The New Normal
Here is a scary thought. The Pareto Principle in economics says that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In practical terms it might mean that 20% of your movies at Warner Bros. would generate 80% of the revenue. Pareto himself noted that 80% of the waelth in Italy was held by 20% of the people.
This morning unemployment hit 10.2%, a 26 year high. Yesterday the Labor Department reported that productivity surged to 9.5%. The U.S. has worked hard to transform itself into a knowledge economy and companies like Google and Goldman Sachs record record revenues per worker. What if some version of the Pareto Principle begins to apply itself to employment–20% of the workers produce 80% of the GDP? Dan Greenhaus of Miller Taback & Co has the grim reality of our future.
We have argued and continue to argue that another jobless recovery is materializing and if our estimates for G.D.P. growth going forward materialize, the unemployment rate will remain at elevated levels for several years. Nearly 16 million people are unemployed right now while another 9 million are working part-time jobs because they cannot get a full-time job.
So here is the reality of life for the bottom 40% of America’s families. After they pay for food, housing and transportation they have $1200 per year to spend on “discretionary items” like clothing, medicine and doctors. Never mind telephone, Internet or cable TV which are supposed to be middle class entitlements. I don’t believe the 25 million underemployed people in this country are not going to sit on their hands passively zoned out in front of the TV set in the next two years, especially when they see Hedge Fund managers taking home $100 million bonuses for successfully taking down companies like Abitibi-Bowater, CIT, General Growth Properties, Six Flags and even General Motors with their brilliant government subsidized Credit Default Swaps and bond packages that forced the companies into bankruptcy.
In earlier times we had outsider artists who could articulate the rage like Woody Guthrie in the Depression.
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
I believe it’s going to take a new renaissance of rebellious artists, spiritual leaders and politicians to wake up the public to the reality of the real America. Glenn Beck has no solutions but to retreat to a fantasy world of the 1950′s. The truth is that for more than half a century Republicans and Democrats alike have been prisoners of the conventional wisdom propounded by Wall Street bankers, military contractors, the Chamber of Commerce and their academic neoclassical economics enablers. The result is a hollowed out economy with no manufacturing base for exports except in making weapons of mass destruction, dependent on financial bubbles to keep the party going. Well, the party is over. Anyone who thought that just electing Barack Obama was the solution to our problems, misunderstood the institutional power of the Establishment and their conventional wisdom.
As I have said before, we are in an Interregnum where the old is dying, but the new cannot be born. Obama’s election was just the start of what needs to be a new age of reform. Writing of the Progressive Era 100 years ago, Richard Hofstadter noted that the reform movement “was the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine.”
Of course the task of Teddy Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair and the Muckrakers of 1904 was a lot easier than the task of Barack Obama. America was entering a period of technological mastery and export superiority. Jobs were plentiful. What TR had to do was break up the monopolies and end the corruption and greed in industries like meat packing and coal mining. Obama will have to do all of that (break up the Big Banks and reform the food and energy businesses), but his task will be far greater because he has to help create 30 million new jobs in the next few years. To do that we will need to remake our industrial base, because it’s clear these jobs are not going to come from the existing knowledge and service economy that gets more productive by the day.
We cannot return to the prosperity of the 1950′s. It was a result of the ‘last man standing’ effect. The rest of the industrialized world had just bombed itself into oblivion (except for maybe the French who had not geared up for war production and who therefore could not simply shift part of that production to consumer goods as we did). America was the sole producer in the world and we enjoyed the type of profit margins one would expect. Since then, it’s a straight trajectory downward as the rest of the world catches up. We could have maintained our comparative advantage had we focused on producing high quality manufactured goods and manufacturing technology. We could have dismantled the military industrial congressional complex and shifted our resources to training a labor force that could make the best civilian technology in the world. Instead, we fell in love with the myth of the Financial Economy and let mass media get us hooked on daily fix of perpetual war. We removed the blue collar American worker from the equation and will spend the foreseeable future paying the piper for his off-key tune.
We cannot return to the prosperity of the 1950′s. It was a result of the ‘last man standing’ effect. The rest of the industrialized world had just bombed itself into oblivion (except for maybe the French who had not geared up for war production and who therefore could not simply shift part of that production to consumer goods as we did). America was the sole producer in the world and we enjoyed the type of profit margins one would expect. Since then, it’s a straight trajectory downward as the rest of the world catches up. We could have maintained our comparative advantage had we focused on producing high quality manufactured goods and manufacturing technology. We could have dismantled the military industrial congressional complex and shifted our resources to training a labor force that could make the best civilian technology in the world. Instead, we fell in love with the myth of the Financial Economy and let mass media get us hooked on daily fix of perpetual war. We removed the blue collar American worker from the equation and will spend the foreseeable future paying the piper for his off-key tune.
We cannot return to the prosperity of the 1950′s. It was a result of the ‘last man standing’ effect. The rest of the industrialized world had just bombed itself into oblivion (except for maybe the French who had not geared up for war production and who therefore could not simply shift part of that production to consumer goods as we did). America was the sole producer in the world and we enjoyed the type of profit margins one would expect. Since then, it’s a straight trajectory downward as the rest of the world catches up. We could have maintained our comparative advantage had we focused on producing high quality manufactured goods and manufacturing technology. We could have dismantled the military industrial congressional complex and shifted our resources to training a labor force that could make the best civilian technology in the world. Instead, we fell in love with the myth of the Financial Economy and let mass media get us hooked on daily fix of perpetual war. We removed the blue collar American worker from the equation and will spend the foreseeable future paying the piper for his off-key tune.
You’re tone is a’changin, Jon. I like it.
You’re tone is a’changin, Jon. I like it.
You’re tone is a’changin, Jon. I like it.
Many years ago I knew an anthropologist who had done his PhD work on a kind of “Paradise Lost” theory of how the Native Americans (Chumash tribe) lived in the Santa Barbara area. He figured that in order to maintain their life-style, the needed to do what we consider “work” only about three hours a day. That covered food, shelter, etc. He and his wife lived with a tribe at the headwaters of the Amazon for a number of months to observe a reasonably close analog of the Chumash experience, and there in South America, the natives had to “work” about four hours a day. The rest of the time was give over to community, art, and spiritual practice. Of course, there was no rich/poor split…and the cult of individuality was absent. Whither goest we?
Many years ago I knew an anthropologist who had done his PhD work on a kind of “Paradise Lost” theory of how the Native Americans (Chumash tribe) lived in the Santa Barbara area. He figured that in order to maintain their life-style, the needed to do what we consider “work” only about three hours a day. That covered food, shelter, etc. He and his wife lived with a tribe at the headwaters of the Amazon for a number of months to observe a reasonably close analog of the Chumash experience, and there in South America, the natives had to “work” about four hours a day. The rest of the time was give over to community, art, and spiritual practice. Of course, there was no rich/poor split…and the cult of individuality was absent. Whither goest we?
Many years ago I knew an anthropologist who had done his PhD work on a kind of “Paradise Lost” theory of how the Native Americans (Chumash tribe) lived in the Santa Barbara area. He figured that in order to maintain their life-style, the needed to do what we consider “work” only about three hours a day. That covered food, shelter, etc. He and his wife lived with a tribe at the headwaters of the Amazon for a number of months to observe a reasonably close analog of the Chumash experience, and there in South America, the natives had to “work” about four hours a day. The rest of the time was give over to community, art, and spiritual practice. Of course, there was no rich/poor split…and the cult of individuality was absent. Whither goest we?
If the people of the US would just wake up, America could change for the better. There are signs it’s happening, but for my taste, it’s happening too slowly…
If the people of the US would just wake up, America could change for the better. There are signs it’s happening, but for my taste, it’s happening too slowly…
If the people of the US would just wake up, America could change for the better. There are signs it’s happening, but for my taste, it’s happening too slowly…
To do that we will need to remake our industrial base, because it’s clear these jobs are not going to come from the existing knowledge and service economy that gets more productive by the day.
That is exactly it , there is no other solution but forward and fast. It goes beyond any political meddling, just plain survival. Adaptation and lots of R&D.
To do that we will need to remake our industrial base, because it’s clear these jobs are not going to come from the existing knowledge and service economy that gets more productive by the day.
That is exactly it , there is no other solution but forward and fast. It goes beyond any political meddling, just plain survival. Adaptation and lots of R&D.
To do that we will need to remake our industrial base, because it’s clear these jobs are not going to come from the existing knowledge and service economy that gets more productive by the day.
That is exactly it , there is no other solution but forward and fast. It goes beyond any political meddling, just plain survival. Adaptation and lots of R&D.
So, it’s the last pass through this empty house
See the ghosts of my life on the walls
Things cleaned out like my bank account
Life feels as empty as these halls.
I see a lot of empty homes
I see neighborhoods blown and still
I’d like to blame two empty houses
Up on Capital Hill.
So, it’s the last pass through this empty house
See the ghosts of my life on the walls
Things cleaned out like my bank account
Life feels as empty as these halls.
I see a lot of empty homes
I see neighborhoods blown and still
I’d like to blame two empty houses
Up on Capital Hill.
So, it’s the last pass through this empty house
See the ghosts of my life on the walls
Things cleaned out like my bank account
Life feels as empty as these halls.
I see a lot of empty homes
I see neighborhoods blown and still
I’d like to blame two empty houses
Up on Capital Hill.
Was the use of “Capital” instead of “Capitol” an intentional densitizing of language, to pun on the Scylla and Charybdis our Ship of State has to somehow sail between? With a fractional Honest Abe at the helm?
Was the use of “Capital” instead of “Capitol” an intentional densitizing of language, to pun on the Scylla and Charybdis our Ship of State has to somehow sail between? With a fractional Honest Abe at the helm?
Was the use of “Capital” instead of “Capitol” an intentional densitizing of language, to pun on the Scylla and Charybdis our Ship of State has to somehow sail between? With a fractional Honest Abe at the helm?
At least Abe had a pilot’s license.
At least Abe had a pilot’s license.
At least Abe had a pilot’s license.
Add these:
* Neal Ferguson, conservative economist, says that the current corruption in Washington rivals the Golden Age. He said even England is looking to break up the TBTF banks.
* The unions believe that just because Ford had its first profitable quarter that it’s time to increase their demands.
* The CEO of Kaiser showed Ezra Klein a series of charts that show the US paying more than double in health costs what all other industrialized pay…while achieving no better results.
* Republican health plan would allow insurers to locate in the Marianas while offering who knows what kind of insurance across state lines. So, if the insurer stops you from getting that operation, you’d probably have no recourse in domestic law.
* Senate passed 98 -0 extension for unemployment…and added a tax deduction to homeowners who have owned their homes for more than 6 years. This subsidy helps financially stable homeowners buy larger homes, and effectively adding to to the deficit by subsidizing well to do families.
*Per the Sunlight Foundation, Philadelphia congressman Robert Brady recently joined 71 other lawmakers in signing a letter to the FCC questioning the commission’s newly stated policy of network neutrality,…. …Brady is the leading recipient of campaign contributions from the combination of telecom companies and their lobbyists. Brady received most of 2007’s almost $92K contributions from Comcast.
* Sunlight Foundation: The other [House Ethics] investigations involve four lawmakers probed for improperly receiving a tax break on their homes in Maryland or the District of Columbia; North Carolina Rep. Heath Shuler is under investigation for a land swap deal; Florida Rep. Connie Mack is under investigation in connection to an earmark for Coconut Road that was submitted by Rep. Don Young; Rep. Joe Barton was under investigation for gifts given to a non-profit that he operates by companies with business before his committee, but he has since been exonerated. All the other lawmakers under investigation have been previously publicly reported.
…and so many more stories that fail to receive notice on the MSM radar and little known by the public. Too much of Washington lives and works in 19th C thinking, refusing to face or deal with the realities of the 21st C. Oh, yeah, it’s time for a big change, but Obama cannot do it, at least not alone. But why should Congress change when it’s old, time-honored glories and gifts suits its members quite well?
Add these:
* Neal Ferguson, conservative economist, says that the current corruption in Washington rivals the Golden Age. He said even England is looking to break up the TBTF banks.
* The unions believe that just because Ford had its first profitable quarter that it’s time to increase their demands.
* The CEO of Kaiser showed Ezra Klein a series of charts that show the US paying more than double in health costs what all other industrialized pay…while achieving no better results.
* Republican health plan would allow insurers to locate in the Marianas while offering who knows what kind of insurance across state lines. So, if the insurer stops you from getting that operation, you’d probably have no recourse in domestic law.
* Senate passed 98 -0 extension for unemployment…and added a tax deduction to homeowners who have owned their homes for more than 6 years. This subsidy helps financially stable homeowners buy larger homes, and effectively adding to to the deficit by subsidizing well to do families.
*Per the Sunlight Foundation, Philadelphia congressman Robert Brady recently joined 71 other lawmakers in signing a letter to the FCC questioning the commission’s newly stated policy of network neutrality,…. …Brady is the leading recipient of campaign contributions from the combination of telecom companies and their lobbyists. Brady received most of 2007’s almost $92K contributions from Comcast.
* Sunlight Foundation: The other [House Ethics] investigations involve four lawmakers probed for improperly receiving a tax break on their homes in Maryland or the District of Columbia; North Carolina Rep. Heath Shuler is under investigation for a land swap deal; Florida Rep. Connie Mack is under investigation in connection to an earmark for Coconut Road that was submitted by Rep. Don Young; Rep. Joe Barton was under investigation for gifts given to a non-profit that he operates by companies with business before his committee, but he has since been exonerated. All the other lawmakers under investigation have been previously publicly reported.
…and so many more stories that fail to receive notice on the MSM radar and little known by the public. Too much of Washington lives and works in 19th C thinking, refusing to face or deal with the realities of the 21st C. Oh, yeah, it’s time for a big change, but Obama cannot do it, at least not alone. But why should Congress change when it’s old, time-honored glories and gifts suits its members quite well?
Add these:
* Neal Ferguson, conservative economist, says that the current corruption in Washington rivals the Golden Age. He said even England is looking to break up the TBTF banks.
* The unions believe that just because Ford had its first profitable quarter that it’s time to increase their demands.
* The CEO of Kaiser showed Ezra Klein a series of charts that show the US paying more than double in health costs what all other industrialized pay…while achieving no better results.
* Republican health plan would allow insurers to locate in the Marianas while offering who knows what kind of insurance across state lines. So, if the insurer stops you from getting that operation, you’d probably have no recourse in domestic law.
* Senate passed 98 -0 extension for unemployment…and added a tax deduction to homeowners who have owned their homes for more than 6 years. This subsidy helps financially stable homeowners buy larger homes, and effectively adding to to the deficit by subsidizing well to do families.
*Per the Sunlight Foundation, Philadelphia congressman Robert Brady recently joined 71 other lawmakers in signing a letter to the FCC questioning the commission’s newly stated policy of network neutrality,…. …Brady is the leading recipient of campaign contributions from the combination of telecom companies and their lobbyists. Brady received most of 2007’s almost $92K contributions from Comcast.
* Sunlight Foundation: The other [House Ethics] investigations involve four lawmakers probed for improperly receiving a tax break on their homes in Maryland or the District of Columbia; North Carolina Rep. Heath Shuler is under investigation for a land swap deal; Florida Rep. Connie Mack is under investigation in connection to an earmark for Coconut Road that was submitted by Rep. Don Young; Rep. Joe Barton was under investigation for gifts given to a non-profit that he operates by companies with business before his committee, but he has since been exonerated. All the other lawmakers under investigation have been previously publicly reported.
…and so many more stories that fail to receive notice on the MSM radar and little known by the public. Too much of Washington lives and works in 19th C thinking, refusing to face or deal with the realities of the 21st C. Oh, yeah, it’s time for a big change, but Obama cannot do it, at least not alone. But why should Congress change when it’s old, time-honored glories and gifts suits its members quite well?
“I believe it’s going to take a new renaissance of rebellious artists, spiritual leaders and politicians to wake up the public to the reality of the real America.”
I saw one part of the beginning of that last night at the Ryman, Jon. Some part of this effort is reaching back into older songs and finding the authentic expression needed to remember the way we came. When done with serious powerful talent under the guidance of those turning inward to encounter that spiritual need, to graciously take up the cause of giving over to the next generation our rich heritage, clearing out the artificial and enhancing it, it conveys the right message at the right time of the social contract we willingly make with each other.
We can do less with more. We can take less from the commons. We can defend it for those who have yet to realize where that defense is coming from.
Not everyone can be or should be a star but anyone who understands that it is what we gladly give can shine. Maybe it sounds like old hippie BS, but keep the faith with each other and we will not lack for anything we really need.
Remember what Woody said and tried to stand for: don’t let people tell you you’re nothing. Don’t let them make you think you owe them everthing just to subsist. You are free and the promise on the statue in the harbor in New York is just as real today as it was a hundred years ago and perhaps even more possible. We just have to take off the hair coat, quit kneeing our own nuts and work for it. As Arlo says, “Keep the old songs alive.”
Better days ahead, I think.
“I believe it’s going to take a new renaissance of rebellious artists, spiritual leaders and politicians to wake up the public to the reality of the real America.”
I saw one part of the beginning of that last night at the Ryman, Jon. Some part of this effort is reaching back into older songs and finding the authentic expression needed to remember the way we came. When done with serious powerful talent under the guidance of those turning inward to encounter that spiritual need, to graciously take up the cause of giving over to the next generation our rich heritage, clearing out the artificial and enhancing it, it conveys the right message at the right time of the social contract we willingly make with each other.
We can do less with more. We can take less from the commons. We can defend it for those who have yet to realize where that defense is coming from.
Not everyone can be or should be a star but anyone who understands that it is what we gladly give can shine. Maybe it sounds like old hippie BS, but keep the faith with each other and we will not lack for anything we really need.
Remember what Woody said and tried to stand for: don’t let people tell you you’re nothing. Don’t let them make you think you owe them everthing just to subsist. You are free and the promise on the statue in the harbor in New York is just as real today as it was a hundred years ago and perhaps even more possible. We just have to take off the hair coat, quit kneeing our own nuts and work for it. As Arlo says, “Keep the old songs alive.”
Better days ahead, I think.
“I believe it’s going to take a new renaissance of rebellious artists, spiritual leaders and politicians to wake up the public to the reality of the real America.”
I saw one part of the beginning of that last night at the Ryman, Jon. Some part of this effort is reaching back into older songs and finding the authentic expression needed to remember the way we came. When done with serious powerful talent under the guidance of those turning inward to encounter that spiritual need, to graciously take up the cause of giving over to the next generation our rich heritage, clearing out the artificial and enhancing it, it conveys the right message at the right time of the social contract we willingly make with each other.
We can do less with more. We can take less from the commons. We can defend it for those who have yet to realize where that defense is coming from.
Not everyone can be or should be a star but anyone who understands that it is what we gladly give can shine. Maybe it sounds like old hippie BS, but keep the faith with each other and we will not lack for anything we really need.
Remember what Woody said and tried to stand for: don’t let people tell you you’re nothing. Don’t let them make you think you owe them everthing just to subsist. You are free and the promise on the statue in the harbor in New York is just as real today as it was a hundred years ago and perhaps even more possible. We just have to take off the hair coat, quit kneeing our own nuts and work for it. As Arlo says, “Keep the old songs alive.”
Better days ahead, I think.
Nice, Tom.
Nice, Tom.
Nice, Tom.
The rich have to understand a simple old lesson: when the people quit trying, they ain’t gonna be rich much longer.
How did Ford Motor Company hold it together? The same way they started: building a pretty good car almost anyone could afford.
Wanta know why I hate Macs? They are boutique boxes built to capture market instead of growing it.
Some very wealthy powerful personalities are going to finally ask themselves if they are global citizens or fair neighbors. I don’t mean isolationism; I mean investing locally, working harder to grow market instead of market share, taking pride in employing than in shareholding. I once worked for a company that took that attitude and as a result had not only a fine product but a worldwide reputation for excellence. Then the shareholders took over. Pfft! The product, the reputation and the profts went elsewhere. If you manage a company and you don’t put your people ahead of the stockholders, you don’t understand management whatever else you are told you know about business.
The rich have to understand a simple old lesson: when the people quit trying, they ain’t gonna be rich much longer.
How did Ford Motor Company hold it together? The same way they started: building a pretty good car almost anyone could afford.
Wanta know why I hate Macs? They are boutique boxes built to capture market instead of growing it.
Some very wealthy powerful personalities are going to finally ask themselves if they are global citizens or fair neighbors. I don’t mean isolationism; I mean investing locally, working harder to grow market instead of market share, taking pride in employing than in shareholding. I once worked for a company that took that attitude and as a result had not only a fine product but a worldwide reputation for excellence. Then the shareholders took over. Pfft! The product, the reputation and the profts went elsewhere. If you manage a company and you don’t put your people ahead of the stockholders, you don’t understand management whatever else you are told you know about business.
The rich have to understand a simple old lesson: when the people quit trying, they ain’t gonna be rich much longer.
How did Ford Motor Company hold it together? The same way they started: building a pretty good car almost anyone could afford.
Wanta know why I hate Macs? They are boutique boxes built to capture market instead of growing it.
Some very wealthy powerful personalities are going to finally ask themselves if they are global citizens or fair neighbors. I don’t mean isolationism; I mean investing locally, working harder to grow market instead of market share, taking pride in employing than in shareholding. I once worked for a company that took that attitude and as a result had not only a fine product but a worldwide reputation for excellence. Then the shareholders took over. Pfft! The product, the reputation and the profts went elsewhere. If you manage a company and you don’t put your people ahead of the stockholders, you don’t understand management whatever else you are told you know about business.
Yeah, but short-term, you can puff your resume up, make a bunch of Golden Handshakes, and bail out under multiple Golden Parachutes to your personal own soft landing every time. and laugh all the way to the investment bank. You got to admire people who are so adept at this, like watching Walter Payton doing a long broken-field run, though the fuckers who pump their MBAs and slick derivative skills are doing more of a “broken dreams” and “breaking bank” and “busting nations” sprint.
And ain’t you never heard of the latest? “Management by intimidation?” Now THAT’s how you motivate people to pull those huge sandstone blocks up the sides of the Pyramids. And “Office Space” is now a TV series. The End.
Yeah, but short-term, you can puff your resume up, make a bunch of Golden Handshakes, and bail out under multiple Golden Parachutes to your personal own soft landing every time. and laugh all the way to the investment bank. You got to admire people who are so adept at this, like watching Walter Payton doing a long broken-field run, though the fuckers who pump their MBAs and slick derivative skills are doing more of a “broken dreams” and “breaking bank” and “busting nations” sprint.
And ain’t you never heard of the latest? “Management by intimidation?” Now THAT’s how you motivate people to pull those huge sandstone blocks up the sides of the Pyramids. And “Office Space” is now a TV series. The End.
Yeah, but short-term, you can puff your resume up, make a bunch of Golden Handshakes, and bail out under multiple Golden Parachutes to your personal own soft landing every time. and laugh all the way to the investment bank. You got to admire people who are so adept at this, like watching Walter Payton doing a long broken-field run, though the fuckers who pump their MBAs and slick derivative skills are doing more of a “broken dreams” and “breaking bank” and “busting nations” sprint.
And ain’t you never heard of the latest? “Management by intimidation?” Now THAT’s how you motivate people to pull those huge sandstone blocks up the sides of the Pyramids. And “Office Space” is now a TV series. The End.
Maybe especially if the “ahead” is “a head,” on a pike? Since there is no visible means of imposing any kind of corrective to the Golden Ones. Who if they are wise, are busily lining their nests and getting ready to be Raptured Up to their penthouses in Dubai or on the World Ship. Remember the fate of old Boxer, in the “Animal House” parable — worked loyally, followed the party line, once he showed weakness it was off to the knackers.
The body politic at present really does remind me of some unfortunate, like my mother, being eaten by its own metastatic-cancerous substance until it dies, or does a Phoenix turn…
Maybe especially if the “ahead” is “a head,” on a pike? Since there is no visible means of imposing any kind of corrective to the Golden Ones. Who if they are wise, are busily lining their nests and getting ready to be Raptured Up to their penthouses in Dubai or on the World Ship. Remember the fate of old Boxer, in the “Animal House” parable — worked loyally, followed the party line, once he showed weakness it was off to the knackers.
The body politic at present really does remind me of some unfortunate, like my mother, being eaten by its own metastatic-cancerous substance until it dies, or does a Phoenix turn…
Maybe especially if the “ahead” is “a head,” on a pike? Since there is no visible means of imposing any kind of corrective to the Golden Ones. Who if they are wise, are busily lining their nests and getting ready to be Raptured Up to their penthouses in Dubai or on the World Ship. Remember the fate of old Boxer, in the “Animal House” parable — worked loyally, followed the party line, once he showed weakness it was off to the knackers.
The body politic at present really does remind me of some unfortunate, like my mother, being eaten by its own metastatic-cancerous substance until it dies, or does a Phoenix turn…
I’ve experienced all of that. Screw it. If I’m mad about it and don’t change my situation, I’m no better off. So the deal is look for the like minded and work with them. At some point a person has to find their own tribe.
Why do you think the kids are so disgusted with us, so willing to steal the culture? They see it for what it is. They may not be doing the right things to change it and some of them are even more sociopathic than we thought possible, but we have to either exclude them or look past them to the ones that aren’t. We must do that. We have to turn this boat over to the young turks and if we don’t give them someone to respect, why the heck should we be disappointed when they turn into our parents?
