Greetings to My Readers in Poland

            In the last few weeks, there has been a surge of interest in this blog from Poland.  For three weeks there have been more visits from Poland than from any other European country, and one week there were more visits from Poland than from all other European countries combined.

            It would be interesting to know just which articles are of interest in Poland, but the statistical information provided to me by Google tells me only the total number of visits to each article, and the total from each country.  To know who is visiting what--I can only guess.   My first guess is that my readers in Poland would like to have a view of the current world-wide economic debacle as seen from inside the U.S., where it all started.  But they are not such fools as to accept explanations from government officials, or from economists paid by business interests, or even from the academic community.  (In recent years, though colleges still pretend to be a free and independent voice,  most of them have become so dependent on grant money from business interests that academic economists now publish mostly whatever the business block would like to hear.   It is not that any dissenting professor would be fired--it is that since about 1970, anyone who would be likely to have a dissenting view would never have been hired in the first place. Except for labor organizations and a few newspapers,  there are few places in America to hire an economist today unless he is a robot who repeats the business block party line.  For example, the wealthiest 1% of Americans now control 5 times as much wealth as the bottom 80%, and yet many academic economists still repeat the business block line that taxes on the wealthy are too high. )   So while government economists are not allowed to tell you the truth, the business block economists are not even allowed to think it.  I spent 40 years as an electrician and during some of that time I was an elected union official and a labor union activist.  If you are from Poland, then you understand that such people are not easily silenced.

            I assume that my article about "Why Wall Street Wrecks the Economy" was one of the sites which had a wide audience in Poland.  But here are two others that you may find interesting.   One is labeled Does Keynesian Policy Still Work?  The other is  A Keynesian Error. Keynesian economics was the main engine of growth in America and much of Europe from the mid-1930s until recently.   In the post war years, the economic boom in Western Europe which many in Poland may have envied was all provided by Keynesian expansion. But by the time that Poland became free of the collectivist model, the opportunity to use Keynesian tactics was already closing, for reasons discussed in the article.  And today, it may be too late for Poland to feast at the table which fed its Western neighbors so well. But perhaps it is not too late, if it were done correctly. Here is the link to those articles:

Does Keynesian Policy still work?

A Keynesian Error.