Economics 101 with the SF Bay Guardian's Steven T. Jones

I swear they tried that whole "communism" thing in Russia, but I can't for the life of me remember how it turned out...

Steve, if corporate profits bother you so much, buy some stock. Then it's YOUR profits. It's pretty sweet.

OMG. I'm speechless. Steve's writing and reporting has always been an embarassment to the Guardian, but this is nuts. I mean, what he doesn't know about economics could fit in a warehouse.

Tim Redmond DID make some excellent points both in his indepth housing analysis a while back and his first whacks at the Chron's recent binge of silly. But this is amazing to hear STJ go on and on about class warfare and berate Sfist for not being commie enoughe when it was he who gave one of the City biggest plutocrats a front page (insert metaphor here implying something unholy).

http://www.gregdewar.com/2007/05/the_day_the_bay_guardian_died.html

Note to Steve Jones: the "Mint" does not print paper money. The Federal Reserve issues the currency, BEP only prints it. The legal authority is with the Federal Reserve. Here's a wiki on it just in case you're curious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Note

new generation of SFist?

Reads kinda like a discussion between a two-year old and an adult. Steve Jones being the adult.

Like wkcraven said, you may disagree with Steve Jones' argument or philosophy, but at least he held up the intellectual side of the discussion.

haha...I've actually had this conversation numerous times with tenderloin housing clinic employees and clients..didn't know their paycheck came from taxes, not the other way around like most people. Clients had no idea they didn't pay rent. they thought they paid rent..no, the city pays the rent for you.

'you're kidding, I pay rent', "no I'm not kidding, the city pays your rent for you, that's what Care not Cash is".

"no way man, I pay my rent"..."okie dokie"

Oddly, enough it is our capitalism that has raised the standard of living in communist China by giving them access to investment capital and consumer markets that demand goods that they can produce more cheaply than we can.

#8: I think it was more like a conversation between an adult and a 14 year old smartass. Matt, you're an embarassment.

It's funny how politically-charged words like "socialist" and "marxism" cloud the discussion, especially when used as a weapon against ideas that Steve Jones put forward. It's also kind of messy when "money" means different things to different folks commenting here.

Steve's "money" appears to just be the paper that the government prints so that we don't have to barter for products from food and shelter to I-Pods and Prius's. He does say that work creates productivity. Not sure if he meant it this broadly, but work creates good & services as well as wealth. Money, per his definition, is just a way to transfer purchasing power.

"Money" to some of Steve's detractors definitely seems to mean the broader view. Steve would argue, I think, that wealth (and it proxy, money) should be broadly distributed even if that requires confiscation by the government. Others don't want the government to confiscate anything (the knee-jerk anti-tax crowd). Put another way, they don't want to contribute anything to the common good unless, I suspect, it's to the military.

Here's the problem with taking either Steve's view or his detractors' view. Steve seems to believe that people will create wealth even when the creator knows that the extra value (profit) he or she earns will be taken away by the government. This fundamentally denies the greed instinct in humans: many folks work harder because they expect they will get rich. Innovation usually happens because there's money at the end of success. Without the profit motvive, we wouldn't have the technology behind this little blog, we wouldn't have refrigeration, we wouldn't have cable TV (God forbid).

Steve's detractors also get it wrong. Anti-tax conservatives just forget that they like paved roads; they like their policemen and firemen; they like sending their kids to publicly subsidized schools and colleges; they like their street lights; they like their Social Security; they like their military; they like ... Get it?

Here's the original Guardian Letter and comment from Matty Matt:

Stop the homeless sweeps expensive, inefficient, foolish, and morally offensive

EDITORIAL Sister Bernie Galvin and Religious Witness with Homeless People held a press conference Oct. 4 to release some remarkable data: since Mayor Gavin Newsom took office, San Francisco has issued 46,684 citations to homeless people, mostly for what are known as quality-of-life crimes. That's cost the taxpayers $7.8 million.

Unfortunately, almost no news media showed up — the mayor, it turns out, somehow scheduled his press conference on homelessness at exactly the same time. As Amanda Witherell reports on page 15, Newsom's staff say it's all a coincidence — but it reflects how this administration is increasingly treating homeless issues.

Newsom, with the assistance of District Attorney Kamala Harris, is shifting the city back to a model that treats homelessness and poverty as crimes. But years of evidence prove that approach doesn't work.

Newsom's plan, outlined in a memo that Sup.
Chris Daly made public last week, involves sending a team of social service and outreach workers through the Tenderloin with police officers. Now the cops and the social workers are saying they won't patrol together, but the message and the impact are the same: people who commit the sorts of offenses that are almost inevitable when you don't have a place to live — like sleeping on the streets and panhandling — will increasingly be dragged into the criminal justice system.

Frank Jordan, a former police chief, tried that when he was mayor in the early 1990s; he called the program Matrix, and it was an utter failure. The reason is obvious: most homeless people can't pay the fines for these violations. So either the citation process is a waste of everyone's time or, if the city pursues the nonpayment and piles on more and more citations, it winds up creating a criminal record for someone who already is going to have trouble finding work. The promise of services implied by the social workers' involvement in Newsom's plan means nothing if services aren't there — and the city still can't offer, say, substance-abuse treatment on demand or enough housing for all of the people who need it.