We are not helpless. We’ve been made to feel that way and we’ve grown comfortably numb with it. If the shock of what we’re seeing out there shakes us away, call it a blessing and move on.
I’ve experienced all of that. Screw it. If I’m mad about it and don’t change my situation, I’m no better off. So the deal is look for the like minded and work with them. At some point a person has to find their own tribe.
Why do you think the kids are so disgusted with us, so willing to steal the culture? They see it for what it is. They may not be doing the right things to change it and some of them are even more sociopathic than we thought possible, but we have to either exclude them or look past them to the ones that aren’t. We must do that. We have to turn this boat over to the young turks and if we don’t give them someone to respect, why the heck should we be disappointed when they turn into our parents?
We are not helpless. We’ve been made to feel that way and we’ve grown comfortably numb with it. If the shock of what we’re seeing out there shakes us away, call it a blessing and move on.
I’ve experienced all of that. Screw it. If I’m mad about it and don’t change my situation, I’m no better off. So the deal is look for the like minded and work with them. At some point a person has to find their own tribe.
Why do you think the kids are so disgusted with us, so willing to steal the culture? They see it for what it is. They may not be doing the right things to change it and some of them are even more sociopathic than we thought possible, but we have to either exclude them or look past them to the ones that aren’t. We must do that. We have to turn this boat over to the young turks and if we don’t give them someone to respect, why the heck should we be disappointed when they turn into our parents?
We are not helpless. We’ve been made to feel that way and we’ve grown comfortably numb with it. If the shock of what we’re seeing out there shakes us away, call it a blessing and move on.
len, you got it exactly. It will be interesting to see the boundaries of the new divisions and whether we can do better than “Lord of the Flies” or “The Postman” or “Beyond Thunderdome.” I got me a floating home with a certain degree of self-sufficiency — the trick will be figuring out how to persuade people with land and vegetables to trade for fish, or whatever.
len, you got it exactly. It will be interesting to see the boundaries of the new divisions and whether we can do better than “Lord of the Flies” or “The Postman” or “Beyond Thunderdome.” I got me a floating home with a certain degree of self-sufficiency — the trick will be figuring out how to persuade people with land and vegetables to trade for fish, or whatever.
len, you got it exactly. It will be interesting to see the boundaries of the new divisions and whether we can do better than “Lord of the Flies” or “The Postman” or “Beyond Thunderdome.” I got me a floating home with a certain degree of self-sufficiency — the trick will be figuring out how to persuade people with land and vegetables to trade for fish, or whatever.
Not all of them, JT. Maybe Obama isn’t The One but heck, who is really? Ringo said it: “I can feed the birds in my own garden.” That’s the power of local. Pick any thing one CAN do and to that.
Jon is right. The serious artists, politicians, business people and just people have to start changing themselves first, then look around at what can be changed.
Willie Nelson said it: “Real country, in case you forgot.” Arlo said: “Keep on playing the old songs, keep working for the way things ought to be.” Those guys may have gray hair but they learned a lot on the road and the kids respect them for that because they share. When the A-listers do it, the B, C and D listers HAVE to follow. It becomes trendy. And that can be enough.
We’re a good people, JT. We need to be reminded of that. When we do remember we quit electing and working for carcinogens.
Not all of them, JT. Maybe Obama isn’t The One but heck, who is really? Ringo said it: “I can feed the birds in my own garden.” That’s the power of local. Pick any thing one CAN do and to that.
Jon is right. The serious artists, politicians, business people and just people have to start changing themselves first, then look around at what can be changed.
Willie Nelson said it: “Real country, in case you forgot.” Arlo said: “Keep on playing the old songs, keep working for the way things ought to be.” Those guys may have gray hair but they learned a lot on the road and the kids respect them for that because they share. When the A-listers do it, the B, C and D listers HAVE to follow. It becomes trendy. And that can be enough.
We’re a good people, JT. We need to be reminded of that. When we do remember we quit electing and working for carcinogens.
It’s a start and an end in and of itself. If it is positive, it doesn’t have to be greater. The curious twist in Thunderdome is her speech, “Look at it. Civilisation.”
You’ve been to parts of the world that do live off rice and fish and will defend that with M-16s. My God, look at what we have in this country and yet we whine, we fear our own insignificance and because of it makes ourselves less significant.
If it’s positive, it counts. Scale is not the measure. Direction is.
It’s a start and an end in and of itself. If it is positive, it doesn’t have to be greater. The curious twist in Thunderdome is her speech, “Look at it. Civilisation.”
You’ve been to parts of the world that do live off rice and fish and will defend that with M-16s. My God, look at what we have in this country and yet we whine, we fear our own insignificance and because of it makes ourselves less significant.
If it’s positive, it counts. Scale is not the measure. Direction is.
It’s a start and an end in and of itself. If it is positive, it doesn’t have to be greater. The curious twist in Thunderdome is her speech, “Look at it. Civilisation.”
You’ve been to parts of the world that do live off rice and fish and will defend that with M-16s. My God, look at what we have in this country and yet we whine, we fear our own insignificance and because of it makes ourselves less significant.
If it’s positive, it counts. Scale is not the measure. Direction is.
Interesting post. Coming the day before the House votes on health care reform, maybe it’s an indication that it’s finally time to move down Axelrod’s “to do list”.
No reasonable man would make an argument against the changes cited, but it’s naive to continue to expect Obama to make them. I know many are as tired of this rant as I am in making it, but to date, there have been no investigations or indictments into the collapse of the largest credit bubble in the “history of the world”.
If he won’t take on the financial oligarchies, why continue to expect him to break-up the TBTF’s, re-build the country’s manufacturing base, and shut down our overseas military involvement?
It’s not going to happen; after a year under the hot lights and plenty of finger prints, it’s clear that Obama’s not a “change agent”; he’s a “placeholder”.
Interesting post. Coming the day before the House votes on health care reform, maybe it’s an indication that it’s finally time to move down Axelrod’s “to do list”.
No reasonable man would make an argument against the changes cited, but it’s naive to continue to expect Obama to make them. I know many are as tired of this rant as I am in making it, but to date, there have been no investigations or indictments into the collapse of the largest credit bubble in the “history of the world”.
If he won’t take on the financial oligarchies, why continue to expect him to break-up the TBTF’s, re-build the country’s manufacturing base, and shut down our overseas military involvement?
It’s not going to happen; after a year under the hot lights and plenty of finger prints, it’s clear that Obama’s not a “change agent”; he’s a “placeholder”.
Interesting post. Coming the day before the House votes on health care reform, maybe it’s an indication that it’s finally time to move down Axelrod’s “to do list”.
No reasonable man would make an argument against the changes cited, but it’s naive to continue to expect Obama to make them. I know many are as tired of this rant as I am in making it, but to date, there have been no investigations or indictments into the collapse of the largest credit bubble in the “history of the world”.
If he won’t take on the financial oligarchies, why continue to expect him to break-up the TBTF’s, re-build the country’s manufacturing base, and shut down our overseas military involvement?
It’s not going to happen; after a year under the hot lights and plenty of finger prints, it’s clear that Obama’s not a “change agent”; he’s a “placeholder”.
Although to an extent (especially where it comes to the Strangelove police state, and yes, the massive thieving in the credit bubble collapse), I agree with you, I have to wonder why every, and I mean every, member of The Base is jumping up and down and screaming with rage. “Placeholder” is not the word they use for him. “Radical bent on destroying capitalism” is how they describe him.
Although to an extent (especially where it comes to the Strangelove police state, and yes, the massive thieving in the credit bubble collapse), I agree with you, I have to wonder why every, and I mean every, member of The Base is jumping up and down and screaming with rage. “Placeholder” is not the word they use for him. “Radical bent on destroying capitalism” is how they describe him.
Although to an extent (especially where it comes to the Strangelove police state, and yes, the massive thieving in the credit bubble collapse), I agree with you, I have to wonder why every, and I mean every, member of The Base is jumping up and down and screaming with rage. “Placeholder” is not the word they use for him. “Radical bent on destroying capitalism” is how they describe him.
“The greatest threat to our freedom” were the actual words used by that cheerleader of “I just want my country back” pinheads, John Boehner, to describe the severely watered-down health care reform bill.
“The greatest threat to our freedom.”
Not vast unreported illegal wiretapping.
Not a growing private Blackwater defense empire.
Not wars started on patently false pretenses.
Not the credit bubble collapse.
Not even al Qaeda, or that All-Tiime Grand Master Terror Boogey Man, Osama bin Laden.
Nope: health care reform.
“The greatest threat to our freedom” were the actual words used by that cheerleader of “I just want my country back” pinheads, John Boehner, to describe the severely watered-down health care reform bill.
“The greatest threat to our freedom.”
Not vast unreported illegal wiretapping.
Not a growing private Blackwater defense empire.
Not wars started on patently false pretenses.
Not the credit bubble collapse.
Not even al Qaeda, or that All-Tiime Grand Master Terror Boogey Man, Osama bin Laden.
Nope: health care reform.
“The greatest threat to our freedom” were the actual words used by that cheerleader of “I just want my country back” pinheads, John Boehner, to describe the severely watered-down health care reform bill.
“The greatest threat to our freedom.”
Not vast unreported illegal wiretapping.
Not a growing private Blackwater defense empire.
Not wars started on patently false pretenses.
Not the credit bubble collapse.
Not even al Qaeda, or that All-Tiime Grand Master Terror Boogey Man, Osama bin Laden.
Nope: health care reform.
> “The greatest threat to our freedom”
The greatest threat to the liberties of U.S citizens is the failure of it’s courts and representatives to hold the executive to account.
Cowards in those offices have absolutely abrogated their responsibility to restrain the executive from offences against the citzenry.
> “The greatest threat to our freedom”
The greatest threat to the liberties of U.S citizens is the failure of it’s courts and representatives to hold the executive to account.
Cowards in those offices have absolutely abrogated their responsibility to restrain the executive from offences against the citzenry.
> “The greatest threat to our freedom”
The greatest threat to the liberties of U.S citizens is the failure of it’s courts and representatives to hold the executive to account.
Cowards in those offices have absolutely abrogated their responsibility to restrain the executive from offences against the citzenry.
Maybe a class-action lawsuit against the government at all levels is needed. Anyone want to be the lead plaintiff?
Maybe a class-action lawsuit against the government at all levels is needed. Anyone want to be the lead plaintiff?
Maybe a class-action lawsuit against the government at all levels is needed. Anyone want to be the lead plaintiff?
We need more jobs – lots of them. Large Corporations are reducing headcount and increasing productivity with what they have left. New jobs come primarily from small to medium sized businesses.
An economic plan that would level the playing field and give startups and small to medium businesses a chance to grow would be a sane policy.
One of the big holdups right now is health insurance. Everyone NEEDS it. Small and medium companies cannot compete with the megacorps on this and pay disproportionate rates
It’s a simple condition with a complex solution. We have the brains, we have the people. We just have the wrong ones in the places of economic decision making.
We need more jobs – lots of them. Large Corporations are reducing headcount and increasing productivity with what they have left. New jobs come primarily from small to medium sized businesses.
An economic plan that would level the playing field and give startups and small to medium businesses a chance to grow would be a sane policy.
One of the big holdups right now is health insurance. Everyone NEEDS it. Small and medium companies cannot compete with the megacorps on this and pay disproportionate rates
It’s a simple condition with a complex solution. We have the brains, we have the people. We just have the wrong ones in the places of economic decision making.
I like your style, Valerie.
I like your style, Valerie.
I like your style, Valerie.
#1. Notice that massive drop in employment for young people. That sure seems to be, at least in part, a result of the minimum wage hike. Dumb policy.
#2. The notion of 20% of the workforce being so productive that they could produce 80% of the goods everyone buys is actually pretty awesome. If you get out of the aggregate land and start thinking about what that actually means, it’d be an impressive gift to the everyone, much the same way that 2% of our population provides 100% of our food.
Productivity is the heart of prosperity. Given, people can’t have NO INCOME and live well. But if 20% of the workforce is so productive that 80% of the goods can be sold from that base, that must mean that these goods are amazingly affordable.
#3. Man, that graph of the after-tax expenses is pretty awful… as an indictment of the government’s policy for “affordable housing”. So food, necessary for life, is only making up 20% of their expenses but housing is taking up more than half. That’s what I’d call a long-range government inflationary policy FAIL comparable to public education policy.
#4. Rather than break up these banks, how about we let them sink or swim, NOT designate any of them “Too big to fail” and pass a law that strips the government of the ability to bailout insolvent firms. Fear of failure is the regulation we need.
#5. This “American manufacturing is gone” rhetoric is dishonest hyperbole meant to scare people into buying some tyrannical “reform”. America is the world’s leading manufacturer. That’s just a fact. It won’t always be, given our relative population, but that’s nothing to worry about.
‘Made in the USA’ still means something
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30229507//
#6. The things you believe a president can do are not thing that can be done by one man and his lumbering bureaucracy.
“Obama will have to do all of that (break up the Big Banks and reform the food and energy businesses), but his task will be far greater because he has to help create 30 million new jobs in the next few years.”
This is an insane sentence. Presidents don’t “create” jobs except for government jobs. But the government can improve the environment and competitive circumstances that job-creating private entrepreneurs face.
HERE’S A PLAN:
#1. Cut GM & Chrylser loose. Immediately. It was a tragedy for the history of bankruptcy law and US investment that the administration trashed the creditors in order to favor their union buddies that helped run these Goliaths into the ground. Right now, they are nothing more then political theft organizations. Sink or swim for these parasites. (yes, half of my family does live in Detroit).
#2. Strip the Fed of its regulatory power and its “full employment” mandate, replacing it with a mandate to maintain nominal GDP growth at 3%. Repeal legal tender laws and allow free competition in currency in competition with the dollar from a chastened Fed.
#3. I know I can’t have a free banking system, so let’s have a second-best solution: 15% reserve requirements for all credit-creating entities. Period. Consolidate the other regulatory agencies under the DOJ and replace costly paperwork with a beefed up fraud enforcement push.
#3. liquidate fanny and freddie and withdrawal the government from the housing market.
#4. Eliminate the payroll tax.
#5. Eliminate the employer health insurance exemption.
#6. Convert medicare to a voucher program.
#7. institute a flat income and corporate tax at 20% and a negative income tax as a replacement for welfare. Liquidate the IRS and the accounting profession for individuals and small businesses.
#8. End all corporate subsidies, especially food and all foreign government aid.
#9. Eliminate all tariffs on imports.
#10. Finally… shut down the empire. Bring home the boys from Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, etc.
That’s what I would do, based on what I know right now, and subject to change as I learn.
Ideally, the improved business environment and simplicity would lead to job creating entrepreneurial activity. But even in that case it would not be me “creating” the jobs. Just helping provide the job-friendly environment.
#1. Notice that massive drop in employment for young people. That sure seems to be, at least in part, a result of the minimum wage hike. Dumb policy.
#2. The notion of 20% of the workforce being so productive that they could produce 80% of the goods everyone buys is actually pretty awesome. If you get out of the aggregate land and start thinking about what that actually means, it’d be an impressive gift to the everyone, much the same way that 2% of our population provides 100% of our food.
Productivity is the heart of prosperity. Given, people can’t have NO INCOME and live well. But if 20% of the workforce is so productive that 80% of the goods can be sold from that base, that must mean that these goods are amazingly affordable.
#3. Man, that graph of the after-tax expenses is pretty awful… as an indictment of the government’s policy for “affordable housing”. So food, necessary for life, is only making up 20% of their expenses but housing is taking up more than half. That’s what I’d call a long-range government inflationary policy FAIL comparable to public education policy.
#4. Rather than break up these banks, how about we let them sink or swim, NOT designate any of them “Too big to fail” and pass a law that strips the government of the ability to bailout insolvent firms. Fear of failure is the regulation we need.
#5. This “American manufacturing is gone” rhetoric is dishonest hyperbole meant to scare people into buying some tyrannical “reform”. America is the world’s leading manufacturer. That’s just a fact. It won’t always be, given our relative population, but that’s nothing to worry about.
‘Made in the USA’ still means something
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30229507//
#6. The things you believe a president can do are not thing that can be done by one man and his lumbering bureaucracy.
“Obama will have to do all of that (break up the Big Banks and reform the food and energy businesses), but his task will be far greater because he has to help create 30 million new jobs in the next few years.”
This is an insane sentence. Presidents don’t “create” jobs except for government jobs. But the government can improve the environment and competitive circumstances that job-creating private entrepreneurs face.
HERE’S A PLAN:
#1. Cut GM & Chrylser loose. Immediately. It was a tragedy for the history of bankruptcy law and US investment that the administration trashed the creditors in order to favor their union buddies that helped run these Goliaths into the ground. Right now, they are nothing more then political theft organizations. Sink or swim for these parasites. (yes, half of my family does live in Detroit).
#2. Strip the Fed of its regulatory power and its “full employment” mandate, replacing it with a mandate to maintain nominal GDP growth at 3%. Repeal legal tender laws and allow free competition in currency in competition with the dollar from a chastened Fed.
#3. I know I can’t have a free banking system, so let’s have a second-best solution: 15% reserve requirements for all credit-creating entities. Period. Consolidate the other regulatory agencies under the DOJ and replace costly paperwork with a beefed up fraud enforcement push.
#3. liquidate fanny and freddie and withdrawal the government from the housing market.
#4. Eliminate the payroll tax.
#5. Eliminate the employer health insurance exemption.
#6. Convert medicare to a voucher program.
#7. institute a flat income and corporate tax at 20% and a negative income tax as a replacement for welfare. Liquidate the IRS and the accounting profession for individuals and small businesses.
#8. End all corporate subsidies, especially food and all foreign government aid.
#9. Eliminate all tariffs on imports.
#10. Finally… shut down the empire. Bring home the boys from Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, etc.
That’s what I would do, based on what I know right now, and subject to change as I learn.
Ideally, the improved business environment and simplicity would lead to job creating entrepreneurial activity. But even in that case it would not be me “creating” the jobs. Just helping provide the job-friendly environment.
#1. Notice that massive drop in employment for young people. That sure seems to be, at least in part, a result of the minimum wage hike. Dumb policy.
#2. The notion of 20% of the workforce being so productive that they could produce 80% of the goods everyone buys is actually pretty awesome. If you get out of the aggregate land and start thinking about what that actually means, it’d be an impressive gift to the everyone, much the same way that 2% of our population provides 100% of our food.
Productivity is the heart of prosperity. Given, people can’t have NO INCOME and live well. But if 20% of the workforce is so productive that 80% of the goods can be sold from that base, that must mean that these goods are amazingly affordable.
#3. Man, that graph of the after-tax expenses is pretty awful… as an indictment of the government’s policy for “affordable housing”. So food, necessary for life, is only making up 20% of their expenses but housing is taking up more than half. That’s what I’d call a long-range government inflationary policy FAIL comparable to public education policy.
#4. Rather than break up these banks, how about we let them sink or swim, NOT designate any of them “Too big to fail” and pass a law that strips the government of the ability to bailout insolvent firms. Fear of failure is the regulation we need.
#5. This “American manufacturing is gone” rhetoric is dishonest hyperbole meant to scare people into buying some tyrannical “reform”. America is the world’s leading manufacturer. That’s just a fact. It won’t always be, given our relative population, but that’s nothing to worry about.
‘Made in the USA’ still means something
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30229507//
#6. The things you believe a president can do are not thing that can be done by one man and his lumbering bureaucracy.
“Obama will have to do all of that (break up the Big Banks and reform the food and energy businesses), but his task will be far greater because he has to help create 30 million new jobs in the next few years.”
This is an insane sentence. Presidents don’t “create” jobs except for government jobs. But the government can improve the environment and competitive circumstances that job-creating private entrepreneurs face.
HERE’S A PLAN:
#1. Cut GM & Chrylser loose. Immediately. It was a tragedy for the history of bankruptcy law and US investment that the administration trashed the creditors in order to favor their union buddies that helped run these Goliaths into the ground. Right now, they are nothing more then political theft organizations. Sink or swim for these parasites. (yes, half of my family does live in Detroit).
#2. Strip the Fed of its regulatory power and its “full employment” mandate, replacing it with a mandate to maintain nominal GDP growth at 3%. Repeal legal tender laws and allow free competition in currency in competition with the dollar from a chastened Fed.
#3. I know I can’t have a free banking system, so let’s have a second-best solution: 15% reserve requirements for all credit-creating entities. Period. Consolidate the other regulatory agencies under the DOJ and replace costly paperwork with a beefed up fraud enforcement push.
#3. liquidate fanny and freddie and withdrawal the government from the housing market.
#4. Eliminate the payroll tax.
#5. Eliminate the employer health insurance exemption.
#6. Convert medicare to a voucher program.
#7. institute a flat income and corporate tax at 20% and a negative income tax as a replacement for welfare. Liquidate the IRS and the accounting profession for individuals and small businesses.
#8. End all corporate subsidies, especially food and all foreign government aid.
#9. Eliminate all tariffs on imports.
#10. Finally… shut down the empire. Bring home the boys from Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, etc.
That’s what I would do, based on what I know right now, and subject to change as I learn.
Ideally, the improved business environment and simplicity would lead to job creating entrepreneurial activity. But even in that case it would not be me “creating” the jobs. Just helping provide the job-friendly environment.
> That’s what I would do, based on what I know right now,
> and subject to change as I learn.
I think one of the first things you’d learn is that no one’s going to let you upset carts so spectacularly in the first place.
We all have our fantasies of what we’d do if we could be dictator for a while, but as beneficial as it would be (and fun), the world infuriatingly refuses to concede I ought be in charge (not that I’ve ever tried, I suspect I wouldn’t have the neccesary patience with fools to be a politician).
Absent realising our fantasies, and hoping speaking up and out in numerous forums will effect some change I think we’re each better served by thinking and speaking about what things might come to pass, that we’d approve of, if enough people could be convinced it was for the best.
I’m not sure much from your list has much of a chance of winning through current special interests, but a detemrined advocate might have luck with #3 and #5.
> That’s what I would do, based on what I know right now,
> and subject to change as I learn.
I think one of the first things you’d learn is that no one’s going to let you upset carts so spectacularly in the first place.
We all have our fantasies of what we’d do if we could be dictator for a while, but as beneficial as it would be (and fun), the world infuriatingly refuses to concede I ought be in charge (not that I’ve ever tried, I suspect I wouldn’t have the neccesary patience with fools to be a politician).
Absent realising our fantasies, and hoping speaking up and out in numerous forums will effect some change I think we’re each better served by thinking and speaking about what things might come to pass, that we’d approve of, if enough people could be convinced it was for the best.
I’m not sure much from your list has much of a chance of winning through current special interests, but a detemrined advocate might have luck with #3 and #5.
> That’s what I would do, based on what I know right now,
> and subject to change as I learn.
I think one of the first things you’d learn is that no one’s going to let you upset carts so spectacularly in the first place.
We all have our fantasies of what we’d do if we could be dictator for a while, but as beneficial as it would be (and fun), the world infuriatingly refuses to concede I ought be in charge (not that I’ve ever tried, I suspect I wouldn’t have the neccesary patience with fools to be a politician).
Absent realising our fantasies, and hoping speaking up and out in numerous forums will effect some change I think we’re each better served by thinking and speaking about what things might come to pass, that we’d approve of, if enough people could be convinced it was for the best.
I’m not sure much from your list has much of a chance of winning through current special interests, but a detemrined advocate might have luck with #3 and #5.
“Consolidate the other regulatory agencies under the DOJ and replace costly paperwork with a beefed up fraud enforcement push”
That doesn’t tend to work. See Homeland Security.
The problem is not management under a single entity or in other words, span of control. It is ineffective administration of goals and paperwork in conflict. The difference is subtle but real.
It’s the difference between consortia and empires.
“Consolidate the other regulatory agencies under the DOJ and replace costly paperwork with a beefed up fraud enforcement push”
That doesn’t tend to work. See Homeland Security.
The problem is not management under a single entity or in other words, span of control. It is ineffective administration of goals and paperwork in conflict. The difference is subtle but real.
It’s the difference between consortia and empires.
“Consolidate the other regulatory agencies under the DOJ and replace costly paperwork with a beefed up fraud enforcement push”
That doesn’t tend to work. See Homeland Security.
The problem is not management under a single entity or in other words, span of control. It is ineffective administration of goals and paperwork in conflict. The difference is subtle but real.
It’s the difference between consortia and empires.
My point is to move “regulation” to being about more aggressive crime fighting of fraud and less (or none) pre-emptive setting of detailed rules and reports.
It’s not gonna happen, but it’s better than our current situation which is subject to Regulatory Arbitrage.
My point is to move “regulation” to being about more aggressive crime fighting of fraud and less (or none) pre-emptive setting of detailed rules and reports.
It’s not gonna happen, but it’s better than our current situation which is subject to Regulatory Arbitrage.
My point is to move “regulation” to being about more aggressive crime fighting of fraud and less (or none) pre-emptive setting of detailed rules and reports.
It’s not gonna happen, but it’s better than our current situation which is subject to Regulatory Arbitrage.
