exists only in the minds of economics profs.
5. It's not about capitalism vs socialism. It's about who gets the socialism. A purely free market system wouldn't last five minutes, and Elon Musk, the world's largest welfare recipient, knows it.
6. The Keynes-Hayek debate is over. JMK was the best investor of his generation: 12% CAR (compounded annual returns) from 1921-46. Hayek predicted a depression in the early postwar period. Who would you put your money on? Watch the Keynes vs Hayek rap videos to see who wins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
7. Absent sufficiently high marginal tax rates all capitalist systems lead to oligarchy, which I call a plutocrats' plantation, through regulatory capture (withered anti-trust enforcement) and the simple law of compounding. Thomas Piketty shows how the math of wealth concentration works: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/youre-not-a-capitalist-until-84870880fbf0
8. Amazon's Nick Hanauer (pitchforkeconomics.com) gets it. The difference between Hanauer/Buffett and Koch, Musk, Zuck, Adelson and most of the rest of the donor class is that Hanauer and Buffett know which side of the nearly sawed off tree branch they're sitting on.
9. If you're one of the top 10% mildly affluent who've managed to scrape a few crumbs off the plutocrats' table, don't think you're sitting on the right side of the nearly sawed off tree branch. 1929-33 proved you'll hit the ground with the same sickening thud as the rest of us.
