Judy Shelton’s recent interview with the Financial Times is nothing short of remarkable. Her comments represent the most substantive attack on the Fed, and central banking generally, by any potential nominee to the Fed board in recent history. She not only challenges how Jerome Powell and Fed officials conduct monetary policy, but whether they can conduct it competently at all.
For several generations now, one of the loudest criticisms of capitalism is summed up by dismissively characterizing the working class under free markets as being “free to starve.”
For instance, this 2017 Socialist Worker article described Marx’s critique of capitalism as a system in which “workers are free in a ‘double sense’— free to work or free to starve.”
In other words, workers face no choice other than to sell their labor to owners of capital to ensure their own survival.