That’s the problem with change of any kind in a system that doles out so much to special interests. The current beneficiaries will fight it tooth and nail, while the advocates of the reform will have at best of a tentative support for the new regime because they’re not sure of the outcome either.
Still, I’ll keep putting out the ideas regardless. Consider them seeds of a future forest.
That’s the problem with change of any kind in a system that doles out so much to special interests. The current beneficiaries will fight it tooth and nail, while the advocates of the reform will have at best of a tentative support for the new regime because they’re not sure of the outcome either.
Still, I’ll keep putting out the ideas regardless. Consider them seeds of a future forest.
That’s the problem with change of any kind in a system that doles out so much to special interests. The current beneficiaries will fight it tooth and nail, while the advocates of the reform will have at best of a tentative support for the new regime because they’re not sure of the outcome either.
Still, I’ll keep putting out the ideas regardless. Consider them seeds of a future forest.
I can agree with that. I’ve no answer to the complexities of finance and I’m certainly not smart enough to offer one. You are right that productivity where one fifth feed all the rest is a miracle of technology and organization, but it seems to me it has become an ill wind blowing away human decency before it and carving lines in our culture like the face of a dustbowl Okie.
I am haunted by the faces of who and what we leave behind through our aggression.
I can agree with that. I’ve no answer to the complexities of finance and I’m certainly not smart enough to offer one. You are right that productivity where one fifth feed all the rest is a miracle of technology and organization, but it seems to me it has become an ill wind blowing away human decency before it and carving lines in our culture like the face of a dustbowl Okie.
I am haunted by the faces of who and what we leave behind through our aggression.
Fentex:
“The greatest threat to the liberties of U.S citizens is the failure of it’s courts and representatives to hold the executive to account.
“Cowards in those offices have absolutely abrogated their responsibility to restrain the executive from offences against the citzenry.”
Not to mention the entire train of events and notions that leads to the endpoint of U-S-”us” being a nation not of “citizens” but merely of “consumers,” with the peoples of other nations more or less on the same trajectory, where such leaders as there are take their behavioral cues in the area of rights and responsibilities from pushable “scientific polls” and the people with the plain brown envelopes or their electronic debit equivalent, rather than some kind of Solonic long-term ideal.
And of course where “slack” grows all out of whack, because there is a tipping point, long past and ‘way too far back up hill to, like young people said a bit a go in our rapidly evolving patois, “cancel cancel,” and have a “do-over.”
“Slack” being that necessary tolerance in any system for what you might call excursions from mutual fiduciareality. As in, if all laws with incarceration as a penalty were enforced rigorously, the last self-righteous prig left free would have to turn the key on his own jail cell, since all the rest of us would be in the pokey, except maybe for a few juvenile innocents who could then re-enact “The Lord of The Flies.”
As in, anybody here stretched the truth in filling out their tax returns? As in, the most common criminal act in the country, I have heard, is probably building without a permit like that secret rec room — oops showing my age, “entertainment center” — in the basement, with the extension-cord wiring. As in, our collective wink at Senator Suckulater taking just a little mil or three from everyone who actually pays taxes in the country, and then getting a “law passed” by his compadres to send those millioins or billions of tax revenues to the Legislative Lottery Winners in his home jurisdiction, and snuck into a budget bill that the President dare not veto or that would Shut The Government Down, both the healthy parts and the tumors.
As in, the recognition of all of us that when Councilwoman Offonoatoot horsetrades for an ordinance banning the wearing of thongs and the drafter fails to write the “thong” definition acutely and accurately, the cops start busting people for public frippery, 10 days or $500 fine, for wearing flip-flops. Or the cops don’t enforce it, by exercise of “field judgment,” because being sinners themselves, who take their own little bits of self-justified baksheesh and who wouldn’t think, for so many reasons, of busting Councilwoman Offonatoot for minor drunk driving, they know that there has to be some “slack.” And they also know that given a certain degree of “freedom,” being “only human” themselves, they will like almost everyone else, on “seeing their opportunities,” go ahead and “took ‘em” with both hands and a foot, and tell themselves it’s ok because “everyone else is doing it,” forgetting or ignoring what their mothers told them about the wisdom vel non of jumping off the Empire State Building because “everyone else is doing it.” Or after the arrest, the Assistant State’s Attorney exercises “prosecutorial discretion” to “nol pros” and that particular “violation of the rule of law” gets added to the rest of the items in the column labeled “slack.”
Not to pick on police, they behind the Thin Blue Line are where the enforcement rubber hits the road however. And bear in mind that past that certain tipping point, the cancerous nature of the organs of government and our collective conscience overwhelms the correctives that evolution allows us in our societal-scale immune systems — shame, empathy, all that face-to-face, durable-only-in-a-small-polity stuff that lets people living in neolithic surplus work those few productive hours every day (subject to natural cataclysm, of course), and spend the rest of the time storytelling and pursuing the nature of the universal spirit and making spears and atlatls and arrow points.
It’s all just a matter of scale — production tolerances in a machine with additive units, where the entirety gets beyond a certain number N, leading to “interferences” that grind the bearings to shavings and the entire machine to a halt.
One could always melt the whole thing down, re-Constitute some new specs, re-machine to different tolerances, and try again…
Fentex:
“The greatest threat to the liberties of U.S citizens is the failure of it’s courts and representatives to hold the executive to account.
“Cowards in those offices have absolutely abrogated their responsibility to restrain the executive from offences against the citzenry.”
Not to mention the entire train of events and notions that leads to the endpoint of U-S-”us” being a nation not of “citizens” but merely of “consumers,” with the peoples of other nations more or less on the same trajectory, where such leaders as there are take their behavioral cues in the area of rights and responsibilities from pushable “scientific polls” and the people with the plain brown envelopes or their electronic debit equivalent, rather than some kind of Solonic long-term ideal.
And of course where “slack” grows all out of whack, because there is a tipping point, long past and ‘way too far back up hill to, like young people said a bit a go in our rapidly evolving patois, “cancel cancel,” and have a “do-over.”
“Slack” being that necessary tolerance in any system for what you might call excursions from mutual fiduciareality. As in, if all laws with incarceration as a penalty were enforced rigorously, the last self-righteous prig left free would have to turn the key on his own jail cell, since all the rest of us would be in the pokey, except maybe for a few juvenile innocents who could then re-enact “The Lord of The Flies.”
As in, anybody here stretched the truth in filling out their tax returns? As in, the most common criminal act in the country, I have heard, is probably building without a permit like that secret rec room — oops showing my age, “entertainment center” — in the basement, with the extension-cord wiring. As in, our collective wink at Senator Suckulater taking just a little mil or three from everyone who actually pays taxes in the country, and then getting a “law passed” by his compadres to send those millioins or billions of tax revenues to the Legislative Lottery Winners in his home jurisdiction, and snuck into a budget bill that the President dare not veto or that would Shut The Government Down, both the healthy parts and the tumors.
As in, the recognition of all of us that when Councilwoman Offonoatoot horsetrades for an ordinance banning the wearing of thongs and the drafter fails to write the “thong” definition acutely and accurately, the cops start busting people for public frippery, 10 days or $500 fine, for wearing flip-flops. Or the cops don’t enforce it, by exercise of “field judgment,” because being sinners themselves, who take their own little bits of self-justified baksheesh and who wouldn’t think, for so many reasons, of busting Councilwoman Offonatoot for minor drunk driving, they know that there has to be some “slack.” And they also know that given a certain degree of “freedom,” being “only human” themselves, they will like almost everyone else, on “seeing their opportunities,” go ahead and “took ‘em” with both hands and a foot, and tell themselves it’s ok because “everyone else is doing it,” forgetting or ignoring what their mothers told them about the wisdom vel non of jumping off the Empire State Building because “everyone else is doing it.” Or after the arrest, the Assistant State’s Attorney exercises “prosecutorial discretion” to “nol pros” and that particular “violation of the rule of law” gets added to the rest of the items in the column labeled “slack.”
Not to pick on police, they behind the Thin Blue Line are where the enforcement rubber hits the road however. And bear in mind that past that certain tipping point, the cancerous nature of the organs of government and our collective conscience overwhelms the correctives that evolution allows us in our societal-scale immune systems — shame, empathy, all that face-to-face, durable-only-in-a-small-polity stuff that lets people living in neolithic surplus work those few productive hours every day (subject to natural cataclysm, of course), and spend the rest of the time storytelling and pursuing the nature of the universal spirit and making spears and atlatls and arrow points.
It’s all just a matter of scale — production tolerances in a machine with additive units, where the entirety gets beyond a certain number N, leading to “interferences” that grind the bearings to shavings and the entire machine to a halt.
One could always melt the whole thing down, re-Constitute some new specs, re-machine to different tolerances, and try again…
John- I did mean to imply that Pareto’s power curve had arrived yet, but rather to ask the question about what happens in a society with 25% permanent unemployment? I don’t think any of your Austrian solutions answer that question. Rather, I think Rick Turner’s first post goes more to the point. We are going to have to work less and play more–spread the jobs around and tax the $1 million a year+ bonuses on Wall Street and CEO pay at 70%
John- I did mean to imply that Pareto’s power curve had arrived yet, but rather to ask the question about what happens in a society with 25% permanent unemployment? I don’t think any of your Austrian solutions answer that question. Rather, I think Rick Turner’s first post goes more to the point. We are going to have to work less and play more–spread the jobs around and tax the $1 million a year+ bonuses on Wall Street and CEO pay at 70%
John- I did mean to imply that Pareto’s power curve had arrived yet, but rather to ask the question about what happens in a society with 25% permanent unemployment? I don’t think any of your Austrian solutions answer that question. Rather, I think Rick Turner’s first post goes more to the point. We are going to have to work less and play more–spread the jobs around and tax the $1 million a year+ bonuses on Wall Street and CEO pay at 70%
We also have to let some oversized functions fail and split up the work. John is right about that.
Look at the movie industry. The Bigs are regrinding the old. The new is once again coming out of the garages. Why? They are closer to the ground where new things are happening. We can get out of their way, but we can also help them.
We will always fail fighting the user interface and the cycles of evolution borne by proximity, desire and sex. It’s not simply a matter of ‘let them boogie, momma’, we have to rent them the halls and loan them the gear. In return, they have to respect the old songs.
I am reminded that you are a very smart man. FWIW, don’t just be a bean counter of the interregnum while your friends play in the dixieland band riding atop the carriage.
“An’ give me six crap shooting pall bearers,
Let a chorus girl sing me a song.
Put a jazz band on my hearse wagon
To raise hell as we roll along.”
We also have to let some oversized functions fail and split up the work. John is right about that.
Look at the movie industry. The Bigs are regrinding the old. The new is once again coming out of the garages. Why? They are closer to the ground where new things are happening. We can get out of their way, but we can also help them.
We will always fail fighting the user interface and the cycles of evolution borne by proximity, desire and sex. It’s not simply a matter of ‘let them boogie, momma’, we have to rent them the halls and loan them the gear. In return, they have to respect the old songs.
I am reminded that you are a very smart man. FWIW, don’t just be a bean counter of the interregnum while your friends play in the dixieland band riding atop the carriage.
“An’ give me six crap shooting pall bearers,
Let a chorus girl sing me a song.
Put a jazz band on my hearse wagon
To raise hell as we roll along.”
Jon,
Permanent unemployment is a function of some kind of structural rigidity. Lord Skidelsky would even acknowledge that. It’s all about “sticky wages”.
Policies that prevent fluid adjustments in prices and wages, such as the minimum wage and price controls and legal cartels like unions and regulated industries, are the only force that can maintain permanently high unemployment.
European states like France and Germany have long suffered this structural failing, having double-digit unemployment even during the boom.
The solution is simply flexibility.
Ultra-high productivity isn’t going to suddenly solve every human problem. It’s just like food production. The reason we have iPhones is partly because only 2% of us need to farm. The rest of us are freed to solve higher-order problems like communication, story telling, and the higher levels of Mazlos’ Pyramid.
Unstick the rigidities and the barriers to entry. That’s the solution.
Step away from the Malthusian trap, Jon. It’s scientism.
Jon,
Permanent unemployment is a function of some kind of structural rigidity. Lord Skidelsky would even acknowledge that. It’s all about “sticky wages”.
Policies that prevent fluid adjustments in prices and wages, such as the minimum wage and price controls and legal cartels like unions and regulated industries, are the only force that can maintain permanently high unemployment.
European states like France and Germany have long suffered this structural failing, having double-digit unemployment even during the boom.
The solution is simply flexibility.
Ultra-high productivity isn’t going to suddenly solve every human problem. It’s just like food production. The reason we have iPhones is partly because only 2% of us need to farm. The rest of us are freed to solve higher-order problems like communication, story telling, and the higher levels of Mazlos’ Pyramid.
Unstick the rigidities and the barriers to entry. That’s the solution.
Step away from the Malthusian trap, Jon. It’s scientism.
Jon,
Permanent unemployment is a function of some kind of structural rigidity. Lord Skidelsky would even acknowledge that. It’s all about “sticky wages”.
Policies that prevent fluid adjustments in prices and wages, such as the minimum wage and price controls and legal cartels like unions and regulated industries, are the only force that can maintain permanently high unemployment.
European states like France and Germany have long suffered this structural failing, having double-digit unemployment even during the boom.
The solution is simply flexibility.
Ultra-high productivity isn’t going to suddenly solve every human problem. It’s just like food production. The reason we have iPhones is partly because only 2% of us need to farm. The rest of us are freed to solve higher-order problems like communication, story telling, and the higher levels of Mazlos’ Pyramid.
Unstick the rigidities and the barriers to entry. That’s the solution.
Step away from the Malthusian trap, Jon. It’s scientism.
Change? I don’t believe him.
I thank BO for turning me into a political atheist.
Got duopoly?
Change? I don’t believe him.
I thank BO for turning me into a political atheist.
Got duopoly?
Change? I don’t believe him.
I thank BO for turning me into a political atheist.
Got duopoly?
Structural rigidity is too imprecise. The controls are inflexible and the hands on them too easily gamed. It is the difference between analog and digital sound. Both distort but digital has a rock solid ceiling. That’s structural rigidity. Analog distorts but you can saturate it. It gives with some frequencies. You can tune those and that is what rich tone is all about. It’s clearer and cleaner. It is also heavy and takes attention to detail and calibration.
The free market extremist wants no controls. The market technologist wants simple buttons anyone can use. Those two extremes will not work when the environment itself becomes extreme. What you gain in simplicity and ease you lose in flexibility and just in time precision.
A market without regulations will become a robber barron market. A market with the wrong regulations will become a rigged crap table. It becomes a matter of what to regulate, how and for how long. Just as copyrights shouldn’t be forever and a day, information doesn’t want to be free.
We have a new era and it needs a new social contract. It applies to our markets and to the way we interact with the rest of the world. We have to find the basis for that. It’s going to be partly a compromise of freedom to act, an application of technology, and a willingness to make less do more for more people. Governed flexibility; directed evolution; greatest good for greatest number.
Structural rigidity is too imprecise. The controls are inflexible and the hands on them too easily gamed. It is the difference between analog and digital sound. Both distort but digital has a rock solid ceiling. That’s structural rigidity. Analog distorts but you can saturate it. It gives with some frequencies. You can tune those and that is what rich tone is all about. It’s clearer and cleaner. It is also heavy and takes attention to detail and calibration.
The free market extremist wants no controls. The market technologist wants simple buttons anyone can use. Those two extremes will not work when the environment itself becomes extreme. What you gain in simplicity and ease you lose in flexibility and just in time precision.
A market without regulations will become a robber barron market. A market with the wrong regulations will become a rigged crap table. It becomes a matter of what to regulate, how and for how long. Just as copyrights shouldn’t be forever and a day, information doesn’t want to be free.
We have a new era and it needs a new social contract. It applies to our markets and to the way we interact with the rest of the world. We have to find the basis for that. It’s going to be partly a compromise of freedom to act, an application of technology, and a willingness to make less do more for more people. Governed flexibility; directed evolution; greatest good for greatest number.
Structural rigidity is too imprecise. The controls are inflexible and the hands on them too easily gamed. It is the difference between analog and digital sound. Both distort but digital has a rock solid ceiling. That’s structural rigidity. Analog distorts but you can saturate it. It gives with some frequencies. You can tune those and that is what rich tone is all about. It’s clearer and cleaner. It is also heavy and takes attention to detail and calibration.
The free market extremist wants no controls. The market technologist wants simple buttons anyone can use. Those two extremes will not work when the environment itself becomes extreme. What you gain in simplicity and ease you lose in flexibility and just in time precision.
A market without regulations will become a robber barron market. A market with the wrong regulations will become a rigged crap table. It becomes a matter of what to regulate, how and for how long. Just as copyrights shouldn’t be forever and a day, information doesn’t want to be free.
We have a new era and it needs a new social contract. It applies to our markets and to the way we interact with the rest of the world. We have to find the basis for that. It’s going to be partly a compromise of freedom to act, an application of technology, and a willingness to make less do more for more people. Governed flexibility; directed evolution; greatest good for greatest number.
Were you on Earth Jan. 2001-Jan. 2009?
Were you on Earth Jan. 2001-Jan. 2009?
“The CEO of Kaiser showed Ezra Klein a series of charts that show the US paying more than double in health costs what all other industrialized pay…while achieving no better results.”
Not only no better – but 37th in the world.
For a more easily digested version you can sing along to, there’s this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVgOl3cETb4
More seriously, many conservatives have sought to downplay the latest ranking of health care systems, for example by pointing to diet as a contributing factor (as though that was separate from health care!). The Cato Institute had a conniption at the findings. But Australia, for example, has similar rates of obesity, and yet scores much more highly. All of the criticisms in this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125608054324397621.html can be repudiated by comparison with other nations that do it better. Exceptionalists miss the point that there’s nothing particularly distinctive about US society, except perhaps for a unique perspective on personal responsibility.
“Republican health plan would allow insurers to locate in the Marianas while offering who knows what kind of insurance across state lines. So, if the insurer stops you from getting that operation, you’d probably have no recourse in domestic law.”
Good god that’s appalling.
“The CEO of Kaiser showed Ezra Klein a series of charts that show the US paying more than double in health costs what all other industrialized pay…while achieving no better results.”
Not only no better – but 37th in the world.
For a more easily digested version you can sing along to, there’s this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVgOl3cETb4
More seriously, many conservatives have sought to downplay the latest ranking of health care systems, for example by pointing to diet as a contributing factor (as though that was separate from health care!). The Cato Institute had a conniption at the findings. But Australia, for example, has similar rates of obesity, and yet scores much more highly. All of the criticisms in this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125608054324397621.html can be repudiated by comparison with other nations that do it better. Exceptionalists miss the point that there’s nothing particularly distinctive about US society, except perhaps for a unique perspective on personal responsibility.
“Republican health plan would allow insurers to locate in the Marianas while offering who knows what kind of insurance across state lines. So, if the insurer stops you from getting that operation, you’d probably have no recourse in domestic law.”
Good god that’s appalling.
#1. Notice that massive drop in employment for young people. That sure seems to be, at least in part, a result of the minimum wage hike. Dumb policy.
Hmm, I earn $11.25 an hour, work part-time due to having a young child at home. I take home less than $1000 a month from which I attempt to pay my bills. If you think the minimum wage rate hike is unnecessary, I really have to wonder what kind of double digit wage you’re earning that lets you live outside of poverty.
#1. Notice that massive drop in employment for young people. That sure seems to be, at least in part, a result of the minimum wage hike. Dumb policy.
Hmm, I earn $11.25 an hour, work part-time due to having a young child at home. I take home less than $1000 a month from which I attempt to pay my bills. If you think the minimum wage rate hike is unnecessary, I really have to wonder what kind of double digit wage you’re earning that lets you live outside of poverty.
JP, it seems to me that in your mind, “fraud” has a very particular meaning, a pretty broad-stroke one that doesn’t maybe comport with your regular invocation of “constitutional rule of law,” and it certainly does not comport with the laws and judicial system we have. There are about 56 different civil jurisdictions and about as many criminal ones, not counting the Federales. Each and every one has its own definition of “fraud,” of which there are many flavors, both criminal and civil. Not all the elements you have to prove, either as a private civil plaintiff or as a prosecutor, are even worded the same from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Those elements are generally defined by statute, which in our federal system means every state legislature, and of course for “federal frauds” our Congress, has the power to adopt its own version, and many do. And by what magical process would you want to believe that the lawgivers will all be honest and “constitutional?” And each suit and/or prosecution involves a determination by a judge or jury as a finder of fact that all the elements have been made out either by a preponderance of evidence or sometimes by “clear and convincing” evidence or in the criminal case, beyond a reasonable doubt.
A lot of “fraud” in the world everybody else (outside of Austria) lives in is defined by reference to those damn regulations you claim are “the problem,” since in a huge economy and polity your self-interested Perfect Consumer People have not a prayer of “all just getting along,” and thus the regulatory impulse (with all the bad stuff that can flow from it) gains momentum. Maybe you are aware that as American frontierspeople moved West, they outpaced their government, with resulting lawlessness, and that resulted in vigilante actions by people who actually called themselves “Regulators,” and who often became a kind of Mafia as the bad eggs scared off the more worthy citizens. The cycle repeats.
Maybe “fraud” just means, to you at least, whatever you want it to mean, but there ain’t no way in Hell that you or any minority-voice free-market libertarians are going to budge all that jurisprudence and settled law and commercial “ethics” and understandings.
Getting even to the point of a “fraud” trial takes a whole lot of very expensive work and time, in discovery and motions and lining up witnesses etc., and I don’t care what system you think you can dream up, unless it’s maybe trial by combat (which is part of our own jurisprudential heritage and has its own weaknesses), there’s a lot of “government” involved, and that has to be paid for. Unless you have something either magical or more arbitrary in mind. And of course you might believe that all judges are just by having been anointed as such, honest and honorable and interchangeable units of justice dispensation, which of course is a pipe dream, and maybe you think “the common law” is some magical thing too, but that construct exists only because We The People had some traditions from our smaller-community days that judges started to apply as disputes and misdeeds were placed before them. And “the common law” is and ought to be a moving target.
Maybe you think there are independently wealthy people who can be entrusted with the powers the state exercises to address your “fraud,” and can be turned loose like Judge Dredd to “do justice?” Where are you going to find these paragons of virtue?
For my two cents, going for a hay(ek)-ride and chatting up, as if it was a unitary noun, “What will fix it is ‘constitutionalruleoflaw,’” where there are 307 million potential contestants out there just in America and another 6.7 billion that don’t even share our traditions, is a fool’s errand, and staying stuck to what I think you acknowledge is “not going to happen” is a fraud of a different sort. Our friends in Red, peddling their hypocritical self-serving wares, are to my mind the biggest frauds of all. It would seem to me at least that thinking about how to recapture some of the regulatory citadels might be a better expense of time and neurotransmitters.
But that’s just me, of course.
JP, it seems to me that in your mind, “fraud” has a very particular meaning, a pretty broad-stroke one that doesn’t maybe comport with your regular invocation of “constitutional rule of law,” and it certainly does not comport with the laws and judicial system we have. There are about 56 different civil jurisdictions and about as many criminal ones, not counting the Federales. Each and every one has its own definition of “fraud,” of which there are many flavors, both criminal and civil. Not all the elements you have to prove, either as a private civil plaintiff or as a prosecutor, are even worded the same from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Those elements are generally defined by statute, which in our federal system means every state legislature, and of course for “federal frauds” our Congress, has the power to adopt its own version, and many do. And by what magical process would you want to believe that the lawgivers will all be honest and “constitutional?” And each suit and/or prosecution involves a determination by a judge or jury as a finder of fact that all the elements have been made out either by a preponderance of evidence or sometimes by “clear and convincing” evidence or in the criminal case, beyond a reasonable doubt.
A lot of “fraud” in the world everybody else (outside of Austria) lives in is defined by reference to those damn regulations you claim are “the problem,” since in a huge economy and polity your self-interested Perfect Consumer People have not a prayer of “all just getting along,” and thus the regulatory impulse (with all the bad stuff that can flow from it) gains momentum. Maybe you are aware that as American frontierspeople moved West, they outpaced their government, with resulting lawlessness, and that resulted in vigilante actions by people who actually called themselves “Regulators,” and who often became a kind of Mafia as the bad eggs scared off the more worthy citizens. The cycle repeats.
Maybe “fraud” just means, to you at least, whatever you want it to mean, but there ain’t no way in Hell that you or any minority-voice free-market libertarians are going to budge all that jurisprudence and settled law and commercial “ethics” and understandings.
Getting even to the point of a “fraud” trial takes a whole lot of very expensive work and time, in discovery and motions and lining up witnesses etc., and I don’t care what system you think you can dream up, unless it’s maybe trial by combat (which is part of our own jurisprudential heritage and has its own weaknesses), there’s a lot of “government” involved, and that has to be paid for. Unless you have something either magical or more arbitrary in mind. And of course you might believe that all judges are just by having been anointed as such, honest and honorable and interchangeable units of justice dispensation, which of course is a pipe dream, and maybe you think “the common law” is some magical thing too, but that construct exists only because We The People had some traditions from our smaller-community days that judges started to apply as disputes and misdeeds were placed before them. And “the common law” is and ought to be a moving target.
