A vital distinction.

I'm not what you'd call an economist. What you actually call me is best left to another time.

However, here's an interesting comment over at Zero Hedge that illustrates, perhaps, the phenomenon of obtuseness in Western of elites, namely, knowing the sensible course of action but choosing to do the exact opposite. My favorite example of this is the Italian government knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that allowing 100s of thousands of Africans and Muslims into Italy is madness but nevertheless sending the Italian navy to just a few miles off the Libyan coast to "rescue" Africans wanting to come to Italy (and Europe beyond). This appears to be changing as now there is some kind of cooperation with the Libyan Coast Guard and Watersports Flotilla but I still read only this morning of "rescues" being effected by the Italian navy so who knows?

The comment below indicates commenter Batman's belief that the natural parasites in any civilization have an interest in maximizing wealth extraction that is superior to wealth creation and that our knowledge of money and economics has been perverted by them to their own advantage. This is unsettling as I've always assumed that we approached economics with wealth creation in mind with socialists, communists, and malcontents basically nipping at our heels with insane political goals. I never resented wealth because I figured it was evidence of industry, risk taking, intelligence, hard work, and, of course, not a little luck. However, it's clear we're not in Kansas any longer. Not by a long shot. I'm not the first to have that WTF?! moment.

Whether fractional reserve banking is overall something that fired up the economy or not I'm not learned enough to say. However, when the cream of industry, banking and politics conspired to create a central bank that resulted in a 95% loss of value of the dollar, 10s of thousands of American factories ended up on the shores of a communist dictatorship, and some 40 million foreigners have been imported into the United States, there to steal jobs from Americans and drive down wages. You have to ask yourself is there something more than just misjudgment at work here. Trump put his finger on some of this but phrased it in terms of just poor negotiating skills. Pure motive just clueless business and political leaders. Batman says otherwise.

I've not yet read Mr. Werner's piece linked to by Batman but it looks like it will be worth doing so to see how much of what we've seen in the last 80 some years since the start of the New Deal is due to error and how much is due to design. You can no longer automatically assume good will. You just can't.

Batman raises another point succinctly, namely, the distinction between the productive and the parasitic side of capitalism. This is an important insight, that there is this distinction. The reason it is important for modern Westerners is that the seditious, traitorous left goes to great lengths to point out the defects of "capitalism" which is a deliberate misdirection. The left endeavors to obscure the parastic and fabulously destructive nature of socialism – the wise leader fatuously commanding the economic waves to part – whether the example of socialism is the real deal of the U.S.S.R. or the hobbled, hamstrung, over-regulated, over-taxed, financialized, foreigner-flooded Western nations, or most of them. No. They want you to think that that's "capitalism," the essence of exploitation rather than the engine that raised millions from poverty and gave them a shot at a decent life without disease, slavery, and raw sewage. The exploitation and hideous oppression of communist regimes and the peculiar operations of the parasite class in the West must never, ever be admitted.

A caricature of reality.

This is the companion attack of the left to its deliberate obfuscation of the leftist nature of National Socialism. The vile excesses of that system are not at all distinguishable from those of totalitarian leftism in general. To maintain the allure of leftist excess, the left hides the highly visible excesses of National Socialist as a leftist phenomenon by its interminable description of National Socialism as "right-wing." Similarly, the factual allegations about communists in the federal government made by Sen. McCarthy and the revelations about the Hollywood 10 involve a similar distortion. It wasn't the communist infiltration of the government that bothered the American political class. No. It was the work of McCarthy and the House Committee on Unamerican Activities in exposing the presence of communists in the government that drove them to mount a vicious attack on McCarthy and anti-communism. People who expose communists who want to destroy democratic institutions are threats to democratic institutions!!

Well, back to economic matters. The mask has slipped in the last 25 years as the infection of high-speed trading on the stock market, the flood of insane derivatives, the chummy relationship of public employee unions and politicians, open borders, and massive money creation, among other things, have come to light. The result has been the enormous transfer of wealth to the richest 1% that has accompanied astronomical wage stagnation. This is parasitism.

No one's been minding the store in the West for a long time. Almost all Western nations have flooded themselves with savages and run up massive debt and money supplies, all to satisfy, I presume, the moneyed interests and their lumpenproletariat clients on whom the former rely to deliver reliable votes for economic destruction and the slide into third-world grime and savagery. This has nothing to do with common sense or patriotism.

Anyway, here's Batman's comment:

The problem was that no one has ever been able to run a nation state successfully for any length of time, even this is beyond us.

Powerful vested interests are always putting their interests above the long term good.

Let’s relax financial regulations so we can make more money.

Oh dear.

Even worse, they actively seek to corrupt our knowledge of money and economics which ensures that things will never run well.

Monetary theory has been regressing since 1856, when someone worked out how the system really worked.

Credit creation theory -> fractional reserve theory -> financial intermediation theory

“A lost century in economics: Three theories of banking and the conclusive evidence” Richard A. Werner

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521915001477

The Classical Economists of the 19th Century were only too aware of the two sides of capitalism, the productive side where wealth creation takes place and the parasitic side where wealth extraction takes place.

It all disappears in early neoclassical economics.

How are the economically parasitic ruling class going to fare if this becomes common knowledge?^[1]

Notes
^[1] "Flags, Symbols, And Statues Resurgent As Globalism Declines."By Wayne Madsen, Zero Hedge, 9/19/17.