The Rent in Capitalism since Keynes General Theory and the Euthanasia of the Rentier: The European and the Greek Economies as Case-Studies

Abstract

Keynes, in his book short titled as the “General Theory”-GT in 1936, dealt with 2 key figures: the Enterprise-man and the Rentier. The 1 st is a business-man… forecasting the marginal efficiency of capital —MEC, the entrepreneur of today’s time. The 2 nd holds the community’s quantity of money: a kind of private banker. When companies distributed their stock to a great number of shareholders, the persons capable of management separated. Both the Entrepreneurs and the Rentiers are required in any economy, we believe. We graphed thus —for the first time—the “demand for rents and their supply curves”. We further proposed the “money wage” to be equal to the “Cost of Living”, thus the “Trade Unions” will have to bargain for a money wage covering their members’ cost of living! “Full employment” depends on the effec tive demand, which, given that the required investment may fall short, involuntary unemployment will emerge. No EU country ever, since 1950 , achieved full employment, and thus the Western European countries learned to live with the unemployed, at a fixed 5.65% on average on their entire labor force! We presented the “Krimpas-Asimakopulos growth model” based on Mrs. J Robinson’s work. This showed the effort of almost all models built since Keynes to use the so - called “mark-up pricing” ( a non - competitive & a non - monopoly practice )! Moreover, this led us to propose a “controlled” free entry into the market. A further innovative phenomenon —since 2013—emerged in France, where a high taxation on “dividends to be paid”, boosted “investment”! In the EU-22 , there is confusion re garding : “corporate” and “dividend” tax! We showed that one variable, which dominated the economic scene, since 2009, was Money! We also showed that the “greed inflation” emerged, so that to make it urgent for the “super-normal profits” to be taxed heavily, by 90% say, and so to finance the so - called green transition!