Maybe you think there are independently wealthy people who can be entrusted with the powers the state exercises to address your “fraud,” and can be turned loose like Judge Dredd to “do justice?” Where are you going to find these paragons of virtue?
For my two cents, going for a hay(ek)-ride and chatting up, as if it was a unitary noun, “What will fix it is ‘constitutionalruleoflaw,’” where there are 307 million potential contestants out there just in America and another 6.7 billion that don’t even share our traditions, is a fool’s errand, and staying stuck to what I think you acknowledge is “not going to happen” is a fraud of a different sort. Our friends in Red, peddling their hypocritical self-serving wares, are to my mind the biggest frauds of all. It would seem to me at least that thinking about how to recapture some of the regulatory citadels might be a better expense of time and neurotransmitters.
But that’s just me, of course.
JP, it seems to me that in your mind, “fraud” has a very particular meaning, a pretty broad-stroke one that doesn’t maybe comport with your regular invocation of “constitutional rule of law,” and it certainly does not comport with the laws and judicial system we have. There are about 56 different civil jurisdictions and about as many criminal ones, not counting the Federales. Each and every one has its own definition of “fraud,” of which there are many flavors, both criminal and civil. Not all the elements you have to prove, either as a private civil plaintiff or as a prosecutor, are even worded the same from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Those elements are generally defined by statute, which in our federal system means every state legislature, and of course for “federal frauds” our Congress, has the power to adopt its own version, and many do. And by what magical process would you want to believe that the lawgivers will all be honest and “constitutional?” And each suit and/or prosecution involves a determination by a judge or jury as a finder of fact that all the elements have been made out either by a preponderance of evidence or sometimes by “clear and convincing” evidence or in the criminal case, beyond a reasonable doubt.
A lot of “fraud” in the world everybody else (outside of Austria) lives in is defined by reference to those damn regulations you claim are “the problem,” since in a huge economy and polity your self-interested Perfect Consumer People have not a prayer of “all just getting along,” and thus the regulatory impulse (with all the bad stuff that can flow from it) gains momentum. Maybe you are aware that as American frontierspeople moved West, they outpaced their government, with resulting lawlessness, and that resulted in vigilante actions by people who actually called themselves “Regulators,” and who often became a kind of Mafia as the bad eggs scared off the more worthy citizens. The cycle repeats.
Maybe “fraud” just means, to you at least, whatever you want it to mean, but there ain’t no way in Hell that you or any minority-voice free-market libertarians are going to budge all that jurisprudence and settled law and commercial “ethics” and understandings.
Getting even to the point of a “fraud” trial takes a whole lot of very expensive work and time, in discovery and motions and lining up witnesses etc., and I don’t care what system you think you can dream up, unless it’s maybe trial by combat (which is part of our own jurisprudential heritage and has its own weaknesses), there’s a lot of “government” involved, and that has to be paid for. Unless you have something either magical or more arbitrary in mind. And of course you might believe that all judges are just by having been anointed as such, honest and honorable and interchangeable units of justice dispensation, which of course is a pipe dream, and maybe you think “the common law” is some magical thing too, but that construct exists only because We The People had some traditions from our smaller-community days that judges started to apply as disputes and misdeeds were placed before them. And “the common law” is and ought to be a moving target.
Maybe you think there are independently wealthy people who can be entrusted with the powers the state exercises to address your “fraud,” and can be turned loose like Judge Dredd to “do justice?” Where are you going to find these paragons of virtue?
For my two cents, going for a hay(ek)-ride and chatting up, as if it was a unitary noun, “What will fix it is ‘constitutionalruleoflaw,’” where there are 307 million potential contestants out there just in America and another 6.7 billion that don’t even share our traditions, is a fool’s errand, and staying stuck to what I think you acknowledge is “not going to happen” is a fraud of a different sort. Our friends in Red, peddling their hypocritical self-serving wares, are to my mind the biggest frauds of all. It would seem to me at least that thinking about how to recapture some of the regulatory citadels might be a better expense of time and neurotransmitters.
But that’s just me, of course.
Jon, what was the permanent unemployment rate among Roman “citizens” and other residents during the waning days of the Empire? And what did they do all day to keep themselves entertained?
Per the Wiki guys, many problems, but my favorite take is
“Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke:
“In contrast with the declining empire theories, historians such as Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke argue that the Roman Empire itself was a rotten system from its inception, and that the entire Imperial era was one of steady decay of institutions founded in Republican times. In their view, the Empire could never have lasted longer than it did without radical reforms that no Emperor could implement. The Romans had no budgetary system and thus wasted whatever resources they had available. The economy of the Empire was basically a Raubwirtschaft or plunder economy based on looting existing resources rather than producing anything new. The Empire relied on booty from conquered territories (this source of revenue ending, of course, with the end of Roman territorial expansion) or on a pattern of tax collection that drove small-scale farmers into destitution (and onto a dole that required even more exactions upon those who could not escape taxation), or into dependency upon a landed élite exempt from taxation. With the cessation of tribute from conquered territories, the full cost of their military machine had to be borne by the citizenry.
“An economy based upon slave labor [which is pretty much what we've got now] precluded a middle class with purchasing power. The Roman Empire produced few exportable goods. Material innovation, whether through entrepreneurialism or technological advancement, all but ended long before the final dissolution of the Empire. Meanwhile the costs of military defense and the pomp of Emperors continued. Financial needs continued to increase, but the means of meeting them steadily eroded. In the end due to economic failure, even the armor of soldiers deteriorated and the weaponry of soldiers became so obsolete to the extent that the enemies of the Empire had better armor and weapons as well as larger forces. The decrepit social order offered so little to its subjects that many saw the barbarian invasion as liberation from onerous obligations to the ruling class. By the late fifth century the barbarian conqueror Odoacer had no use for the formality of an Empire upon deposing Romulus Augustus and chose neither to assume the title of Emperor himself nor to select a puppet, although legally he kept the lands as a commander of the Eastern Empire and maintained the Roman institutions such as the consulship. The formal end of the Roman Empire corresponds with the time in which the Empire and the title Emperor no longer had value.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire
And there are more reflections we should recognize in that distant mirror, too. Unemployed “citizens” have the vote, and they also have the time and disaffection to listen avidly to demagogues.
Jon, what was the permanent unemployment rate among Roman “citizens” and other residents during the waning days of the Empire? And what did they do all day to keep themselves entertained?
Per the Wiki guys, many problems, but my favorite take is
“Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke:
“In contrast with the declining empire theories, historians such as Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke argue that the Roman Empire itself was a rotten system from its inception, and that the entire Imperial era was one of steady decay of institutions founded in Republican times. In their view, the Empire could never have lasted longer than it did without radical reforms that no Emperor could implement. The Romans had no budgetary system and thus wasted whatever resources they had available. The economy of the Empire was basically a Raubwirtschaft or plunder economy based on looting existing resources rather than producing anything new. The Empire relied on booty from conquered territories (this source of revenue ending, of course, with the end of Roman territorial expansion) or on a pattern of tax collection that drove small-scale farmers into destitution (and onto a dole that required even more exactions upon those who could not escape taxation), or into dependency upon a landed élite exempt from taxation. With the cessation of tribute from conquered territories, the full cost of their military machine had to be borne by the citizenry.
“An economy based upon slave labor [which is pretty much what we've got now] precluded a middle class with purchasing power. The Roman Empire produced few exportable goods. Material innovation, whether through entrepreneurialism or technological advancement, all but ended long before the final dissolution of the Empire. Meanwhile the costs of military defense and the pomp of Emperors continued. Financial needs continued to increase, but the means of meeting them steadily eroded. In the end due to economic failure, even the armor of soldiers deteriorated and the weaponry of soldiers became so obsolete to the extent that the enemies of the Empire had better armor and weapons as well as larger forces. The decrepit social order offered so little to its subjects that many saw the barbarian invasion as liberation from onerous obligations to the ruling class. By the late fifth century the barbarian conqueror Odoacer had no use for the formality of an Empire upon deposing Romulus Augustus and chose neither to assume the title of Emperor himself nor to select a puppet, although legally he kept the lands as a commander of the Eastern Empire and maintained the Roman institutions such as the consulship. The formal end of the Roman Empire corresponds with the time in which the Empire and the title Emperor no longer had value.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire
And there are more reflections we should recognize in that distant mirror, too. Unemployed “citizens” have the vote, and they also have the time and disaffection to listen avidly to demagogues.
Jon, what was the permanent unemployment rate among Roman “citizens” and other residents during the waning days of the Empire? And what did they do all day to keep themselves entertained?
Per the Wiki guys, many problems, but my favorite take is
“Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke:
“In contrast with the declining empire theories, historians such as Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke argue that the Roman Empire itself was a rotten system from its inception, and that the entire Imperial era was one of steady decay of institutions founded in Republican times. In their view, the Empire could never have lasted longer than it did without radical reforms that no Emperor could implement. The Romans had no budgetary system and thus wasted whatever resources they had available. The economy of the Empire was basically a Raubwirtschaft or plunder economy based on looting existing resources rather than producing anything new. The Empire relied on booty from conquered territories (this source of revenue ending, of course, with the end of Roman territorial expansion) or on a pattern of tax collection that drove small-scale farmers into destitution (and onto a dole that required even more exactions upon those who could not escape taxation), or into dependency upon a landed élite exempt from taxation. With the cessation of tribute from conquered territories, the full cost of their military machine had to be borne by the citizenry.
“An economy based upon slave labor [which is pretty much what we've got now] precluded a middle class with purchasing power. The Roman Empire produced few exportable goods. Material innovation, whether through entrepreneurialism or technological advancement, all but ended long before the final dissolution of the Empire. Meanwhile the costs of military defense and the pomp of Emperors continued. Financial needs continued to increase, but the means of meeting them steadily eroded. In the end due to economic failure, even the armor of soldiers deteriorated and the weaponry of soldiers became so obsolete to the extent that the enemies of the Empire had better armor and weapons as well as larger forces. The decrepit social order offered so little to its subjects that many saw the barbarian invasion as liberation from onerous obligations to the ruling class. By the late fifth century the barbarian conqueror Odoacer had no use for the formality of an Empire upon deposing Romulus Augustus and chose neither to assume the title of Emperor himself nor to select a puppet, although legally he kept the lands as a commander of the Eastern Empire and maintained the Roman institutions such as the consulship. The formal end of the Roman Empire corresponds with the time in which the Empire and the title Emperor no longer had value.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire
And there are more reflections we should recognize in that distant mirror, too. Unemployed “citizens” have the vote, and they also have the time and disaffection to listen avidly to demagogues.
I do not think it is possible to rebuild the industrial base. If we were able to rebuild it, the new industry would use high-productivity automation. It wouldn’t create enough jobs for humans. I think we’re facing 20 to 25 percent unemployment. See Jeremy Rifkin’s “The End of Work” for possible solutions.
“It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.”
I do not think it is possible to rebuild the industrial base. If we were able to rebuild it, the new industry would use high-productivity automation. It wouldn’t create enough jobs for humans. I think we’re facing 20 to 25 percent unemployment. See Jeremy Rifkin’s “The End of Work” for possible solutions.
“It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.”
“If we were able to rebuild it, the new industry would use high-productivity automation. It wouldn’t create enough jobs for humans.”
BJH, with all due respect, this is dangerous nonsense, and not just the nonsense about the “industrial base” being hallowed out and needing “rebuilding” when American (false).
The logic you are using regarding productive modern capital is wrong. Take your approach to it’s logical conclusion to see its problems more starkly.
If productive capital “wouldn’t create jobs”… we should switch our economy to less productive capital in order to return to full employment. Instead of digging foundations with shovels, we should have them dug with spoons.
Better yet, let’s ban trucks and have everyone carry cargo on their heads.
This, of course, is the keynesian “digging ditches” nonsense.
Getting more productive is the path to prosperity. Cursing the job-killing machines is the oldest fallacy in the book. The clear path of history, just as in food production, is that productivity boosts real wages and enables new industries to form.
Here’s a tip on this problem: if nobody can afford the stuff being made in these productivity-enhanced factories, the factories will go bankrupt.
All of this is a fallacy of closed “circular flow” thinking. “Men should be able to afford the output of their labor with their wage” is the kind of seductive logical mistake one must work to avoid. That is the long-defunct notion that economic value is derived from labor itself or some objective inherent worth rather than marginal utility for the consumer.
We don’t work for work’s sake. We work in order to purchase the goods and services we can’t provide for ourselves. If those goods and services can be provided cheaper, we get to work less for the same standard of living.
In the end, if robots could replace most of our jobs, that would be good for all of society because 75% of the cost of goods is labor. That would free up everyone to pursue their dreams. To paint. To parent. You name it.
People would still find new things to do. Most of the top jobs today didn’t exist 50 years ago. The job most human being did for thousands of years, food production, is now done almost entirely by machines and the average working class person with 20k in take-home pay gets the benefit of spending less than a quarter of that income on food.
Think about that. How are all these people making enough to pay for food times 4 if they can’t get a job on a farm because of those machines?
The classical labor theory of value was replaced by marginal utility for a reason.
Sorry for being so didactic. This issue is important. Have a great night.
“If we were able to rebuild it, the new industry would use high-productivity automation. It wouldn’t create enough jobs for humans.”
BJH, with all due respect, this is dangerous nonsense, and not just the nonsense about the “industrial base” being hallowed out and needing “rebuilding” when American (false).
The logic you are using regarding productive modern capital is wrong. Take your approach to it’s logical conclusion to see its problems more starkly.
If productive capital “wouldn’t create jobs”… we should switch our economy to less productive capital in order to return to full employment. Instead of digging foundations with shovels, we should have them dug with spoons.
Better yet, let’s ban trucks and have everyone carry cargo on their heads.
This, of course, is the keynesian “digging ditches” nonsense.
Getting more productive is the path to prosperity. Cursing the job-killing machines is the oldest fallacy in the book. The clear path of history, just as in food production, is that productivity boosts real wages and enables new industries to form.
Here’s a tip on this problem: if nobody can afford the stuff being made in these productivity-enhanced factories, the factories will go bankrupt.
All of this is a fallacy of closed “circular flow” thinking. “Men should be able to afford the output of their labor with their wage” is the kind of seductive logical mistake one must work to avoid. That is the long-defunct notion that economic value is derived from labor itself or some objective inherent worth rather than marginal utility for the consumer.
We don’t work for work’s sake. We work in order to purchase the goods and services we can’t provide for ourselves. If those goods and services can be provided cheaper, we get to work less for the same standard of living.
In the end, if robots could replace most of our jobs, that would be good for all of society because 75% of the cost of goods is labor. That would free up everyone to pursue their dreams. To paint. To parent. You name it.
People would still find new things to do. Most of the top jobs today didn’t exist 50 years ago. The job most human being did for thousands of years, food production, is now done almost entirely by machines and the average working class person with 20k in take-home pay gets the benefit of spending less than a quarter of that income on food.
Think about that. How are all these people making enough to pay for food times 4 if they can’t get a job on a farm because of those machines?
The classical labor theory of value was replaced by marginal utility for a reason.
Sorry for being so didactic. This issue is important. Have a great night.
“If we were able to rebuild it, the new industry would use high-productivity automation. It wouldn’t create enough jobs for humans.”
BJH, with all due respect, this is dangerous nonsense, and not just the nonsense about the “industrial base” being hallowed out and needing “rebuilding” when American (false).
The logic you are using regarding productive modern capital is wrong. Take your approach to it’s logical conclusion to see its problems more starkly.
If productive capital “wouldn’t create jobs”… we should switch our economy to less productive capital in order to return to full employment. Instead of digging foundations with shovels, we should have them dug with spoons.
Better yet, let’s ban trucks and have everyone carry cargo on their heads.
This, of course, is the keynesian “digging ditches” nonsense.
Getting more productive is the path to prosperity. Cursing the job-killing machines is the oldest fallacy in the book. The clear path of history, just as in food production, is that productivity boosts real wages and enables new industries to form.
Here’s a tip on this problem: if nobody can afford the stuff being made in these productivity-enhanced factories, the factories will go bankrupt.
All of this is a fallacy of closed “circular flow” thinking. “Men should be able to afford the output of their labor with their wage” is the kind of seductive logical mistake one must work to avoid. That is the long-defunct notion that economic value is derived from labor itself or some objective inherent worth rather than marginal utility for the consumer.
We don’t work for work’s sake. We work in order to purchase the goods and services we can’t provide for ourselves. If those goods and services can be provided cheaper, we get to work less for the same standard of living.
In the end, if robots could replace most of our jobs, that would be good for all of society because 75% of the cost of goods is labor. That would free up everyone to pursue their dreams. To paint. To parent. You name it.
People would still find new things to do. Most of the top jobs today didn’t exist 50 years ago. The job most human being did for thousands of years, food production, is now done almost entirely by machines and the average working class person with 20k in take-home pay gets the benefit of spending less than a quarter of that income on food.
Think about that. How are all these people making enough to pay for food times 4 if they can’t get a job on a farm because of those machines?
The classical labor theory of value was replaced by marginal utility for a reason.
Sorry for being so didactic. This issue is important. Have a great night.
I believe that inflation (especially to fund state warmongering and empire) has generally been the death of monetary nations, including Rome or at least played a significant role.
The destruction of entrepreneurial activity and the middle class is a byproduct of inflation. But then, it could be that the unproductiveness of the economy and the relative hunger of the Roman state for power and territory drove the use of inflation as a way to pay for things. Causality is hard to determine ex-post.
I believe that inflation (especially to fund state warmongering and empire) has generally been the death of monetary nations, including Rome or at least played a significant role.
The destruction of entrepreneurial activity and the middle class is a byproduct of inflation. But then, it could be that the unproductiveness of the economy and the relative hunger of the Roman state for power and territory drove the use of inflation as a way to pay for things. Causality is hard to determine ex-post.
BJH,
Bastiat did it better than me:
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
BJH,
Bastiat did it better than me:
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
BJH,
Bastiat did it better than me:
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
“spread the jobs around”
Christ, Jon. For all your focus on econ, surely more than mine in hours spent and books read, you are trapped in some of the oldest and lamest fallacies of all, especially for someone who’s clearly an innovator with an interest in Schumpeterian creative destruction.
There aren’t some fixed number of jobs to go around. Do yourself a favor and read some Bastiat. The ideology underpinning “spread the jobs around” is as defunct as they come.
“spread the jobs around”
Christ, Jon. For all your focus on econ, surely more than mine in hours spent and books read, you are trapped in some of the oldest and lamest fallacies of all, especially for someone who’s clearly an innovator with an interest in Schumpeterian creative destruction.
There aren’t some fixed number of jobs to go around. Do yourself a favor and read some Bastiat. The ideology underpinning “spread the jobs around” is as defunct as they come.
JTM,
“your self-interested Perfect Consumer People” – needless, inaccurate snark.
Fraud is complex. I wouldn’t have the ignorant hubris to dismantle the complex (and info-rich) order that has emerged in dealing with fraud as you have described.
I leave trashing our institutions with ignorant hubris to the Bush/Obama regime (see Chrysler/GM so-called “bankruptcy”).
All that machinery to deal with fraud is because it is complex. That’s fine. Industrial ex-ante regulation, on the other hand, is little more than a tool of the powerful used to give themselves an advantage. It’s not about “rules of the games”, but about setting certain rules to benefit the politically powerful at the expense of everyone else.
I’d love to hear your positive change ideas, JTM. You seem far more willing to take cheap shots at me while talking in sometimes cryptic platitudes than dig in and propose your institutional solutions.
JTM,
“your self-interested Perfect Consumer People” – needless, inaccurate snark.
Fraud is complex. I wouldn’t have the ignorant hubris to dismantle the complex (and info-rich) order that has emerged in dealing with fraud as you have described.
I leave trashing our institutions with ignorant hubris to the Bush/Obama regime (see Chrysler/GM so-called “bankruptcy”).
All that machinery to deal with fraud is because it is complex. That’s fine. Industrial ex-ante regulation, on the other hand, is little more than a tool of the powerful used to give themselves an advantage. It’s not about “rules of the games”, but about setting certain rules to benefit the politically powerful at the expense of everyone else.
I’d love to hear your positive change ideas, JTM. You seem far more willing to take cheap shots at me while talking in sometimes cryptic platitudes than dig in and propose your institutional solutions.
Th idea of ‘spreading jobs around’ does seem to rely on some kind of owned resource called ‘jobs’ that someone has the authority to spread.
That doesn’t sound like something reflecting any world where people have freedom to create opportunity and compete for their own benefit – a concept that must conflict with the authority of whoever owns the jobs to disburse them.
If industrial efficiency does mean most productive work is to be done by 20ish% of a society then one expects an economy for everything else (relaxation, entertainment and services) to blossom and, unfortunately, the completely parasitic legal and lobbying classes seeking income fed to them by the increasingly destructive invention of fictional rights and priviledges (both of which has happened these last few decades).
If the fear that even with normal economic activity the non-productive majority will be poorer than those producing I would think the policies to follow would be those that best provide for affordable living so that the poorer do not become angry by lose of opportunity.
If societies ever do get into a position where a small minority become the only productive citizens, income will accumuate with them, wealth gaps will broaden, wealth will buy priviledge, priviledge will protect itself and the society will rend itself apart.
Th idea of ‘spreading jobs around’ does seem to rely on some kind of owned resource called ‘jobs’ that someone has the authority to spread.
That doesn’t sound like something reflecting any world where people have freedom to create opportunity and compete for their own benefit – a concept that must conflict with the authority of whoever owns the jobs to disburse them.
If industrial efficiency does mean most productive work is to be done by 20ish% of a society then one expects an economy for everything else (relaxation, entertainment and services) to blossom and, unfortunately, the completely parasitic legal and lobbying classes seeking income fed to them by the increasingly destructive invention of fictional rights and priviledges (both of which has happened these last few decades).
If the fear that even with normal economic activity the non-productive majority will be poorer than those producing I would think the policies to follow would be those that best provide for affordable living so that the poorer do not become angry by lose of opportunity.
If societies ever do get into a position where a small minority become the only productive citizens, income will accumuate with them, wealth gaps will broaden, wealth will buy priviledge, priviledge will protect itself and the society will rend itself apart.
> We don’t work for work’s sake.
> We work in order to purchase the goods
> and services we can’t provide for ourselves.
While accurate as it was meant this is not a complete truth.
The joy of community, earned respect, pride in ability, self esteem from contribtuion and the recognition in the reward along with many other non financial non traded intangible ‘marginal’ values people invest in their work are where ideological consistency with economic models (based on market trading) diverges from the political possiblities in competing for peoples support for policy.
The political market trades in ideas, emotions and aspirations that aren’t traded in cash markets and don’t follow the simple lines and curves we were all shonwi n ECON 101.
That supply and demand, the effects of tax etc can be measured and modeled informs us about how economic transactions aggregate but it doesn’t help as much as some think to explain why people set the values they do.
Which can make political pronouncments derived from economic observation naive.
> We don’t work for work’s sake.
> We work in order to purchase the goods
> and services we can’t provide for ourselves.
While accurate as it was meant this is not a complete truth.
The joy of community, earned respect, pride in ability, self esteem from contribtuion and the recognition in the reward along with many other non financial non traded intangible ‘marginal’ values people invest in their work are where ideological consistency with economic models (based on market trading) diverges from the political possiblities in competing for peoples support for policy.
The political market trades in ideas, emotions and aspirations that aren’t traded in cash markets and don’t follow the simple lines and curves we were all shonwi n ECON 101.
That supply and demand, the effects of tax etc can be measured and modeled informs us about how economic transactions aggregate but it doesn’t help as much as some think to explain why people set the values they do.
Which can make political pronouncments derived from economic observation naive.
> We don’t work for work’s sake.
> We work in order to purchase the goods
> and services we can’t provide for ourselves.
While accurate as it was meant this is not a complete truth.
The joy of community, earned respect, pride in ability, self esteem from contribtuion and the recognition in the reward along with many other non financial non traded intangible ‘marginal’ values people invest in their work are where ideological consistency with economic models (based on market trading) diverges from the political possiblities in competing for peoples support for policy.
The political market trades in ideas, emotions and aspirations that aren’t traded in cash markets and don’t follow the simple lines and curves we were all shonwi n ECON 101.
That supply and demand, the effects of tax etc can be measured and modeled informs us about how economic transactions aggregate but it doesn’t help as much as some think to explain why people set the values they do.
Which can make political pronouncments derived from economic observation naive.
