¿Qué, nos preocupamos?

Just mad, mad about socialism, and mad at that right-wing economist J. Bradford DeLong, are the heterodox-unders;

A ‘crisis’ of high inflation in Venezuela is neoliberals’ primary argument for intervention in Venezuela today. What De Long (2000: 91-2) has described as “political monetarism” is the particular focus of this discussion.[3] This theory maintains that inflation is a function of increases in the money supply by holding all other variables constant, including the velocity of money. In doing so, political monetarism ignores the possibility of negative supply shocks. The practical difficulties with this theory have been realised in practice. De Long (ibid: 92) claims political monetarism “crashed and burned in the 1980s”. However, as Saad-Filho and Morais (2004) have noted, this rigidly quantitative understanding of the relationship between inflation and money supply was dominant in the 1990s throughout Latin America. It is the crux of the contemporary neoliberal assault on Venezuela’s political economy.

Saeth; Oliver Levingston ... a Phd student in political economy at Macquarie University in Sydney. [In a] paper...presented at the conference of the Society for Heterodox Economists at the University of New South Wales in December 2013. 

¿Qué pasa? What else, but the usual;

Michael Perelman (2012) has indicted Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, for waging a class war against labour in the United States. His evocative description of “sado-monetarism” is a reminder of the hidden hand of the bourgeoisie in otherwise prosaic arguments for low inflation. In the Bolivarian Republic, political monetarism has been deployed both to conceal the negative supply shocks produced by investment strikes and to articulate a crisis to which neoliberal prescriptions can be applied.

This paper builds on the Marxian critique of monetarism, arguing that political monetarism is important to neoliberalism because it is constructed using reification and commodity fetishism. Political monetarism re-inserts capital, especially finance capital, into the production process, placing it on equal footing with labour as a component of output. By focusing solely on the stabilisation of the token that represents congealed labour-time, theorists are able to distract from the exclusive role that labour plays in producing surplus value and obscure the possibility of socialising the means of production in the face of capitalist intransigence ....

If it wasn't for Milton Friedman and Brad DeLong la gente would have toilet paper. Of course.