Yet despite all the evidence, Harris has now assigned a full-time staffer to do nothing but prosecute these low-level offenses. She and Newsom both say they want to help people use services — but the only service the DA's Office offers to homeless people who wind up in court is a handout, a single-page list of referrals.

San Francisco has been down this road so many times before that it's infuriating. Criminalizing homeless people is not only wrong; it's expensive, inefficient, foolish, and morally offensive. It also clogs the courts and takes the cops even further away from working on serious crimes.

Daly says he's going to reintroduce his measure allocating an additional $5 million for housing for homeless people. That's a good move, of course. But the supervisors ought to think about something else: if Harris, Newsom, and the cops want to persist in counterproductive and cruel homeless sweeps, perhaps the supervisors should move to cut funding to those departments by a total of, say, $7.8 million.

( 2 comments | Comment on this article )
Posted by: mmsf
Wednesday, October 10, 2007 at 11:10 AM

I disagree with you on every count. The sweeps as you call them are exactly what we need. I just wish they covered the entire city. I am tired of the complaint of criminalizing the homeless. Every attempt to enforce laws for quality of life offenses is met by the same automatic, knee-jerk hyperbole. Let me say this - I am all for continuing the current level of funding for homeless services and perhaps even more. But it's not for free. We have a right to expect an end to the deterioration in living conditions in this city. We cannot continue to tolerate what is going on in this city if we are offering homeless people a viable way out. Enough is enough. Taxpayers live here too and we should be able to expect some sort of return from our dollars.
Posted by: Rockus
Friday, October 12, 2007 at 02:51 PM

So Matty Matt what is your solution? The sweeps have been tried in the past and have proven again and again to be total failures and therefore a waist of tax payers money. Matt Matt it's really easy to complain about a problem with your own "knee-jerk hyperbole" but actually finding a solution is where the real work comes in and I don't see you helping anyone find any solutions.

I agree, what STJ doesn't know about economics could fit in an extremely large warehouse. Reading his posts actually makes my head physically hurt for how completely retarded it is. Anyone who recommends reading Marx as an introduction to economics is not someone to take at all seriously.

Having trouble activating his account, Tim Redmond of the SF Bay Guardian asked me to post the following comment of his:

I thought we were all too intelligent in these circles to resort to stupid quips about the "proletariat." But since I've had to have this fight since I was an economics major at Wesleyan way back in the dark ages, I have to make a point here:

The Soviet Union as we knew it in the post-War era was not built by Karl Marx. There were some guys named Lenin and Stalin who built a political system in the name of his economics. Neither of them had much use for democracy or freedom. One of them was a savage butcher.

That said, you have to admit that Marx was, and remains, one of the most important economists of the modern era. You can't understand capitalism just by reading Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. The critique of capital that Marx put forward was brilliant; I never fully understood the role of labor in productivity and the way labor-price theory actually works until I studied Marx. So yeah, he should be on the reading list of anyone who wants to talk intelligently about economics.

I would add Robert Reich's Supercapitalism to Steve's reading list, too; I did an interview with him last week which will be posted on sfbg.com shortly. He's not a commie either, but he thinks that taxes and regulation are critical and the only way to save capitalism.

The theory of money -- how it's created, what it is, how it effects the economy -- is that stuff of dozens of textbooks and a thousand doctoral theses. But the bottom line is, money today is not a direct measure of labor productivity; it's a far more artifical construct, as Steve points out.

Yes, taxes come from labor. But these days, a sane system would tax investment income and speculative income much higher than what we typically think of as labor. And a lot of the economy today is built on investment income and speculation that has nothing to do with productive labor.

Yeah, it's all more complicated than that, but folks: If you can't understand that money doesn't directly equal labor, and that you can udnerstand and use Marx's economic analysis without being a commie .. geez. I thought people in San Francisco were smarter than that.

I don't really see the problem with taking the air out of a guy that takes himself a little too seriously.

I mean, STJ is a heck of a nice guy in my experience and a compelling journalist, but I always thought it was one of SFist's missions to deflate some that kind of self-important bullshit. Mattymatt, whether you claim it was juvenile or not, did just that in an amusing manner. So kudos.

Then, I'll give Matty $100 to keep on writing.

Yo Steve: There is no such thing as the London Guardian... the paper used to be called the Manchester Guardian and now simply called The Guardian.

If anyone is interested, you can get the online version of that paper here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/

IMHO it's a much better paper than the SF Bay Guardian, by leaps and bounds.

I couldn't agree more, Grrg.

And my offer was perfectly reasonable as well. I suggest that Mattymatt collect on that $100 that Brock just promised him.

Although I notice above that Matt believes "Money comes from work", which would make him a Marxist. In that case, I'll take the $100.

what was zsa zsa doing when her husband was screwing anna nicole?