As I like to say on my facebook posts…”interesting stuff” … so here I am a middle-aged well-educated very experienced professional librarian/bookseller who wondered about all of this stuff last year about this time and decided to do something about it…I was definitely in the lower 40% of American families salary-wise…I saw a very bleak future for anyone who had to work for a living in the US of A … so I quickly got my teaching certificate and hightailed it out of the country…I and some 20,000 other native English speakers are now teaching English in South Korea where the money is good ( you can save a lot), housing is cheap (I have a free apartment that is so much better than anything I have lived in the the US in the last ten years), healthcare is reasonable (everyone is insured – it only took them 12 years to implement universal coverage), taxes are minimal (I’m currently exempt from income tax but if I stay more than two years my taxes shoot up to a maximum of 17%) and if I stay into my retirement years I can actually expect to receive the benefits – we don’t file tax returns, our employers take care of what equals a US tax return so I am certain that the administrative side of collecting taxes is significantly less than the US – my monthly insurance premium is about $50 and I have to pay 20% of any medical costs – for example my physical for work which included blood work and x-rays cost me $30, I didn’t need an appointment and the whole thing took about 30 minutes – without a doubt THE most efficient health care service I have ever received in my life – cars are fairly inexpensive here but gas is pricey (as it should be) which encourages folks to use the incredible public transportation services – I can ride from my incredibly small rural outpost to the third largest city in the country for less than $15 – my takehome pay exceeds what I made on my last job in the US even though I took a 20% salary cut – I have money in the bank, a fairly easy life, and I’m helping rural kids learn English, something I apparently wasn’t qualified to do in the US – I watch the local farmers every day toiling on the land by hand, without major mechanization or much chemical use and I am amazed at how the agricultural economy here runs – it’s not perfect (I broke down and traveled to Daegu to buy bacon at Costco) but for me I am having the best, relatively stress-free, time of my life – South Korea consistently ranks in the top 15 economies based on GDP – I’m pretty sure that I am never coming back
As I like to say on my facebook posts…”interesting stuff” … so here I am a middle-aged well-educated very experienced professional librarian/bookseller who wondered about all of this stuff last year about this time and decided to do something about it…I was definitely in the lower 40% of American families salary-wise…I saw a very bleak future for anyone who had to work for a living in the US of A … so I quickly got my teaching certificate and hightailed it out of the country…I and some 20,000 other native English speakers are now teaching English in South Korea where the money is good ( you can save a lot), housing is cheap (I have a free apartment that is so much better than anything I have lived in the the US in the last ten years), healthcare is reasonable (everyone is insured – it only took them 12 years to implement universal coverage), taxes are minimal (I’m currently exempt from income tax but if I stay more than two years my taxes shoot up to a maximum of 17%) and if I stay into my retirement years I can actually expect to receive the benefits – we don’t file tax returns, our employers take care of what equals a US tax return so I am certain that the administrative side of collecting taxes is significantly less than the US – my monthly insurance premium is about $50 and I have to pay 20% of any medical costs – for example my physical for work which included blood work and x-rays cost me $30, I didn’t need an appointment and the whole thing took about 30 minutes – without a doubt THE most efficient health care service I have ever received in my life – cars are fairly inexpensive here but gas is pricey (as it should be) which encourages folks to use the incredible public transportation services – I can ride from my incredibly small rural outpost to the third largest city in the country for less than $15 – my takehome pay exceeds what I made on my last job in the US even though I took a 20% salary cut – I have money in the bank, a fairly easy life, and I’m helping rural kids learn English, something I apparently wasn’t qualified to do in the US – I watch the local farmers every day toiling on the land by hand, without major mechanization or much chemical use and I am amazed at how the agricultural economy here runs – it’s not perfect (I broke down and traveled to Daegu to buy bacon at Costco) but for me I am having the best, relatively stress-free, time of my life – South Korea consistently ranks in the top 15 economies based on GDP – I’m pretty sure that I am never coming back
“The joy of community, earned respect, pride in ability, self esteem from contribtuion and the recognition in the reward along with many other non financial non traded intangible ‘marginal’ values people invest in their work are where ideological consistency with economic models (based on market trading) diverges from the political possiblities in competing for peoples support for policy.”
Okay I didn’t expect you to go where you did with that line. I expected you to say that all of those non-monetary components of work matter and don’t fit the economic logic. My response to that would be that I believe people find all of those social and psychological needs filled in many different ways, often not through their job and there’s no reason to expect that make-work can provide that any better than the work people could find in a world of flexible wages (the keep to full employment).
But I don’t see what “politics” has to do with it. Politics is a poor substitute for peaceful, voluntary trade and exchange. Politics is the attempt to gain through force what you can’t gain through merit. It’s plunder. It’s plunder by 51% who get a winner-take-all majority to take from the 49%. That’s why Madison wanted the majority caged by a constitution that kept most of life off the table from the political process.
Fentex, maybe you can expand on what you’re saying here, because I don’t think I’m getting your full intention.
Politics, again, is plunder masquerading as charity. It’s the art of promising a free lunch and hiding the true costs. Just think about the way the term “politics” gets used at work! When someone gets a raise and people say it was because of “politics”, it ain’t a compliment to that person’s ability. That says it all I think.
“The joy of community, earned respect, pride in ability, self esteem from contribtuion and the recognition in the reward along with many other non financial non traded intangible ‘marginal’ values people invest in their work are where ideological consistency with economic models (based on market trading) diverges from the political possiblities in competing for peoples support for policy.”
Okay I didn’t expect you to go where you did with that line. I expected you to say that all of those non-monetary components of work matter and don’t fit the economic logic. My response to that would be that I believe people find all of those social and psychological needs filled in many different ways, often not through their job and there’s no reason to expect that make-work can provide that any better than the work people could find in a world of flexible wages (the keep to full employment).
But I don’t see what “politics” has to do with it. Politics is a poor substitute for peaceful, voluntary trade and exchange. Politics is the attempt to gain through force what you can’t gain through merit. It’s plunder. It’s plunder by 51% who get a winner-take-all majority to take from the 49%. That’s why Madison wanted the majority caged by a constitution that kept most of life off the table from the political process.
Fentex, maybe you can expand on what you’re saying here, because I don’t think I’m getting your full intention.
Politics, again, is plunder masquerading as charity. It’s the art of promising a free lunch and hiding the true costs. Just think about the way the term “politics” gets used at work! When someone gets a raise and people say it was because of “politics”, it ain’t a compliment to that person’s ability. That says it all I think.
That IS an interesting story. Korea is an amazing success story.
Wouldn’t it be so much better if we shut down global trade in order to “rebuild our industrial base” and made it impossible for you to go get that job?
Free movement and free trade at work.
Fiona, tell us more about the culture.
That IS an interesting story. Korea is an amazing success story.
Wouldn’t it be so much better if we shut down global trade in order to “rebuild our industrial base” and made it impossible for you to go get that job?
Free movement and free trade at work.
Fiona, tell us more about the culture.
Hekateris,
I empathize with your situation. Truly.
You don’t understand. You’re buying the “because we (the politicians) say jump, people will simply ask how high?”. It’s the standard model of politics: talk about the result as if its assured, move on with no regard for the unintended consequences.
Pushing up the minimum wage gives SOME people a higher wage AT THE EXPENSE of higher unemployment for people who are priced out of the market.
If you are 17, can barely read, have no high-school diploma and no record with any other employment, you aren’t worth $7.25/hour when that wage can go toward more productive equipment or a more experienced worker.
So that 17 year old is priced out of the legitimate economy and pushed into the black market which for many kids like this leads to drug dealing. At that point, the drug-warfare state proceeds to do it’s best at making you a felon and permanently unemployable.
Meanwhile, you can’t get a 13-year-old kid in my neighborhood to baby sit for much less than minimum wage even though it’s a cash business and they aren’t under the law. Funny how supply and demand work.
The minimum wage laws are nonsense and hurt the people who need that first job the most. Meanwhile, they have no impact whatsoever on anyone whose value exceeds the wage naturally on the market (which is most people over 20). They are perverse and destructive to the poor and should be abolished.
Hekateris,
I empathize with your situation. Truly.
You don’t understand. You’re buying the “because we (the politicians) say jump, people will simply ask how high?”. It’s the standard model of politics: talk about the result as if its assured, move on with no regard for the unintended consequences.
Pushing up the minimum wage gives SOME people a higher wage AT THE EXPENSE of higher unemployment for people who are priced out of the market.
If you are 17, can barely read, have no high-school diploma and no record with any other employment, you aren’t worth $7.25/hour when that wage can go toward more productive equipment or a more experienced worker.
So that 17 year old is priced out of the legitimate economy and pushed into the black market which for many kids like this leads to drug dealing. At that point, the drug-warfare state proceeds to do it’s best at making you a felon and permanently unemployable.
Meanwhile, you can’t get a 13-year-old kid in my neighborhood to baby sit for much less than minimum wage even though it’s a cash business and they aren’t under the law. Funny how supply and demand work.
The minimum wage laws are nonsense and hurt the people who need that first job the most. Meanwhile, they have no impact whatsoever on anyone whose value exceeds the wage naturally on the market (which is most people over 20). They are perverse and destructive to the poor and should be abolished.
Hekateris,
I empathize with your situation. Truly.
You don’t understand. You’re buying the “because we (the politicians) say jump, people will simply ask how high?”. It’s the standard model of politics: talk about the result as if its assured, move on with no regard for the unintended consequences.
Pushing up the minimum wage gives SOME people a higher wage AT THE EXPENSE of higher unemployment for people who are priced out of the market.
If you are 17, can barely read, have no high-school diploma and no record with any other employment, you aren’t worth $7.25/hour when that wage can go toward more productive equipment or a more experienced worker.
So that 17 year old is priced out of the legitimate economy and pushed into the black market which for many kids like this leads to drug dealing. At that point, the drug-warfare state proceeds to do it’s best at making you a felon and permanently unemployable.
Meanwhile, you can’t get a 13-year-old kid in my neighborhood to baby sit for much less than minimum wage even though it’s a cash business and they aren’t under the law. Funny how supply and demand work.
The minimum wage laws are nonsense and hurt the people who need that first job the most. Meanwhile, they have no impact whatsoever on anyone whose value exceeds the wage naturally on the market (which is most people over 20). They are perverse and destructive to the poor and should be abolished.
Nice post Fiona.
Nice post Fiona.
Nice post Fiona.
> The minimum wage laws are nonsense and hurt
> the people who need that first job the most
The last time I saw research testing this hypothesis in the real world it was not well supported.
Someone posted a link to a famous letter by Bastiat recently that argued that cheaper imports represented a gift of the difference in cost to consumers. That gift an obvious benefit to their wealth, and could no more be agitated against as the gift of wind for windmills or fish for fishermen.
After all if you object to something because it’s cheap logically you should object to anything gifted by nature because it’s free.
Putting aside the mistaken belief that much of anything is free (as ecologists are trying desperately to hammer home to economists there’s a cost in pollution and decimation of resources) the logic in this kind of argument is clear.
There are base costs, lower limits. Bastiat used what could be seen in agraian economies to make a point – it doesn’t make sense to rail against something cheaper because it’s cheaper.
I mention this because I intend to make a connection between that logic and socially mandated resource boundaries.
There’s no point railing against a socially mandated minimum standard because it’s mandated.
The idea that minimum wages force costs up and reduce the opportunity for employment due to reduced opportunity to invest in marginally profitable low skilled enterprises is not wholly born out by observation.
It may just fuel inflation, but unlike the inflation fueled by the printing of money for the investing classes this inflation may benefit the poorest by lagging their rise in income.
Nor is it entirely clear that if some opportunities are lost they outweigh the greater good.
The poorer community is more cooperative and generous than the richer – increasing funds among the poorest does good for the wider community even if unevenly distributed.
It’s hard to untangle the morass of reality and exceptionally hard to identify cause and effect in the aggregated effects of economic interaction, but you can’t beat checking theory against reality.
I ought point out that I’m not confident I know about life in the U.S with regards to this – I don’t know the relative values and costs of things nor have any experience with the social and community orgainzation of the U.S.
It may just be that labour costs are pushing any reasonable limit and the incentive to export employment balanced on a spreadsheets tiny adjustment in many U.S. businesses, so I don’t presume to know if any suggested minimum wage makes sense.
I just know that the simple mantra of minimum wage = bad is as mistaken as minimum age and minimum protection = bad is.
> The minimum wage laws are nonsense and hurt
> the people who need that first job the most
The last time I saw research testing this hypothesis in the real world it was not well supported.
Someone posted a link to a famous letter by Bastiat recently that argued that cheaper imports represented a gift of the difference in cost to consumers. That gift an obvious benefit to their wealth, and could no more be agitated against as the gift of wind for windmills or fish for fishermen.
After all if you object to something because it’s cheap logically you should object to anything gifted by nature because it’s free.
Putting aside the mistaken belief that much of anything is free (as ecologists are trying desperately to hammer home to economists there’s a cost in pollution and decimation of resources) the logic in this kind of argument is clear.
There are base costs, lower limits. Bastiat used what could be seen in agraian economies to make a point – it doesn’t make sense to rail against something cheaper because it’s cheaper.
I mention this because I intend to make a connection between that logic and socially mandated resource boundaries.
There’s no point railing against a socially mandated minimum standard because it’s mandated.
The idea that minimum wages force costs up and reduce the opportunity for employment due to reduced opportunity to invest in marginally profitable low skilled enterprises is not wholly born out by observation.
It may just fuel inflation, but unlike the inflation fueled by the printing of money for the investing classes this inflation may benefit the poorest by lagging their rise in income.
Nor is it entirely clear that if some opportunities are lost they outweigh the greater good.
The poorer community is more cooperative and generous than the richer – increasing funds among the poorest does good for the wider community even if unevenly distributed.
It’s hard to untangle the morass of reality and exceptionally hard to identify cause and effect in the aggregated effects of economic interaction, but you can’t beat checking theory against reality.
I ought point out that I’m not confident I know about life in the U.S with regards to this – I don’t know the relative values and costs of things nor have any experience with the social and community orgainzation of the U.S.
It may just be that labour costs are pushing any reasonable limit and the incentive to export employment balanced on a spreadsheets tiny adjustment in many U.S. businesses, so I don’t presume to know if any suggested minimum wage makes sense.
I just know that the simple mantra of minimum wage = bad is as mistaken as minimum age and minimum protection = bad is.
> The minimum wage laws are nonsense and hurt
> the people who need that first job the most
The last time I saw research testing this hypothesis in the real world it was not well supported.
Someone posted a link to a famous letter by Bastiat recently that argued that cheaper imports represented a gift of the difference in cost to consumers. That gift an obvious benefit to their wealth, and could no more be agitated against as the gift of wind for windmills or fish for fishermen.
After all if you object to something because it’s cheap logically you should object to anything gifted by nature because it’s free.
Putting aside the mistaken belief that much of anything is free (as ecologists are trying desperately to hammer home to economists there’s a cost in pollution and decimation of resources) the logic in this kind of argument is clear.
There are base costs, lower limits. Bastiat used what could be seen in agraian economies to make a point – it doesn’t make sense to rail against something cheaper because it’s cheaper.
I mention this because I intend to make a connection between that logic and socially mandated resource boundaries.
There’s no point railing against a socially mandated minimum standard because it’s mandated.
The idea that minimum wages force costs up and reduce the opportunity for employment due to reduced opportunity to invest in marginally profitable low skilled enterprises is not wholly born out by observation.
It may just fuel inflation, but unlike the inflation fueled by the printing of money for the investing classes this inflation may benefit the poorest by lagging their rise in income.
Nor is it entirely clear that if some opportunities are lost they outweigh the greater good.
The poorer community is more cooperative and generous than the richer – increasing funds among the poorest does good for the wider community even if unevenly distributed.
It’s hard to untangle the morass of reality and exceptionally hard to identify cause and effect in the aggregated effects of economic interaction, but you can’t beat checking theory against reality.
I ought point out that I’m not confident I know about life in the U.S with regards to this – I don’t know the relative values and costs of things nor have any experience with the social and community orgainzation of the U.S.
It may just be that labour costs are pushing any reasonable limit and the incentive to export employment balanced on a spreadsheets tiny adjustment in many U.S. businesses, so I don’t presume to know if any suggested minimum wage makes sense.
I just know that the simple mantra of minimum wage = bad is as mistaken as minimum age and minimum protection = bad is.
> But I don’t see what “politics” has to do with it
We’re talking about the world around us, and often how we’d like it’s current governance to change policies.
Most of the topics here begin with Jon highighting something then people discussing how it’s good/bad and how we’d like it better orgainsed when we disagree with the current state of things.
These are political issues.
When someone argues that everyone would be better off if economic policies were less dictated and more free to reflect free markets it’s a political issue.
Politics took the free/open markets away, agitating for them back is a political act.
With reghards to poeples valuing of their jobs/work…
> people find all of those social and
> psychological needs filled in many different
> ways, often not through their job
One does not get to tell people what they value. It doesn’t matter what we think if people find worth in their jobs.
It doesn’t matter that I find work tiresome and would happily live without labour – when we talk about people valuing their work for more than their income we’re just not talking about me.
Being able to recognize that many people don’t attach certain values to their work says nothing about all those people who do.
> there’s no reason to expect that make-work
> can provide that any better than the work
> people could find in a world of flexible wages
This may well be true, my musing wasn’t so much about the possibility of a free market for labour keeping people employed as it was about the political diffilculty in getting there from here.
The western world hasn’t really had a free labour market during the modern industrial era (post World War 2), so much being disguised by the booming benefits of productivity.
For most people, and political classes the most pointedly, the idea is a complete and very scary unknown.
> But I don’t see what “politics” has to do with it
We’re talking about the world around us, and often how we’d like it’s current governance to change policies.
Most of the topics here begin with Jon highighting something then people discussing how it’s good/bad and how we’d like it better orgainsed when we disagree with the current state of things.
These are political issues.
When someone argues that everyone would be better off if economic policies were less dictated and more free to reflect free markets it’s a political issue.
Politics took the free/open markets away, agitating for them back is a political act.
With reghards to poeples valuing of their jobs/work…
> people find all of those social and
> psychological needs filled in many different
> ways, often not through their job
One does not get to tell people what they value. It doesn’t matter what we think if people find worth in their jobs.
It doesn’t matter that I find work tiresome and would happily live without labour – when we talk about people valuing their work for more than their income we’re just not talking about me.
Being able to recognize that many people don’t attach certain values to their work says nothing about all those people who do.
> there’s no reason to expect that make-work
> can provide that any better than the work
> people could find in a world of flexible wages
This may well be true, my musing wasn’t so much about the possibility of a free market for labour keeping people employed as it was about the political diffilculty in getting there from here.
The western world hasn’t really had a free labour market during the modern industrial era (post World War 2), so much being disguised by the booming benefits of productivity.
For most people, and political classes the most pointedly, the idea is a complete and very scary unknown.
> But I don’t see what “politics” has to do with it
We’re talking about the world around us, and often how we’d like it’s current governance to change policies.
Most of the topics here begin with Jon highighting something then people discussing how it’s good/bad and how we’d like it better orgainsed when we disagree with the current state of things.
These are political issues.
When someone argues that everyone would be better off if economic policies were less dictated and more free to reflect free markets it’s a political issue.
Politics took the free/open markets away, agitating for them back is a political act.
With reghards to poeples valuing of their jobs/work…
> people find all of those social and
> psychological needs filled in many different
> ways, often not through their job
One does not get to tell people what they value. It doesn’t matter what we think if people find worth in their jobs.
It doesn’t matter that I find work tiresome and would happily live without labour – when we talk about people valuing their work for more than their income we’re just not talking about me.
Being able to recognize that many people don’t attach certain values to their work says nothing about all those people who do.
> there’s no reason to expect that make-work
> can provide that any better than the work
> people could find in a world of flexible wages
This may well be true, my musing wasn’t so much about the possibility of a free market for labour keeping people employed as it was about the political diffilculty in getting there from here.
The western world hasn’t really had a free labour market during the modern industrial era (post World War 2), so much being disguised by the booming benefits of productivity.
For most people, and political classes the most pointedly, the idea is a complete and very scary unknown.
John, you make some interesting points as usual, especially your link to the Bastiat piece. What much of this conversation, and many more before it, hinge on is the tension between lower prices and profitability and higher – rising – unemployment as jobs disappear to outsourcing or higher worker productivity or new technologies. How is this tension to be solved? That is the real question that requires a new response.
Take your example of the farmers. Most of the farm products on markets today are from large corporate farms. These so-called farmers reap huge agriculture subsidies and profits while at the same time selling at a price lower than smaller family farms can. A win for the consumers – and the corporate farmer shareholders/owners – but it puts smaller farmers out of business, increasing bankruptcies and unemployment. A month or so ago, I read that a year ago when gas prices were so high, one of the large produce companies, based in California (Dole or Del Monte or some such company), decided it was too expensive to ship broccoli (or some such produce) from California to New York. As a result, the company bought up as much available farmland as they could in New York to grow broccoli. While this action reduced the price of broccoli for consumers, it effectively drove small farmers out of business. Now, the problem exists of what can or will these small farmers, who have spent generations on the land, do to pay their bills? How are they and their families to survive?
To diverge slightly from the core of this issue is the matter of subsidies and protectionism. Do we, as a country, need to artificially stabilize the price of farm goods, especially when that means a greater advantage to corporate farms? Take the case of sugar. Right now, it is illegal to import sugar into this country, even though the cost of imported sugar would be much lower, thus reducing the cost to manufacturers and consumers alike. But opening the door to imported sugar effectively reduce the profits of one very wealthy family in Florida which holds a virtual monopoly on the sugar business…and effectively force many cane and beet sugar growers either out of business or into new crops.
These examples, although foggy perhaps, are what I meant by antiquated thinking in solving 21st C problems. The manufacturing and service industry jobs that have off-shored will never return. That is a sheer fact of reality. So the problem exists of what to do with all those people who lost their jobs?
Jon is wrong, I believe, to suggest that the only solution to full employment is for hire employees companies neither need nor can afford. If you carry his logic, as I currently – and maybe inaccurately – understand it further, if a company were to hire all these additional employees, reducing the hours worked by their current staff, then to be profitable a company would have to enforce job sharing. Job sharing, in order to be economically viable for a company, would mean reduced wages and benefits for the current staff. Let’s take Jon’s employment case for an example. Let’s say that his university decided it wanted to hire back some of those unemployed professors, but since budgets are restrictive it said that the only way to hire even one more professor, four other professors would have to give up a quarter of their classes, a quarter of their wages and a quarter of their benefits. I cannot believe that scenario would go over well.
Still the problem remains of continuing high unemployment, and the tension between costs and unemployment. While most educated workers will be able to transition into new businesses once emerging industries begin to grow, there will still be a great many who have neither the desire nor the ability to get a higher education. Not everyone is suited to a college education. So, what do these displaced workers do? Turn burgers at MacDonald’s for minimum wage? Even at an $8/hr wage, a 40-hour weekly gross income is only $320…or about $16,000 annual gross income. Hardly enough for a single person, let alone a family, to survive on.
So, what needs to be done to resolve this tension? I believe there are plenty of solutions, but few politicians are brave enough to advocate them because of the corruption within the political system that awards favors and protectionism and subsidies for dollars rendered. Plus, there is a startlingly lack of imagination and innovation within the body politic because they’re petrified of “upsetting the apple cart” which might lose them their well-financed jobs. Lots could be done to erase the anti-competitiveness and level the playing field by removing subsidies; eliminating protections; leveling out – as in a flat tax with no deductions other than dependents – the tax system to give small and mid-sized businesses a competitive opportunity as well as the average taxpayer; breaking up the TBTF banks that, as long as they exist, will pose a danger to the economy; requiring transparency in financial transactions (think CDSs) that effectively could end the casino culture on Wall St.; end the huge military industrial complex that greedily gobbles up the nation’s treasure; and finally invest in education and long term infrastructure.
The only missing piece of my puzzle – one that haunts me – is how to get banks back in the business of lending rather than gambling on “get rich quick” schemes so a whole new set of entrepreneurs can bring out the next generation of goods and services the world will want or need.
John, you make some interesting points as usual, especially your link to the Bastiat piece. What much of this conversation, and many more before it, hinge on is the tension between lower prices and profitability and higher – rising – unemployment as jobs disappear to outsourcing or higher worker productivity or new technologies. How is this tension to be solved? That is the real question that requires a new response.
Take your example of the farmers. Most of the farm products on markets today are from large corporate farms. These so-called farmers reap huge agriculture subsidies and profits while at the same time selling at a price lower than smaller family farms can. A win for the consumers – and the corporate farmer shareholders/owners – but it puts smaller farmers out of business, increasing bankruptcies and unemployment. A month or so ago, I read that a year ago when gas prices were so high, one of the large produce companies, based in California (Dole or Del Monte or some such company), decided it was too expensive to ship broccoli (or some such produce) from California to New York. As a result, the company bought up as much available farmland as they could in New York to grow broccoli. While this action reduced the price of broccoli for consumers, it effectively drove small farmers out of business. Now, the problem exists of what can or will these small farmers, who have spent generations on the land, do to pay their bills? How are they and their families to survive?
To diverge slightly from the core of this issue is the matter of subsidies and protectionism. Do we, as a country, need to artificially stabilize the price of farm goods, especially when that means a greater advantage to corporate farms? Take the case of sugar. Right now, it is illegal to import sugar into this country, even though the cost of imported sugar would be much lower, thus reducing the cost to manufacturers and consumers alike. But opening the door to imported sugar effectively reduce the profits of one very wealthy family in Florida which holds a virtual monopoly on the sugar business…and effectively force many cane and beet sugar growers either out of business or into new crops.
These examples, although foggy perhaps, are what I meant by antiquated thinking in solving 21st C problems. The manufacturing and service industry jobs that have off-shored will never return. That is a sheer fact of reality. So the problem exists of what to do with all those people who lost their jobs?
Jon is wrong, I believe, to suggest that the only solution to full employment is for hire employees companies neither need nor can afford. If you carry his logic, as I currently – and maybe inaccurately – understand it further, if a company were to hire all these additional employees, reducing the hours worked by their current staff, then to be profitable a company would have to enforce job sharing. Job sharing, in order to be economically viable for a company, would mean reduced wages and benefits for the current staff. Let’s take Jon’s employment case for an example. Let’s say that his university decided it wanted to hire back some of those unemployed professors, but since budgets are restrictive it said that the only way to hire even one more professor, four other professors would have to give up a quarter of their classes, a quarter of their wages and a quarter of their benefits. I cannot believe that scenario would go over well.
Still the problem remains of continuing high unemployment, and the tension between costs and unemployment. While most educated workers will be able to transition into new businesses once emerging industries begin to grow, there will still be a great many who have neither the desire nor the ability to get a higher education. Not everyone is suited to a college education. So, what do these displaced workers do? Turn burgers at MacDonald’s for minimum wage? Even at an $8/hr wage, a 40-hour weekly gross income is only $320…or about $16,000 annual gross income. Hardly enough for a single person, let alone a family, to survive on.
So, what needs to be done to resolve this tension? I believe there are plenty of solutions, but few politicians are brave enough to advocate them because of the corruption within the political system that awards favors and protectionism and subsidies for dollars rendered. Plus, there is a startlingly lack of imagination and innovation within the body politic because they’re petrified of “upsetting the apple cart” which might lose them their well-financed jobs. Lots could be done to erase the anti-competitiveness and level the playing field by removing subsidies; eliminating protections; leveling out – as in a flat tax with no deductions other than dependents – the tax system to give small and mid-sized businesses a competitive opportunity as well as the average taxpayer; breaking up the TBTF banks that, as long as they exist, will pose a danger to the economy; requiring transparency in financial transactions (think CDSs) that effectively could end the casino culture on Wall St.; end the huge military industrial complex that greedily gobbles up the nation’s treasure; and finally invest in education and long term infrastructure.
The only missing piece of my puzzle – one that haunts me – is how to get banks back in the business of lending rather than gambling on “get rich quick” schemes so a whole new set of entrepreneurs can bring out the next generation of goods and services the world will want or need.
John, you make some interesting points as usual, especially your link to the Bastiat piece. What much of this conversation, and many more before it, hinge on is the tension between lower prices and profitability and higher – rising – unemployment as jobs disappear to outsourcing or higher worker productivity or new technologies. How is this tension to be solved? That is the real question that requires a new response.
Take your example of the farmers. Most of the farm products on markets today are from large corporate farms. These so-called farmers reap huge agriculture subsidies and profits while at the same time selling at a price lower than smaller family farms can. A win for the consumers – and the corporate farmer shareholders/owners – but it puts smaller farmers out of business, increasing bankruptcies and unemployment. A month or so ago, I read that a year ago when gas prices were so high, one of the large produce companies, based in California (Dole or Del Monte or some such company), decided it was too expensive to ship broccoli (or some such produce) from California to New York. As a result, the company bought up as much available farmland as they could in New York to grow broccoli. While this action reduced the price of broccoli for consumers, it effectively drove small farmers out of business. Now, the problem exists of what can or will these small farmers, who have spent generations on the land, do to pay their bills? How are they and their families to survive?
To diverge slightly from the core of this issue is the matter of subsidies and protectionism. Do we, as a country, need to artificially stabilize the price of farm goods, especially when that means a greater advantage to corporate farms? Take the case of sugar. Right now, it is illegal to import sugar into this country, even though the cost of imported sugar would be much lower, thus reducing the cost to manufacturers and consumers alike. But opening the door to imported sugar effectively reduce the profits of one very wealthy family in Florida which holds a virtual monopoly on the sugar business…and effectively force many cane and beet sugar growers either out of business or into new crops.
These examples, although foggy perhaps, are what I meant by antiquated thinking in solving 21st C problems. The manufacturing and service industry jobs that have off-shored will never return. That is a sheer fact of reality. So the problem exists of what to do with all those people who lost their jobs?
Jon is wrong, I believe, to suggest that the only solution to full employment is for hire employees companies neither need nor can afford. If you carry his logic, as I currently – and maybe inaccurately – understand it further, if a company were to hire all these additional employees, reducing the hours worked by their current staff, then to be profitable a company would have to enforce job sharing. Job sharing, in order to be economically viable for a company, would mean reduced wages and benefits for the current staff. Let’s take Jon’s employment case for an example. Let’s say that his university decided it wanted to hire back some of those unemployed professors, but since budgets are restrictive it said that the only way to hire even one more professor, four other professors would have to give up a quarter of their classes, a quarter of their wages and a quarter of their benefits. I cannot believe that scenario would go over well.
Still the problem remains of continuing high unemployment, and the tension between costs and unemployment. While most educated workers will be able to transition into new businesses once emerging industries begin to grow, there will still be a great many who have neither the desire nor the ability to get a higher education. Not everyone is suited to a college education. So, what do these displaced workers do? Turn burgers at MacDonald’s for minimum wage? Even at an $8/hr wage, a 40-hour weekly gross income is only $320…or about $16,000 annual gross income. Hardly enough for a single person, let alone a family, to survive on.
So, what needs to be done to resolve this tension? I believe there are plenty of solutions, but few politicians are brave enough to advocate them because of the corruption within the political system that awards favors and protectionism and subsidies for dollars rendered. Plus, there is a startlingly lack of imagination and innovation within the body politic because they’re petrified of “upsetting the apple cart” which might lose them their well-financed jobs. Lots could be done to erase the anti-competitiveness and level the playing field by removing subsidies; eliminating protections; leveling out – as in a flat tax with no deductions other than dependents – the tax system to give small and mid-sized businesses a competitive opportunity as well as the average taxpayer; breaking up the TBTF banks that, as long as they exist, will pose a danger to the economy; requiring transparency in financial transactions (think CDSs) that effectively could end the casino culture on Wall St.; end the huge military industrial complex that greedily gobbles up the nation’s treasure; and finally invest in education and long term infrastructure.
The only missing piece of my puzzle – one that haunts me – is how to get banks back in the business of lending rather than gambling on “get rich quick” schemes so a whole new set of entrepreneurs can bring out the next generation of goods and services the world will want or need.
Incentivize growing markets instead of market share.
Incentivize growing markets instead of market share.
Fentex,
With regard to subjective values and work, I don’t think I made my point well. I’m not dismissing the non-monetary value of work. I certainly derive all kind of social and personal psychological benefits from my work, having the benefit of enjoying my day job a great deal.
My point was that the notions regarding the value of make-work and “spreading the jobs around” as espoused by Keynes with his digging ditches-as-stimulus and repeated often by Jon are nonsense. They are not a useful foundation for government policy. Now, I know he’d probably point to the WPA and other FDR actions, but all of those were efforts to fix a problem of Hoover/FDR/Fed’s earlier creation.
“my musing wasn’t so much about the possibility of a free market for labour keeping people employed as it was about the political difficulty in getting there from here.”
Agreed. I think it’s happening all around us and has been for a while. The shift toward independent work, freelance, small businesses with loose confederations of flexible freelance workers, etc. The world is moving very much in the bottom-up, de-centralized direction whether the current political powers want to believe it or not.
Education can help. The review of history can help. But then there’s the public choice problem. For that, I turn to Upton Sinclair:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”
Fentex,
With regard to subjective values and work, I don’t think I made my point well. I’m not dismissing the non-monetary value of work. I certainly derive all kind of social and personal psychological benefits from my work, having the benefit of enjoying my day job a great deal.
My point was that the notions regarding the value of make-work and “spreading the jobs around” as espoused by Keynes with his digging ditches-as-stimulus and repeated often by Jon are nonsense. They are not a useful foundation for government policy. Now, I know he’d probably point to the WPA and other FDR actions, but all of those were efforts to fix a problem of Hoover/FDR/Fed’s earlier creation.
“my musing wasn’t so much about the possibility of a free market for labour keeping people employed as it was about the political difficulty in getting there from here.”
Agreed. I think it’s happening all around us and has been for a while. The shift toward independent work, freelance, small businesses with loose confederations of flexible freelance workers, etc. The world is moving very much in the bottom-up, de-centralized direction whether the current political powers want to believe it or not.
Education can help. The review of history can help. But then there’s the public choice problem. For that, I turn to Upton Sinclair:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”
thanks for the kind messages…Korea is far from a perfect society but I am amazed at how such a geographically small country (about the size of New Jersey) can rank so high economically.
Some of things that I don’t like here include widespread racism, an incessant need to prove that Koreans are superior to all other cultures, pressure to succeed which is resulting on some alarming suicide trends especially in the cities, H1N1 paranoia, unimaginative architecture, overuse of red pepper to disguise boring food, a beauty obsession that is positively scary, and having to travel 2.5 hours to buy bacon (inside joke)
I see myself as part of the brain drain that the US is now experiencing, much as England did in the late 50′s and early 60′s, the same brain drain that lead my father, an aerospace engineer, to leave the UK for greener grass in the US. I am old enough to remember the incredible economic turmoil of the 1970′s and I am really tired of hearing about how tough things are now – they have always been pretty tough for those of us not on the high-wage fast-track.
but I digress…… Korea is an interesting mix of high-tech industry and small scale farming and fishing… from what I have seen everyone works here but not the three jobs I had to take on to keep a roof over my head in the US … nobody goes bankrupt because they have a medical condition … all children go to regular school and are expected to achieve no matter what their learning or physical disabilities are … I could go on and on but I won’t
If you want to see a glimpse of rural life here, check out the amazing film “Old Partner” which was the hit of the film festival circuit this year – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Partner – I see men like this every day here in the countryside although most of them use these weird little tractors instead of a cow
I should also add that I am also following in the footsteps of that great 19th century traveler Isabella Bird and am hoping to work up a film project about her … anybody interested in helping?
thanks for the kind messages…Korea is far from a perfect society but I am amazed at how such a geographically small country (about the size of New Jersey) can rank so high economically.
Some of things that I don’t like here include widespread racism, an incessant need to prove that Koreans are superior to all other cultures, pressure to succeed which is resulting on some alarming suicide trends especially in the cities, H1N1 paranoia, unimaginative architecture, overuse of red pepper to disguise boring food, a beauty obsession that is positively scary, and having to travel 2.5 hours to buy bacon (inside joke)
I see myself as part of the brain drain that the US is now experiencing, much as England did in the late 50′s and early 60′s, the same brain drain that lead my father, an aerospace engineer, to leave the UK for greener grass in the US. I am old enough to remember the incredible economic turmoil of the 1970′s and I am really tired of hearing about how tough things are now – they have always been pretty tough for those of us not on the high-wage fast-track.
but I digress…… Korea is an interesting mix of high-tech industry and small scale farming and fishing… from what I have seen everyone works here but not the three jobs I had to take on to keep a roof over my head in the US … nobody goes bankrupt because they have a medical condition … all children go to regular school and are expected to achieve no matter what their learning or physical disabilities are … I could go on and on but I won’t
If you want to see a glimpse of rural life here, check out the amazing film “Old Partner” which was the hit of the film festival circuit this year – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Partner – I see men like this every day here in the countryside although most of them use these weird little tractors instead of a cow
I should also add that I am also following in the footsteps of that great 19th century traveler Isabella Bird and am hoping to work up a film project about her … anybody interested in helping?
> These so-called farmers reap huge agriculture
> subsidies and profits while at the same time
> selling at a price lower than smaller family
> farms can. A win for the consumers
Not if you consider the amount and supporting infrastructure of taxation funding the subsidies a distorting and punishing loss to consumers.
> These so-called farmers reap huge agriculture
> subsidies and profits while at the same time
> selling at a price lower than smaller family
> farms can. A win for the consumers
Not if you consider the amount and supporting infrastructure of taxation funding the subsidies a distorting and punishing loss to consumers.
Len and Fentex:
First, how do you incentivize growing markets instead of market share? What mechanism do you use in a supposedly free market?
Two articles I read today illustrate my concern. Both are about Goldman Sachs. One in the UK Guardian which speaks to corporate culture and its personnel’s values. The other was about G-S being turned down by the WH in their attempt to buy Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae debt. While I didn’t quite understand the entire article, what struck me was a G-S quote: “don’t they know who we are?” It was as if to say, “Don’t they realize how important and superior we are? We should have anything we want because we’re better than everyone else.” So, again, I ask how do you change the incentives?
And, Fentex, I suspect that most people do not see the correlation between what they pay in taxes and subsidies, price supports, and protectionism.
It’s kind of like someone I knew years ago whose husband died in an accident. She was perfectly capable of working – strong, able, intelligent, creative – to support her 2 children but didn’t want to work. In her mind, living on “the dole” was perfectly fine. She failed to see the correlation between what she was receiving and what the taxpayers were paying. In her mind, it was government money…not the money of hard-working taxpayers like me or her friends or her family. Somehow, in her mind, it was free money. Money that, apparently, magically appeared out of nowhere and cost no one anything.
The same thing goes, until now, for how tax monies are spent. Most people don’t know. And until now, with so many people out of work, most have not had the time to look and question. After all, you can’t work 50 to 60 hours a week, do all the necessary chores, spend time with the kids, and still keep up with how Congress is spending tax dollars. You just trusted. Or if you knew, you were too busy trying to keep everything together and pay the bills that you just didn’t have the time, let alone energy, to devote to dealing with obvious Congressional misappropriations.
While I still think the “tea party” protests are way over the top and not at all on the mark, these people do make a point. And that point is that too much of our national treasure has gone to people and companies who neither need it nor deserve it. The system rewards the companies with the greatest lobbying dollars at the expense of everyone else, pushing up tax rates and preventing innovation…along with preventing needed infrastructure projects from being completed.
According to the Society of Civil Engineers, most of the country’s bridges, dams, and other civil structures are overdue to fail. In other words, crumble. Yet, we continue to pour tax dollars into industry sectors that do not need and should not have protection.
Hey, but the good news is that Congress is getting rich! A recent survey from Open Source stated that most Senators, since being voted into office, are now millionaires. Never mind that you and I can’t find a job that pays the bills or provides any kind of financial security.
Len and Fentex:
First, how do you incentivize growing markets instead of market share? What mechanism do you use in a supposedly free market?
Two articles I read today illustrate my concern. Both are about Goldman Sachs. One in the UK Guardian which speaks to corporate culture and its personnel’s values. The other was about G-S being turned down by the WH in their attempt to buy Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae debt. While I didn’t quite understand the entire article, what struck me was a G-S quote: “don’t they know who we are?” It was as if to say, “Don’t they realize how important and superior we are? We should have anything we want because we’re better than everyone else.” So, again, I ask how do you change the incentives?
And, Fentex, I suspect that most people do not see the correlation between what they pay in taxes and subsidies, price supports, and protectionism.
It’s kind of like someone I knew years ago whose husband died in an accident. She was perfectly capable of working – strong, able, intelligent, creative – to support her 2 children but didn’t want to work. In her mind, living on “the dole” was perfectly fine. She failed to see the correlation between what she was receiving and what the taxpayers were paying. In her mind, it was government money…not the money of hard-working taxpayers like me or her friends or her family. Somehow, in her mind, it was free money. Money that, apparently, magically appeared out of nowhere and cost no one anything.
The same thing goes, until now, for how tax monies are spent. Most people don’t know. And until now, with so many people out of work, most have not had the time to look and question. After all, you can’t work 50 to 60 hours a week, do all the necessary chores, spend time with the kids, and still keep up with how Congress is spending tax dollars. You just trusted. Or if you knew, you were too busy trying to keep everything together and pay the bills that you just didn’t have the time, let alone energy, to devote to dealing with obvious Congressional misappropriations.
While I still think the “tea party” protests are way over the top and not at all on the mark, these people do make a point. And that point is that too much of our national treasure has gone to people and companies who neither need it nor deserve it. The system rewards the companies with the greatest lobbying dollars at the expense of everyone else, pushing up tax rates and preventing innovation…along with preventing needed infrastructure projects from being completed.
According to the Society of Civil Engineers, most of the country’s bridges, dams, and other civil structures are overdue to fail. In other words, crumble. Yet, we continue to pour tax dollars into industry sectors that do not need and should not have protection.
Hey, but the good news is that Congress is getting rich! A recent survey from Open Source stated that most Senators, since being voted into office, are now millionaires. Never mind that you and I can’t find a job that pays the bills or provides any kind of financial security.
Fiona,
Do you know how S. Korea manages its’ economy? In other words, what has the government done to encourage business, pay for health care, and still not let its budget deficit grow out of control?
What lessons can the US take from S. Korea?
Fiona,
Do you know how S. Korea manages its’ economy? In other words, what has the government done to encourage business, pay for health care, and still not let its budget deficit grow out of control?
What lessons can the US take from S. Korea?
Fiona,
Do you know how S. Korea manages its’ economy? In other words, what has the government done to encourage business, pay for health care, and still not let its budget deficit grow out of control?
What lessons can the US take from S. Korea?
“Do you know how S. Korea manages its’ economy? In other words, what has the government done to encourage business, pay for health care, and still not let its budget deficit grow out of control?”
I’m glad you asked that..the Wall Street Journal did a piece recently about the South Korean economy
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125651482563207031.html
As far as health care goes I think it is because everyone is in the same pool, everyone pays for insurance and expects to pay 20% of their health costs. Koreans are fastidious about health to the point of obsession in some ways but they still have undrinkable water for the most part (or so I have been told)
Two points that I failed to bring up earlier that totally surprised me are the dedication, lead by the federal government, to environmental issues and telecommunications. South Korea has one of the highest broadband penetration rates in the world. Even in my fairly poor community every household has high-speed internet access. The monthly rate is fairly cheap, about $35, and I watch tv and movies via my internet hookup – very nice!!!
The entire country recycles and I mean everybody. We have recycling stations all over our town and we sort everything. Food waste that can be fed to animals goes in one bin. All of the packaging goes into another, paper , glass and metal into yet more bins. For details on recycling here try this link http://www.korea4expats.com/article-recycling.html
The other thing that amazes me is the adoption of alternative energy. My county is considered the poorest in the country and we have a wind farm. I see wind turbines all over the place. Koreans are attempting to do something about the plague of air pollution in the cities and there is an optional program to reduce driving where you only drive every other day based on the last digit of your car tag.
I will be glad to answer other questions as I can.
“Do you know how S. Korea manages its’ economy? In other words, what has the government done to encourage business, pay for health care, and still not let its budget deficit grow out of control?”
I’m glad you asked that..the Wall Street Journal did a piece recently about the South Korean economy
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125651482563207031.html
As far as health care goes I think it is because everyone is in the same pool, everyone pays for insurance and expects to pay 20% of their health costs. Koreans are fastidious about health to the point of obsession in some ways but they still have undrinkable water for the most part (or so I have been told)
Two points that I failed to bring up earlier that totally surprised me are the dedication, lead by the federal government, to environmental issues and telecommunications. South Korea has one of the highest broadband penetration rates in the world. Even in my fairly poor community every household has high-speed internet access. The monthly rate is fairly cheap, about $35, and I watch tv and movies via my internet hookup – very nice!!!
The entire country recycles and I mean everybody. We have recycling stations all over our town and we sort everything. Food waste that can be fed to animals goes in one bin. All of the packaging goes into another, paper , glass and metal into yet more bins. For details on recycling here try this link http://www.korea4expats.com/article-recycling.html
The other thing that amazes me is the adoption of alternative energy. My county is considered the poorest in the country and we have a wind farm. I see wind turbines all over the place. Koreans are attempting to do something about the plague of air pollution in the cities and there is an optional program to reduce driving where you only drive every other day based on the last digit of your car tag.
I will be glad to answer other questions as I can.
WPA
CCC
That would be a start…
And we will eventually be manufacturing here again. Look at the history since WWII just in my industry…music…Japan…huge gains in the world, then industrial wages exceeded those in the US by about 1995. The rise of Korea…then a lot of those jobs outsourced first to Indonesia, now China because once again, the industrial wages shot up quickly. Now it’s China and India, and it will take longer for their wages to approach parity with ours…Japan’s, Germany, etc., but it will eventually. Then where does manufacturing go? Add in peak oil, and you’ll have a slow movement back to more local production as international transportation becomes more and more of a price issue. Already you have shipping companies slowing down freighters and tankers a good 20% in order to save bunker fuel. This could take 150 years or more to level out, but it will.
WPA
CCC
That would be a start…
And we will eventually be manufacturing here again. Look at the history since WWII just in my industry…music…Japan…huge gains in the world, then industrial wages exceeded those in the US by about 1995. The rise of Korea…then a lot of those jobs outsourced first to Indonesia, now China because once again, the industrial wages shot up quickly. Now it’s China and India, and it will take longer for their wages to approach parity with ours…Japan’s, Germany, etc., but it will eventually. Then where does manufacturing go? Add in peak oil, and you’ll have a slow movement back to more local production as international transportation becomes more and more of a price issue. Already you have shipping companies slowing down freighters and tankers a good 20% in order to save bunker fuel. This could take 150 years or more to level out, but it will.
WPA
CCC
That would be a start…
And we will eventually be manufacturing here again. Look at the history since WWII just in my industry…music…Japan…huge gains in the world, then industrial wages exceeded those in the US by about 1995. The rise of Korea…then a lot of those jobs outsourced first to Indonesia, now China because once again, the industrial wages shot up quickly. Now it’s China and India, and it will take longer for their wages to approach parity with ours…Japan’s, Germany, etc., but it will eventually. Then where does manufacturing go? Add in peak oil, and you’ll have a slow movement back to more local production as international transportation becomes more and more of a price issue. Already you have shipping companies slowing down freighters and tankers a good 20% in order to save bunker fuel. This could take 150 years or more to level out, but it will.
BTW, one of the “advantages” that Korea has…like Japan…is a very homogenized culture. There are very few ethnic minorities to be seen, and there are virtually no “illegal aliens” other than welcomed escapees from North Korea.
Being a melting pot carries a cost as well as bringing benefits. Too bad our fearless leaders can’t do more with the benefits and admit to the costs. If Koreans can learn English, why can’t we?
BTW, one of the “advantages” that Korea has…like Japan…is a very homogenized culture. There are very few ethnic minorities to be seen, and there are virtually no “illegal aliens” other than welcomed escapees from North Korea.
Being a melting pot carries a cost as well as bringing benefits. Too bad our fearless leaders can’t do more with the benefits and admit to the costs. If Koreans can learn English, why can’t we?
So much so wrong in that post, it’s really quite impressive.
“And we will eventually be manufacturing here again.”
America is the leading manufacturer on earth, so this statement is purely false. Indeed manufacturing employment has been declining in the USA… just as it has in China… just as farm employment fell as that became productive. That’s the nature of getting better at doing stuff with robots, and it is, on balance good for us. It’s not easy for those pushed out of their jobs by the robots, but it’s good for everyone else. There’s no reason to scorn service jobs. Service is a good thing.
WPA, CCC, “Peak Oil”. It’s a cornucopia of fallacious fun. WPA and CCC were the least bad of FDR’s disastrous reign, but they were only deemed necessarily because of depression Hoover and the Fed created and FDR himself extended. “Peak Oil” is a non-issue. We will run out of oil some day. That day may come in 100 years or 30 or who the hell knows.
Regardless, as we run out, the prices will rise for real (instead of due to inflation by the Fed like in 2008) and alternatives will become viable. The energized hybrid market in 2008 after a decade of nobody caring is proof of that as well as being proof that the “oil crisis” in the 1970s was 100% caused by government price controls.
So much so wrong in that post, it’s really quite impressive.
“And we will eventually be manufacturing here again.”
America is the leading manufacturer on earth, so this statement is purely false. Indeed manufacturing employment has been declining in the USA… just as it has in China… just as farm employment fell as that became productive. That’s the nature of getting better at doing stuff with robots, and it is, on balance good for us. It’s not easy for those pushed out of their jobs by the robots, but it’s good for everyone else. There’s no reason to scorn service jobs. Service is a good thing.
WPA, CCC, “Peak Oil”. It’s a cornucopia of fallacious fun. WPA and CCC were the least bad of FDR’s disastrous reign, but they were only deemed necessarily because of depression Hoover and the Fed created and FDR himself extended. “Peak Oil” is a non-issue. We will run out of oil some day. That day may come in 100 years or 30 or who the hell knows.
Regardless, as we run out, the prices will rise for real (instead of due to inflation by the Fed like in 2008) and alternatives will become viable. The energized hybrid market in 2008 after a decade of nobody caring is proof of that as well as being proof that the “oil crisis” in the 1970s was 100% caused by government price controls.
So much so wrong in that post, it’s really quite impressive.
“And we will eventually be manufacturing here again.”
America is the leading manufacturer on earth, so this statement is purely false. Indeed manufacturing employment has been declining in the USA… just as it has in China… just as farm employment fell as that became productive. That’s the nature of getting better at doing stuff with robots, and it is, on balance good for us. It’s not easy for those pushed out of their jobs by the robots, but it’s good for everyone else. There’s no reason to scorn service jobs. Service is a good thing.
WPA, CCC, “Peak Oil”. It’s a cornucopia of fallacious fun. WPA and CCC were the least bad of FDR’s disastrous reign, but they were only deemed necessarily because of depression Hoover and the Fed created and FDR himself extended. “Peak Oil” is a non-issue. We will run out of oil some day. That day may come in 100 years or 30 or who the hell knows.
Regardless, as we run out, the prices will rise for real (instead of due to inflation by the Fed like in 2008) and alternatives will become viable. The energized hybrid market in 2008 after a decade of nobody caring is proof of that as well as being proof that the “oil crisis” in the 1970s was 100% caused by government price controls.
Don’t the Japanese look at the Koreans as a “minority”?
Don’t the Japanese look at the Koreans as a “minority”?
Rats. I’m not a WSJ member which makes it impossible for me to read the entire article.
Any chance you could explain?
Rats. I’m not a WSJ member which makes it impossible for me to read the entire article.
Any chance you could explain?
Rats. I’m not a WSJ member which makes it impossible for me to read the entire article.
Any chance you could explain?
John, there is an historic antipathy between the Koreans and the Japanese.
Many centuries ago, Japan attempted to annex Korea through warfare. Yes, many Japanese thought of Koreans as being a “minority.” Actually, it’s far more racial in nature. But that’s pretty much a norm in a homogeneous society that for hundreds of centuries remained closed to foreign immigration.
John, there is an historic antipathy between the Koreans and the Japanese.
Many centuries ago, Japan attempted to annex Korea through warfare. Yes, many Japanese thought of Koreans as being a “minority.” Actually, it’s far more racial in nature. But that’s pretty much a norm in a homogeneous society that for hundreds of centuries remained closed to foreign immigration.
John, there is an historic antipathy between the Koreans and the Japanese.
Many centuries ago, Japan attempted to annex Korea through warfare. Yes, many Japanese thought of Koreans as being a “minority.” Actually, it’s far more racial in nature. But that’s pretty much a norm in a homogeneous society that for hundreds of centuries remained closed to foreign immigration.
This is why I’m so ardently pro-free trade, pro-open borders and anti-welfare-state. It’s all about peace and love. Seriously
Trade interconnects. It fosters relationships that don’t form in isolation. It binds through mutual necessity in a peaceful and socially constructive way. Welfare statism on the other hand creates a “keep your immigrant hands off my tax dollars” mentality that fosters xenophobia and more isolation which makes the world more fragile and at risk of war. You can see that kind of nationalism throughout the Europe-socialist zone. It’s repulsive.
Another interesting aside. For all the talk of pending malthusian resource scarcity, it is very interesting that small nations with relatively little natural resources have done so well: Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea. Natural resources can, in fact, be a curse that establishes lazy oligarchs who turn to hands-outs as a way to maintain political stability (think oil-rich nations especially Saudi Arabia and Venezuela).
Decent, predictable rule of law and property rights beats natural resources any day of the week.
This is why I’m so ardently pro-free trade, pro-open borders and anti-welfare-state. It’s all about peace and love. Seriously
Trade interconnects. It fosters relationships that don’t form in isolation. It binds through mutual necessity in a peaceful and socially constructive way. Welfare statism on the other hand creates a “keep your immigrant hands off my tax dollars” mentality that fosters xenophobia and more isolation which makes the world more fragile and at risk of war. You can see that kind of nationalism throughout the Europe-socialist zone. It’s repulsive.
Another interesting aside. For all the talk of pending malthusian resource scarcity, it is very interesting that small nations with relatively little natural resources have done so well: Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea. Natural resources can, in fact, be a curse that establishes lazy oligarchs who turn to hands-outs as a way to maintain political stability (think oil-rich nations especially Saudi Arabia and Venezuela).
Decent, predictable rule of law and property rights beats natural resources any day of the week.
The libertarian position would be it’s not anyones responibility to create incentives, one leaves it to the demand to be the incentive.
People a little more willing to allow governments to have economic policies argue over how best to encourage investment without damaging distortions – reducing costs by reducing regulatory requirements, explicit tax incentives (research gets a lot of that) and loans with conditions through to protection of markets.
Personally I’m a big fan of simply not discouraging new investment by ensuring everyone gets treated the same – not creating incentives to move capital to artifically supported markets, not permitting non-productive tax dodges and favoured industries.
I’ve also long maintained that a primary concern of governance to the supression of corruption. Corruption is a cancer that destroys all other efforts at progress and is a primary cause of most subsequent ills.
Mistaken policy and missteps can be easily corrected in a polling booth, but corruption can’t be.
The libertarian position would be it’s not anyones responibility to create incentives, one leaves it to the demand to be the incentive.
People a little more willing to allow governments to have economic policies argue over how best to encourage investment without damaging distortions – reducing costs by reducing regulatory requirements, explicit tax incentives (research gets a lot of that) and loans with conditions through to protection of markets.
Personally I’m a big fan of simply not discouraging new investment by ensuring everyone gets treated the same – not creating incentives to move capital to artifically supported markets, not permitting non-productive tax dodges and favoured industries.
I’ve also long maintained that a primary concern of governance to the supression of corruption. Corruption is a cancer that destroys all other efforts at progress and is a primary cause of most subsequent ills.
Mistaken policy and missteps can be easily corrected in a polling booth, but corruption can’t be.
The libertarian position would be it’s not anyones responibility to create incentives, one leaves it to the demand to be the incentive.
People a little more willing to allow governments to have economic policies argue over how best to encourage investment without damaging distortions – reducing costs by reducing regulatory requirements, explicit tax incentives (research gets a lot of that) and loans with conditions through to protection of markets.
Personally I’m a big fan of simply not discouraging new investment by ensuring everyone gets treated the same – not creating incentives to move capital to artifically supported markets, not permitting non-productive tax dodges and favoured industries.
I’ve also long maintained that a primary concern of governance to the supression of corruption. Corruption is a cancer that destroys all other efforts at progress and is a primary cause of most subsequent ills.
Mistaken policy and missteps can be easily corrected in a polling booth, but corruption can’t be.
I endorse this reply from Fentex 100%.
Government need not and should not “encourage” investment or entrepreneurship. Having the power to do so simply makes it a magnet for rent-seeking lobby money which is a sunk-cost to society and a great creator of corruption. Just look at Jersey. The state government is so overbearing that it’s basically assumed one must grease the palms of some politician in order to get anything done. The result is The Soprano State.
Power attracts corruption.
I endorse this reply from Fentex 100%.
Government need not and should not “encourage” investment or entrepreneurship. Having the power to do so simply makes it a magnet for rent-seeking lobby money which is a sunk-cost to society and a great creator of corruption. Just look at Jersey. The state government is so overbearing that it’s basically assumed one must grease the palms of some politician in order to get anything done. The result is The Soprano State.
Power attracts corruption.
> “Peak Oil” is a non-issue.
Like hell it is. The world’s been living high on the hog for a while now and it’s not going to want to be weaned off it – but there is no easy replacement to hand for oils high energy density.
The faster oil runs out the more it’s going to hurt, the more it’s going to cause frustrations and conflicts.
Which isn’t to make any claims about what’s been responsible for fluctuations in oil’s price.
> “Peak Oil” is a non-issue.
Like hell it is. The world’s been living high on the hog for a while now and it’s not going to want to be weaned off it – but there is no easy replacement to hand for oils high energy density.
The faster oil runs out the more it’s going to hurt, the more it’s going to cause frustrations and conflicts.
Which isn’t to make any claims about what’s been responsible for fluctuations in oil’s price.
> Many centuries ago…
Try sixty years ago for the most recent chapter.
> Many centuries ago…
Try sixty years ago for the most recent chapter.
> Many centuries ago…
Try sixty years ago for the most recent chapter.
>You can see that kind of nationalism throughout
> the Europe-socialist zone.
The European Union exists to create a common market and state aimed at removing the divisions that lead to their internicine wars.
A few years ago I drove/wove from Calais to Istanbul and couldn’t help but notice the extensive motorway building everywhere I went.
My girlfriend was joking about roving tunnel salesmen being on a commission for the number of tunnels under Greek, Croat, Serb, Italian etc mountains roads were being driven through.
Europeans are trying very hard to knit their economies together for this express purpose (of avoiding wars).
>You can see that kind of nationalism throughout
> the Europe-socialist zone.
The European Union exists to create a common market and state aimed at removing the divisions that lead to their internicine wars.
A few years ago I drove/wove from Calais to Istanbul and couldn’t help but notice the extensive motorway building everywhere I went.
My girlfriend was joking about roving tunnel salesmen being on a commission for the number of tunnels under Greek, Croat, Serb, Italian etc mountains roads were being driven through.
Europeans are trying very hard to knit their economies together for this express purpose (of avoiding wars).
>You can see that kind of nationalism throughout
> the Europe-socialist zone.
The European Union exists to create a common market and state aimed at removing the divisions that lead to their internicine wars.
A few years ago I drove/wove from Calais to Istanbul and couldn’t help but notice the extensive motorway building everywhere I went.
My girlfriend was joking about roving tunnel salesmen being on a commission for the number of tunnels under Greek, Croat, Serb, Italian etc mountains roads were being driven through.
Europeans are trying very hard to knit their economies together for this express purpose (of avoiding wars).
Allow me to re-phrase. “Peak Oil” will take care of itself without any “help” from coercive force, subsidy or mandate from the govt. Market prices will do the trick to alter consumption and incentivize entrepreneurial discovery of alternatives.
The three links you need on this and the broader set of Malthusian fear monger issues:
‘Peak Oil’ is a waste of Energy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
‘The Simon-Ehrlich Wager’:
http://www.perc.org/articles/article588.php
‘Falling fertility”
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14744915
Allow me to re-phrase. “Peak Oil” will take care of itself without any “help” from coercive force, subsidy or mandate from the govt. Market prices will do the trick to alter consumption and incentivize entrepreneurial discovery of alternatives.
The three links you need on this and the broader set of Malthusian fear monger issues:
‘Peak Oil’ is a waste of Energy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
‘The Simon-Ehrlich Wager’:
http://www.perc.org/articles/article588.php
‘Falling fertility”
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14744915
Allow me to re-phrase. “Peak Oil” will take care of itself without any “help” from coercive force, subsidy or mandate from the govt. Market prices will do the trick to alter consumption and incentivize entrepreneurial discovery of alternatives.
The three links you need on this and the broader set of Malthusian fear monger issues:
‘Peak Oil’ is a waste of Energy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
‘The Simon-Ehrlich Wager’:
http://www.perc.org/articles/article588.php
‘Falling fertility”
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14744915
“Europeans are trying very hard to knit their economies together for this express purpose (of avoiding wars).”
Indeed. But some are not doing a very good job integrating immigrants. It’s a natural tension, birds-of-a-feather and all that. But when you have a hefty welfare state and high tax rates, that creates a natural dislike for newcomers hoping onto the rolls of the doles.
“Europeans are trying very hard to knit their economies together for this express purpose (of avoiding wars).”
Indeed. But some are not doing a very good job integrating immigrants. It’s a natural tension, birds-of-a-feather and all that. But when you have a hefty welfare state and high tax rates, that creates a natural dislike for newcomers hoping onto the rolls of the doles.
“Europeans are trying very hard to knit their economies together for this express purpose (of avoiding wars).”
Indeed. But some are not doing a very good job integrating immigrants. It’s a natural tension, birds-of-a-feather and all that. But when you have a hefty welfare state and high tax rates, that creates a natural dislike for newcomers hoping onto the rolls of the doles.
just a couple of notes about South Korea
1. We do indeed have a large illegal alien population here – it’s estimated that 20% of the foreign population, around 225,000 right now, are working here illegally – some are even ethnically Korean but have been living in China – there are detention facilities for illegals but they are somewhat controversial – many Koreans emigrated from here over the last 20 years or so and there is a tremendous shortage of unskilled labor and, like the US, they are seriously worried about a rapidly aging population
2. We start teaching English in the first grade here and you really can’t get into the University without English competency – private academies called hagwons abound which provide even more English instruction – students go to school from 9am to 3:30 and then often go straight to hagwon after school for several more hours – the regular school week includes 2 saturdays a month but overall the students are in the classroom about the same number of hours as US schoolchildren but it is not uncommon to see small children in hagwons late into the evening – every school has broadband access and I teach in a truly state of the art classroom in the poorest county in the country – Koreans value education
3. The economy – the postings are in and during the 3rd quarter the economy grew by 2.9% while the US economy continued to shrink – as I understand it the government basically spent a lot of money to grease the wheels – jobs were created (they continue to bring in English teachers at government expense), bridges and roads were built or repaired, but most importantly they did everything they could to bolster people’s confidence in the economy – a detailed, but slanted, look at the current picture can be found here http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2009/10/127_54316.html
just a couple of notes about South Korea
1. We do indeed have a large illegal alien population here – it’s estimated that 20% of the foreign population, around 225,000 right now, are working here illegally – some are even ethnically Korean but have been living in China – there are detention facilities for illegals but they are somewhat controversial – many Koreans emigrated from here over the last 20 years or so and there is a tremendous shortage of unskilled labor and, like the US, they are seriously worried about a rapidly aging population
2. We start teaching English in the first grade here and you really can’t get into the University without English competency – private academies called hagwons abound which provide even more English instruction – students go to school from 9am to 3:30 and then often go straight to hagwon after school for several more hours – the regular school week includes 2 saturdays a month but overall the students are in the classroom about the same number of hours as US schoolchildren but it is not uncommon to see small children in hagwons late into the evening – every school has broadband access and I teach in a truly state of the art classroom in the poorest county in the country – Koreans value education
3. The economy – the postings are in and during the 3rd quarter the economy grew by 2.9% while the US economy continued to shrink – as I understand it the government basically spent a lot of money to grease the wheels – jobs were created (they continue to bring in English teachers at government expense), bridges and roads were built or repaired, but most importantly they did everything they could to bolster people’s confidence in the economy – a detailed, but slanted, look at the current picture can be found here http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2009/10/127_54316.html
just a couple of notes about South Korea
1. We do indeed have a large illegal alien population here – it’s estimated that 20% of the foreign population, around 225,000 right now, are working here illegally – some are even ethnically Korean but have been living in China – there are detention facilities for illegals but they are somewhat controversial – many Koreans emigrated from here over the last 20 years or so and there is a tremendous shortage of unskilled labor and, like the US, they are seriously worried about a rapidly aging population
2. We start teaching English in the first grade here and you really can’t get into the University without English competency – private academies called hagwons abound which provide even more English instruction – students go to school from 9am to 3:30 and then often go straight to hagwon after school for several more hours – the regular school week includes 2 saturdays a month but overall the students are in the classroom about the same number of hours as US schoolchildren but it is not uncommon to see small children in hagwons late into the evening – every school has broadband access and I teach in a truly state of the art classroom in the poorest county in the country – Koreans value education
3. The economy – the postings are in and during the 3rd quarter the economy grew by 2.9% while the US economy continued to shrink – as I understand it the government basically spent a lot of money to grease the wheels – jobs were created (they continue to bring in English teachers at government expense), bridges and roads were built or repaired, but most importantly they did everything they could to bolster people’s confidence in the economy – a detailed, but slanted, look at the current picture can be found here http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2009/10/127_54316.html
You keep saying it — now back it up. You got any credible proof that “America is the leading manufacturer on earth”? Or is that just another postulate in the faith, like the notion that “fraud” can magically be countered by some Deus Ex Machina?
http://community.machinedesign.com/blogs/editordesk/archive/2008/01/29/sobering-manufacturing-statistics-for-the-upcoming-primary-election.aspx
http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=3061
But of course you may be relying on one sentence in the CIA World Factbook,, snuck in among all the other facts showing weak and declining everything and debt to the world, that doesn’t break out how much of our “industrial” production is the machinery of war. And of course it’s ok with your Grand Global View that manufacturing job losses are huge and that it’s libertarianly correct that the wage slaves in broken lands should pick up those functions.
You keep saying it — now back it up. You got any credible proof that “America is the leading manufacturer on earth”? Or is that just another postulate in the faith, like the notion that “fraud” can magically be countered by some Deus Ex Machina?
http://community.machinedesign.com/blogs/editordesk/archive/2008/01/29/sobering-manufacturing-statistics-for-the-upcoming-primary-election.aspx
http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=3061
But of course you may be relying on one sentence in the CIA World Factbook,, snuck in among all the other facts showing weak and declining everything and debt to the world, that doesn’t break out how much of our “industrial” production is the machinery of war. And of course it’s ok with your Grand Global View that manufacturing job losses are huge and that it’s libertarianly correct that the wage slaves in broken lands should pick up those functions.
You keep saying it — now back it up. You got any credible proof that “America is the leading manufacturer on earth”? Or is that just another postulate in the faith, like the notion that “fraud” can magically be countered by some Deus Ex Machina?
http://community.machinedesign.com/blogs/editordesk/archive/2008/01/29/sobering-manufacturing-statistics-for-the-upcoming-primary-election.aspx
http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=3061
But of course you may be relying on one sentence in the CIA World Factbook,, snuck in among all the other facts showing weak and declining everything and debt to the world, that doesn’t break out how much of our “industrial” production is the machinery of war. And of course it’s ok with your Grand Global View that manufacturing job losses are huge and that it’s libertarianly correct that the wage slaves in broken lands should pick up those functions.
I’ve posted this link many times:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30229507/ns/business-us_business/
I’m not talking about Manufacturing employment. I’m talking about manufacturing output. The robots are taking over most of the jobs in manufacturing and that’s fine. It’s the same progress that enabled our entire nation (plus a surplus) to be fed by only 2% of the labor force.
But in the world of 1950’s Nostalgianomics, working on an assembly line is for some utterly arbitrary (and frankly ridiculous) reason, worse than working in businesses that directly serve people.
Humans doesn’t need to be assemblers if the robots can do it for us. That frees more of us up to be communicators, teachers, councilors, designers, inventors, developers, doctors, lawyers, marketers, decorators, etc.
All good things. Give up the religion, JTM. That “golden era” of manufacturing employment is gone and that’s a good thing. There’s plenty of problems left to solve with new jobs to come that will solve them. Always has been, probably always will be.
I’ve posted this link many times:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30229507/ns/business-us_business/
I’m not talking about Manufacturing employment. I’m talking about manufacturing output. The robots are taking over most of the jobs in manufacturing and that’s fine. It’s the same progress that enabled our entire nation (plus a surplus) to be fed by only 2% of the labor force.
But in the world of 1950’s Nostalgianomics, working on an assembly line is for some utterly arbitrary (and frankly ridiculous) reason, worse than working in businesses that directly serve people.
Humans doesn’t need to be assemblers if the robots can do it for us. That frees more of us up to be communicators, teachers, councilors, designers, inventors, developers, doctors, lawyers, marketers, decorators, etc.
All good things. Give up the religion, JTM. That “golden era” of manufacturing employment is gone and that’s a good thing. There’s plenty of problems left to solve with new jobs to come that will solve them. Always has been, probably always will be.
I’ve posted this link many times:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30229507/ns/business-us_business/
I’m not talking about Manufacturing employment. I’m talking about manufacturing output. The robots are taking over most of the jobs in manufacturing and that’s fine. It’s the same progress that enabled our entire nation (plus a surplus) to be fed by only 2% of the labor force.
But in the world of 1950’s Nostalgianomics, working on an assembly line is for some utterly arbitrary (and frankly ridiculous) reason, worse than working in businesses that directly serve people.
Humans doesn’t need to be assemblers if the robots can do it for us. That frees more of us up to be communicators, teachers, councilors, designers, inventors, developers, doctors, lawyers, marketers, decorators, etc.
All good things. Give up the religion, JTM. That “golden era” of manufacturing employment is gone and that’s a good thing. There’s plenty of problems left to solve with new jobs to come that will solve them. Always has been, probably always will be.
Wet blankets and icewater –
It appears that such rosiness as was in the cheeks of The Nation’s Economy was just a passing fever, and that the patient is sicker than Dr. Pangloss wanted to let on…
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/11/9/802392/-Breaking:-BLS,-Fed,-BEA,-et-al-Overstate-Strength-of-Economy
And of course there’s that “bulge” between U3 and U6…
Now what?
What’s next?
Wet blankets and icewater –
It appears that such rosiness as was in the cheeks of The Nation’s Economy was just a passing fever, and that the patient is sicker than Dr. Pangloss wanted to let on…
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/11/9/802392/-Breaking:-BLS,-Fed,-BEA,-et-al-Overstate-Strength-of-Economy
And of course there’s that “bulge” between U3 and U6…
Now what?
What’s next?
Wet blankets and icewater –
It appears that such rosiness as was in the cheeks of The Nation’s Economy was just a passing fever, and that the patient is sicker than Dr. Pangloss wanted to let on…
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/11/9/802392/-Breaking:-BLS,-Fed,-BEA,-et-al-Overstate-Strength-of-Economy
And of course there’s that “bulge” between U3 and U6…
Now what?
What’s next?
Valerie,
Thanks for the compliment. And there’s a ton of great stuff in your post here. Especially this:
—-
“Lots could be done to erase the anti-competitiveness and level the playing field by removing subsidies; eliminating protections; leveling out – as in a flat tax with no deductions other than dependents – the tax system to give small and mid-sized businesses a competitive opportunity as well as the average taxpayer; breaking up the TBTF banks that, as long as they exist, will pose a danger to the economy; requiring transparency in financial transactions (think CDSs) that effectively could end the casino culture on Wall St.; end the huge military industrial complex that greedily gobbles up the nation’s treasure;”
—-
Great stuff. We are of the same mind on many things, Valerie Curl.
Change is hard. It’s hard on the people that must endure it. I don’t (or try not to) say that “everyone wins” with freedom and free trade, because it’s not true. There are losers. People whose life-long pursuit dies. Whose business dries up. These are hard things and I have interest in making light of them.
Still, the political effort to prevent such change kills the goose of prosperity for all. We see that with tariffs like those levied by Bush on Steel and Obama on Tires. All consumers becomes poorer so that a tiny, politically powerful and electorally vital minority can be better off. It’s immoral, it makes society poorer and it fosters lobbying instead of innovating.
Now, to the discussion of your less-than-great stuff:
—-
“Take your example of the farmers. Most of the farm products on markets today are from large corporate farms. These so-called farmers reap huge agriculture subsidies and profits while at the same time selling at a price lower than smaller family farms can. A win for the consumers – and the corporate farmer shareholders/owners – but it puts smaller farmers out of business, increasing bankruptcies and unemployment.”
—-
I think you are mistaken in some respects here. Many (most?) of the food products available are not subsidized or protected by import quotas. On the other hand, I think the largest crops are (corn, wheat, sugar). That needs to stop immediately and would be successful, just as it was in New Zealand. Small farming may now simply be a niche pursuit for organics, etc. Maybe not. So be it. Judging it to be “good” normatively is just religion by zealous “buy local” fundamentalists that can’t bear the thought that efficiency and productivity are, in fact, the most environmental approach we can have. 1000 small organic farms may very well be much more harmful to the environment (never mind the economy) than a handful of super-productive high-yield farms. Or maybe not. That’s an empirical question that the “buy local” set treats as gospel truth regardless.
But this is part of a larger romance and nostalgia in the minds of the intellectual progressive “left” (or whatever, I hate that generalization). There was a time, during the FDR era, when progressives were obsessed about “efficiency” and looked up to the fascist model of pre-war Italy. The NRA was an effort to formalize and codify efficiency and bigness. The New Dealers saw excessive competition as a problem. Big corporations, Big Government and Big Labor was the order of the day for New Dealer’s progressivism.
And yet, the earlier (and then later) “progressives” saw trust-busting as a crucial component of their so-called “reform”. TR and the rest were all about anti-trust (though, in reality, it was all merely a tool of incompetent competitors rather than consumer protection, which is why attacking companies for charging LOW prices has been the norm), and yet FDR was breaking the letter and spirit of this misguided anti-trust law with his NRA cartels.
This, I believe was based on the fallacious ideology that the capitalist economy spirals inherently into crisis as diminishing returns on production eliminate profit. It’s a Marxist concept divorced from reality of human action, creativity and the diversity and complexity of our world. It’s circular flow thinking. Closed loop thinking.
The history of economics in the progressive movement is one of bi-polar, unhinged reaction to the perceived ills of the moment with only one undying faith: that government and its technocrats are somehow immune to the Animal Spirits and can swoop in to correct all so-called “market failures”. Call it the Stiglitz model or the Keynesian Model or whatever. It’s the hope for Angels to win elections from a see of mortals. This is why the Galbraiths of our world are always and everywhere romantics for “planning”. I simply call it hubris.
You can chart the same flip-flopping course through the progressive love/hate relationship with economic growth, oscillating between state-lead “pro-growth” and then “anti-growth” whims.
Don’t fall into closed-loop trap. It’s intuitive feeling, but it’s wrong. Jobs are created and destroyed every day. The schemers with the guns are no better at seeing through the fog of uncertainty than any other speculator. They simply can use guns to back their plans and extract their revenue when they fail. That is the key difference between the private entrepreneur and the public bureaucrat.
“the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design” – F A Hayek.
Valerie,
Thanks for the compliment. And there’s a ton of great stuff in your post here. Especially this:
—-
“Lots could be done to erase the anti-competitiveness and level the playing field by removing subsidies; eliminating protections; leveling out – as in a flat tax with no deductions other than dependents – the tax system to give small and mid-sized businesses a competitive opportunity as well as the average taxpayer; breaking up the TBTF banks that, as long as they exist, will pose a danger to the economy; requiring transparency in financial transactions (think CDSs) that effectively could end the casino culture on Wall St.; end the huge military industrial complex that greedily gobbles up the nation’s treasure;”
—-
Great stuff. We are of the same mind on many things, Valerie Curl.
Change is hard. It’s hard on the people that must endure it. I don’t (or try not to) say that “everyone wins” with freedom and free trade, because it’s not true. There are losers. People whose life-long pursuit dies. Whose business dries up. These are hard things and I have interest in making light of them.
Still, the political effort to prevent such change kills the goose of prosperity for all. We see that with tariffs like those levied by Bush on Steel and Obama on Tires. All consumers becomes poorer so that a tiny, politically powerful and electorally vital minority can be better off. It’s immoral, it makes society poorer and it fosters lobbying instead of innovating.
Now, to the discussion of your less-than-great stuff:
—-
“Take your example of the farmers. Most of the farm products on markets today are from large corporate farms. These so-called farmers reap huge agriculture subsidies and profits while at the same time selling at a price lower than smaller family farms can. A win for the consumers – and the corporate farmer shareholders/owners – but it puts smaller farmers out of business, increasing bankruptcies and unemployment.”
—-
I think you are mistaken in some respects here. Many (most?) of the food products available are not subsidized or protected by import quotas. On the other hand, I think the largest crops are (corn, wheat, sugar). That needs to stop immediately and would be successful, just as it was in New Zealand. Small farming may now simply be a niche pursuit for organics, etc. Maybe not. So be it. Judging it to be “good” normatively is just religion by zealous “buy local” fundamentalists that can’t bear the thought that efficiency and productivity are, in fact, the most environmental approach we can have. 1000 small organic farms may very well be much more harmful to the environment (never mind the economy) than a handful of super-productive high-yield farms. Or maybe not. That’s an empirical question that the “buy local” set treats as gospel truth regardless.
But this is part of a larger romance and nostalgia in the minds of the intellectual progressive “left” (or whatever, I hate that generalization). There was a time, during the FDR era, when progressives were obsessed about “efficiency” and looked up to the fascist model of pre-war Italy. The NRA was an effort to formalize and codify efficiency and bigness. The New Dealers saw excessive competition as a problem. Big corporations, Big Government and Big Labor was the order of the day for New Dealer’s progressivism.
And yet, the earlier (and then later) “progressives” saw trust-busting as a crucial component of their so-called “reform”. TR and the rest were all about anti-trust (though, in reality, it was all merely a tool of incompetent competitors rather than consumer protection, which is why attacking companies for charging LOW prices has been the norm), and yet FDR was breaking the letter and spirit of this misguided anti-trust law with his NRA cartels.
This, I believe was based on the fallacious ideology that the capitalist economy spirals inherently into crisis as diminishing returns on production eliminate profit. It’s a Marxist concept divorced from reality of human action, creativity and the diversity and complexity of our world. It’s circular flow thinking. Closed loop thinking.
The history of economics in the progressive movement is one of bi-polar, unhinged reaction to the perceived ills of the moment with only one undying faith: that government and its technocrats are somehow immune to the Animal Spirits and can swoop in to correct all so-called “market failures”. Call it the Stiglitz model or the Keynesian Model or whatever. It’s the hope for Angels to win elections from a see of mortals. This is why the Galbraiths of our world are always and everywhere romantics for “planning”. I simply call it hubris.
You can chart the same flip-flopping course through the progressive love/hate relationship with economic growth, oscillating between state-lead “pro-growth” and then “anti-growth” whims.
Don’t fall into closed-loop trap. It’s intuitive feeling, but it’s wrong. Jobs are created and destroyed every day. The schemers with the guns are no better at seeing through the fog of uncertainty than any other speculator. They simply can use guns to back their plans and extract their revenue when they fail. That is the key difference between the private entrepreneur and the public bureaucrat.
“the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design” – F A Hayek.
Valerie,
Thanks for the compliment. And there’s a ton of great stuff in your post here. Especially this:
—-
“Lots could be done to erase the anti-competitiveness and level the playing field by removing subsidies; eliminating protections; leveling out – as in a flat tax with no deductions other than dependents – the tax system to give small and mid-sized businesses a competitive opportunity as well as the average taxpayer; breaking up the TBTF banks that, as long as they exist, will pose a danger to the economy; requiring transparency in financial transactions (think CDSs) that effectively could end the casino culture on Wall St.; end the huge military industrial complex that greedily gobbles up the nation’s treasure;”
—-
Great stuff. We are of the same mind on many things, Valerie Curl.
Change is hard. It’s hard on the people that must endure it. I don’t (or try not to) say that “everyone wins” with freedom and free trade, because it’s not true. There are losers. People whose life-long pursuit dies. Whose business dries up. These are hard things and I have interest in making light of them.
Still, the political effort to prevent such change kills the goose of prosperity for all. We see that with tariffs like those levied by Bush on Steel and Obama on Tires. All consumers becomes poorer so that a tiny, politically powerful and electorally vital minority can be better off. It’s immoral, it makes society poorer and it fosters lobbying instead of innovating.
Now, to the discussion of your less-than-great stuff:
—-
“Take your example of the farmers. Most of the farm products on markets today are from large corporate farms. These so-called farmers reap huge agriculture subsidies and profits while at the same time selling at a price lower than smaller family farms can. A win for the consumers – and the corporate farmer shareholders/owners – but it puts smaller farmers out of business, increasing bankruptcies and unemployment.”
—-
I think you are mistaken in some respects here. Many (most?) of the food products available are not subsidized or protected by import quotas. On the other hand, I think the largest crops are (corn, wheat, sugar). That needs to stop immediately and would be successful, just as it was in New Zealand. Small farming may now simply be a niche pursuit for organics, etc. Maybe not. So be it. Judging it to be “good” normatively is just religion by zealous “buy local” fundamentalists that can’t bear the thought that efficiency and productivity are, in fact, the most environmental approach we can have. 1000 small organic farms may very well be much more harmful to the environment (never mind the economy) than a handful of super-productive high-yield farms. Or maybe not. That’s an empirical question that the “buy local” set treats as gospel truth regardless.
But this is part of a larger romance and nostalgia in the minds of the intellectual progressive “left” (or whatever, I hate that generalization). There was a time, during the FDR era, when progressives were obsessed about “efficiency” and looked up to the fascist model of pre-war Italy. The NRA was an effort to formalize and codify efficiency and bigness. The New Dealers saw excessive competition as a problem. Big corporations, Big Government and Big Labor was the order of the day for New Dealer’s progressivism.
And yet, the earlier (and then later) “progressives” saw trust-busting as a crucial component of their so-called “reform”. TR and the rest were all about anti-trust (though, in reality, it was all merely a tool of incompetent competitors rather than consumer protection, which is why attacking companies for charging LOW prices has been the norm), and yet FDR was breaking the letter and spirit of this misguided anti-trust law with his NRA cartels.
This, I believe was based on the fallacious ideology that the capitalist economy spirals inherently into crisis as diminishing returns on production eliminate profit. It’s a Marxist concept divorced from reality of human action, creativity and the diversity and complexity of our world. It’s circular flow thinking. Closed loop thinking.
The history of economics in the progressive movement is one of bi-polar, unhinged reaction to the perceived ills of the moment with only one undying faith: that government and its technocrats are somehow immune to the Animal Spirits and can swoop in to correct all so-called “market failures”. Call it the Stiglitz model or the Keynesian Model or whatever. It’s the hope for Angels to win elections from a see of mortals. This is why the Galbraiths of our world are always and everywhere romantics for “planning”. I simply call it hubris.
You can chart the same flip-flopping course through the progressive love/hate relationship with economic growth, oscillating between state-lead “pro-growth” and then “anti-growth” whims.
Don’t fall into closed-loop trap. It’s intuitive feeling, but it’s wrong. Jobs are created and destroyed every day. The schemers with the guns are no better at seeing through the fog of uncertainty than any other speculator. They simply can use guns to back their plans and extract their revenue when they fail. That is the key difference between the private entrepreneur and the public bureaucrat.
“the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design” – F A Hayek.
“First, how do you incentivize growing markets instead of market share? What mechanism do you use in a supposedly free market?”
First, there are many systems at work here. The banking system has obviously gone completely nuts. I say fat broomsticks up their rears from the brush end first. That H1N1 vaccine scandal is an incredible insult to the nation on top of the criminal investing. No love lost here.
So take a moment to look away from that rage maker to some areas where we have created and grown markets. Here is one example: standards-based software. Yeah, those Internet millionaires. How did they do it? If you put Apple and Warstler in one corner and almost everyone else in the other, they did it by using open standards based on shared intellectual property. (So did Morgan but he did it by being willing to poison the system whereas Apple does it with a closed walled garden.)
A second ingredient is market tier collapse brought about by simpler standards, the 80/20 kind that instead of boiling the ocean and erecting complexity barriers, rip through the complexity and extract the high potential core. When that happens the top tiers that monopolize markets have to adapt their product lines very rapidly or fall behind as the market expands rapidly. Microsoft has been pretty good at that. Apple steals and improves. Who made the first iPods? It wasn’t Apple. Who made the first GUI-enriched operating systems? It wasn’t Apple. Or Microsoft.
The story of Silicon Valley is not the story of some kids in a garage or a few renegade engineers going private. It is the story of billions in spookware investing in research aided by a university dean who insisted that students take that research and start companies. This isn’t precisely a ‘free market’. It is directed evolution.
Had GM and Chrysler taken responsibility as Ford did, they would still be competitive. No free lunch.
Power attracts corruption but smart power defends itself from corruption. It understands the poison and refuses it just as Ford did.
Take the example of the music and film industries. The dumb ones will do as the manager for U2 did and the RIAA did and sue the pants off their customers. They’ll die along with their brands. The smart ones will understand the changes taking place and start negotiations with their customers respectfully. They’ll find a way to keep copyright alive but still share what has little value to them in terms of quality. They’ll manage their hidden costs to the advantage of the market growth. They’ll create new production standards for that end while at the same time creating a vehicle for sharing new contracts with their members while not slamming the door on new talent and ideas. They’ll keep the elite cultivar and cross-breed it with the healthy plants found in the wild, in the garages, and they’ll offer it up on terms equitable to the wild ones so they can form their own families. They’ll be examples one can respect because instead of assaulting them and trying to take away their access, they’ll defend it and look for other ways to monetize. They’ll play smart like Ford, like the A-listers in Britain who told their government that going after the Internet access of private individuals was just wrong. They’ll pick battles with the C-listers who try to poison the environment and the big companies who engineer the poison. They’ll point their guns where the enemies of growth are. They’ll refuse the deals that may enrich them but rob the commons. They’ll quit robbing the future in honor of the present.
And for that, we will respect them and reward them. We’ll recognize the hidden costs. We’ll refuse to take their property as our own as if we were raiding an Irish farm in times of famine.
When the top tiers collapse into the second and third tiers of a market, it is not the end of quality. It is another cycle of growth.
Too Big Too Fail is just wrong. Too greedy too care is just stupid.
“First, how do you incentivize growing markets instead of market share? What mechanism do you use in a supposedly free market?”
First, there are many systems at work here. The banking system has obviously gone completely nuts. I say fat broomsticks up their rears from the brush end first. That H1N1 vaccine scandal is an incredible insult to the nation on top of the criminal investing. No love lost here.
So take a moment to look away from that rage maker to some areas where we have created and grown markets. Here is one example: standards-based software. Yeah, those Internet millionaires. How did they do it? If you put Apple and Warstler in one corner and almost everyone else in the other, they did it by using open standards based on shared intellectual property. (So did Morgan but he did it by being willing to poison the system whereas Apple does it with a closed walled garden.)
A second ingredient is market tier collapse brought about by simpler standards, the 80/20 kind that instead of boiling the ocean and erecting complexity barriers, rip through the complexity and extract the high potential core. When that happens the top tiers that monopolize markets have to adapt their product lines very rapidly or fall behind as the market expands rapidly. Microsoft has been pretty good at that. Apple steals and improves. Who made the first iPods? It wasn’t Apple. Who made the first GUI-enriched operating systems? It wasn’t Apple. Or Microsoft.
The story of Silicon Valley is not the story of some kids in a garage or a few renegade engineers going private. It is the story of billions in spookware investing in research aided by a university dean who insisted that students take that research and start companies. This isn’t precisely a ‘free market’. It is directed evolution.
Had GM and Chrysler taken responsibility as Ford did, they would still be competitive. No free lunch.
Power attracts corruption but smart power defends itself from corruption. It understands the poison and refuses it just as Ford did.
Take the example of the music and film industries. The dumb ones will do as the manager for U2 did and the RIAA did and sue the pants off their customers. They’ll die along with their brands. The smart ones will understand the changes taking place and start negotiations with their customers respectfully. They’ll find a way to keep copyright alive but still share what has little value to them in terms of quality. They’ll manage their hidden costs to the advantage of the market growth. They’ll create new production standards for that end while at the same time creating a vehicle for sharing new contracts with their members while not slamming the door on new talent and ideas. They’ll keep the elite cultivar and cross-breed it with the healthy plants found in the wild, in the garages, and they’ll offer it up on terms equitable to the wild ones so they can form their own families. They’ll be examples one can respect because instead of assaulting them and trying to take away their access, they’ll defend it and look for other ways to monetize. They’ll play smart like Ford, like the A-listers in Britain who told their government that going after the Internet access of private individuals was just wrong. They’ll pick battles with the C-listers who try to poison the environment and the big companies who engineer the poison. They’ll point their guns where the enemies of growth are. They’ll refuse the deals that may enrich them but rob the commons. They’ll quit robbing the future in honor of the present.
And for that, we will respect them and reward them. We’ll recognize the hidden costs. We’ll refuse to take their property as our own as if we were raiding an Irish farm in times of famine.
When the top tiers collapse into the second and third tiers of a market, it is not the end of quality. It is another cycle of growth.
Too Big Too Fail is just wrong. Too greedy too care is just stupid.
“First, how do you incentivize growing markets instead of market share? What mechanism do you use in a supposedly free market?”
First, there are many systems at work here. The banking system has obviously gone completely nuts. I say fat broomsticks up their rears from the brush end first. That H1N1 vaccine scandal is an incredible insult to the nation on top of the criminal investing. No love lost here.
So take a moment to look away from that rage maker to some areas where we have created and grown markets. Here is one example: standards-based software. Yeah, those Internet millionaires. How did they do it? If you put Apple and Warstler in one corner and almost everyone else in the other, they did it by using open standards based on shared intellectual property. (So did Morgan but he did it by being willing to poison the system whereas Apple does it with a closed walled garden.)
A second ingredient is market tier collapse brought about by simpler standards, the 80/20 kind that instead of boiling the ocean and erecting complexity barriers, rip through the complexity and extract the high potential core. When that happens the top tiers that monopolize markets have to adapt their product lines very rapidly or fall behind as the market expands rapidly. Microsoft has been pretty good at that. Apple steals and improves. Who made the first iPods? It wasn’t Apple. Who made the first GUI-enriched operating systems? It wasn’t Apple. Or Microsoft.
The story of Silicon Valley is not the story of some kids in a garage or a few renegade engineers going private. It is the story of billions in spookware investing in research aided by a university dean who insisted that students take that research and start companies. This isn’t precisely a ‘free market’. It is directed evolution.
Had GM and Chrysler taken responsibility as Ford did, they would still be competitive. No free lunch.
Power attracts corruption but smart power defends itself from corruption. It understands the poison and refuses it just as Ford did.
Take the example of the music and film industries. The dumb ones will do as the manager for U2 did and the RIAA did and sue the pants off their customers. They’ll die along with their brands. The smart ones will understand the changes taking place and start negotiations with their customers respectfully. They’ll find a way to keep copyright alive but still share what has little value to them in terms of quality. They’ll manage their hidden costs to the advantage of the market growth. They’ll create new production standards for that end while at the same time creating a vehicle for sharing new contracts with their members while not slamming the door on new talent and ideas. They’ll keep the elite cultivar and cross-breed it with the healthy plants found in the wild, in the garages, and they’ll offer it up on terms equitable to the wild ones so they can form their own families. They’ll be examples one can respect because instead of assaulting them and trying to take away their access, they’ll defend it and look for other ways to monetize. They’ll play smart like Ford, like the A-listers in Britain who told their government that going after the Internet access of private individuals was just wrong. They’ll pick battles with the C-listers who try to poison the environment and the big companies who engineer the poison. They’ll point their guns where the enemies of growth are. They’ll refuse the deals that may enrich them but rob the commons. They’ll quit robbing the future in honor of the present.
And for that, we will respect them and reward them. We’ll recognize the hidden costs. We’ll refuse to take their property as our own as if we were raiding an Irish farm in times of famine.
When the top tiers collapse into the second and third tiers of a market, it is not the end of quality. It is another cycle of growth.
Too Big Too Fail is just wrong. Too greedy too care is just stupid.
The “too greedy to care” being “stupid” algorithm only works if the greedy individuals suffer some kind of consequence that actually matter to them personally. They demonstrably could not care less if the rest of us desiccate and disappear, since They’ve Got Their. The balloonist bankers get their millions or billions and get to ride off into the sunset. That’s not a cycle, it’s a cliff, for the rest of us.
The “too greedy to care” being “stupid” algorithm only works if the greedy individuals suffer some kind of consequence that actually matter to them personally. They demonstrably could not care less if the rest of us desiccate and disappear, since They’ve Got Their. The balloonist bankers get their millions or billions and get to ride off into the sunset. That’s not a cycle, it’s a cliff, for the rest of us.
The “too greedy to care” being “stupid” algorithm only works if the greedy individuals suffer some kind of consequence that actually matter to them personally. They demonstrably could not care less if the rest of us desiccate and disappear, since They’ve Got Their. The balloonist bankers get their millions or billions and get to ride off into the sunset. That’s not a cycle, it’s a cliff, for the rest of us.
I can see why you prefer to stick with that article for your repetitive citations. Harold L. Sirkin, “Mr. Globality” himself, sounds exactly like your kind of guy, in fact you kind of sound exactly like him. Other than some Chamber of Commerce kind of assertions, and noting kind of aslant that maybe a lot of what is being counted as “American” industrial output may be from foreign factories owned by “American multinationals” (and isn’t that phrase itself a sick joke?) and the contribution to the net that “aircraft and missiles” apparently makes, I don’t see that your Sirkin circularity “proves” any such thing about the strength of US industrial output. It certainly discounts any possible notion that as Freud would have had it, the two main things humans need are Arbeit und Liebe, meaningful work and love in their lives.
And I have had plant jobs and know there’s not much joy and virtue in assembly line work and the other miseries that the blandishments of the people who proceded you in touting the virtues of Free Market Capitalism brought to the Industrial Revolution. There’s a reason folks might want to point out your use of straw man arguments — like your claim that anyone who thinks your prescription for the next Golden Age is full of wholes is “guilty” of “Nostalgianomics,” that typical sneering, condescending hogwash label that you might expect to come out the tight asses of the people at the Cato Institute — that veritable sewer outfall of self-serving “wisdom,” wil do anything to cure what ails us. One might more justifiably assert that your “libertarian” prescription for what to do “going forward” is “Jetson-omics.”
I can see why you prefer to stick with that article for your repetitive citations. Harold L. Sirkin, “Mr. Globality” himself, sounds exactly like your kind of guy, in fact you kind of sound exactly like him. Other than some Chamber of Commerce kind of assertions, and noting kind of aslant that maybe a lot of what is being counted as “American” industrial output may be from foreign factories owned by “American multinationals” (and isn’t that phrase itself a sick joke?) and the contribution to the net that “aircraft and missiles” apparently makes, I don’t see that your Sirkin circularity “proves” any such thing about the strength of US industrial output. It certainly discounts any possible notion that as Freud would have had it, the two main things humans need are Arbeit und Liebe, meaningful work and love in their lives.
And I have had plant jobs and know there’s not much joy and virtue in assembly line work and the other miseries that the blandishments of the people who proceded you in touting the virtues of Free Market Capitalism brought to the Industrial Revolution. There’s a reason folks might want to point out your use of straw man arguments — like your claim that anyone who thinks your prescription for the next Golden Age is full of wholes is “guilty” of “Nostalgianomics,” that typical sneering, condescending hogwash label that you might expect to come out the tight asses of the people at the Cato Institute — that veritable sewer outfall of self-serving “wisdom,” wil do anything to cure what ails us. One might more justifiably assert that your “libertarian” prescription for what to do “going forward” is “Jetson-omics.”
I can see why you prefer to stick with that article for your repetitive citations. Harold L. Sirkin, “Mr. Globality” himself, sounds exactly like your kind of guy, in fact you kind of sound exactly like him. Other than some Chamber of Commerce kind of assertions, and noting kind of aslant that maybe a lot of what is being counted as “American” industrial output may be from foreign factories owned by “American multinationals” (and isn’t that phrase itself a sick joke?) and the contribution to the net that “aircraft and missiles” apparently makes, I don’t see that your Sirkin circularity “proves” any such thing about the strength of US industrial output. It certainly discounts any possible notion that as Freud would have had it, the two main things humans need are Arbeit und Liebe, meaningful work and love in their lives.
And I have had plant jobs and know there’s not much joy and virtue in assembly line work and the other miseries that the blandishments of the people who proceded you in touting the virtues of Free Market Capitalism brought to the Industrial Revolution. There’s a reason folks might want to point out your use of straw man arguments — like your claim that anyone who thinks your prescription for the next Golden Age is full of wholes is “guilty” of “Nostalgianomics,” that typical sneering, condescending hogwash label that you might expect to come out the tight asses of the people at the Cato Institute — that veritable sewer outfall of self-serving “wisdom,” wil do anything to cure what ails us. One might more justifiably assert that your “libertarian” prescription for what to do “going forward” is “Jetson-omics.”
What?! They lied? Who lied? The Fed, BLS, Mr. Market or the media assigned to their watch? Maybe they all did. But in their defense, it’s become terribly confusing over the past year with all of the new acronyms, Czars and such.
If this article is correct, care to guess on where the DOW and S&P 500 should be? Hint, nowhere near the stratospheric heights it’s levitated to since Mar.
Here’s a companion article published in Harper’s in 2008 http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082023
It seems this nonsense has been going on for quite a while.
What?! They lied? Who lied? The Fed, BLS, Mr. Market or the media assigned to their watch? Maybe they all did. But in their defense, it’s become terribly confusing over the past year with all of the new acronyms, Czars and such.
If this article is correct, care to guess on where the DOW and S&P 500 should be? Hint, nowhere near the stratospheric heights it’s levitated to since Mar.
Here’s a companion article published in Harper’s in 2008 http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082023
It seems this nonsense has been going on for quite a while.
What?! They lied? Who lied? The Fed, BLS, Mr. Market or the media assigned to their watch? Maybe they all did. But in their defense, it’s become terribly confusing over the past year with all of the new acronyms, Czars and such.
If this article is correct, care to guess on where the DOW and S&P 500 should be? Hint, nowhere near the stratospheric heights it’s levitated to since Mar.
Here’s a companion article published in Harper’s in 2008 http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082023
It seems this nonsense has been going on for quite a while.
It is amazing how fast water wastes a mountain of mud. We can always print more money.
It is amazing how fast water wastes a mountain of mud. We can always print more money.
hopefully my last post on the Korean economy – for those who doubt the value of universal health coverage here is a posting just made by one of my middle-aged English teacher friends here in Korea
“Memo: If you have excruciating chest pains in Korea and think you’re having a heart attack: 1. get co-teacher to write note describing symptoms, 2. go to clinic, 3. get chest x-ray, heart test in less than 1 hour, 4. discover pulled muscle in your ribs, 5. get GOOD meds, 6. take meds 7. feel good, COST: (for Dr., X-ray, EKG and meds) 9,600 KRW, USD: $8.30. Korean health care “ROK’s!”"
hopefully my last post on the Korean economy – for those who doubt the value of universal health coverage here is a posting just made by one of my middle-aged English teacher friends here in Korea
“Memo: If you have excruciating chest pains in Korea and think you’re having a heart attack: 1. get co-teacher to write note describing symptoms, 2. go to clinic, 3. get chest x-ray, heart test in less than 1 hour, 4. discover pulled muscle in your ribs, 5. get GOOD meds, 6. take meds 7. feel good, COST: (for Dr., X-ray, EKG and meds) 9,600 KRW, USD: $8.30. Korean health care “ROK’s!”"
Maybe but you gotta live with people who think you are a dog. A well cared for dog but a dog.
I’ll take my chances here with Blue Cross Blue Shield and a BA that enabled me to become a VP because I worked at it.
Maybe but you gotta live with people who think you are a dog. A well cared for dog but a dog.
I’ll take my chances here with Blue Cross Blue Shield and a BA that enabled me to become a VP because I worked at it.
Are you suggesting that South Korea is a lazy man’s socialist paradise, where hard work never pays off, and advancement based on merit is impossible?
In South Korea, apparently they treat foreigners as pets. That’s why they all work so hard to learn to speak English. Because they see us as dogs.
Are you suggesting that South Korea is a lazy man’s socialist paradise, where hard work never pays off, and advancement based on merit is impossible?
In South Korea, apparently they treat foreigners as pets. That’s why they all work so hard to learn to speak English. Because they see us as dogs.
Are you suggesting that South Korea is a lazy man’s socialist paradise, where hard work never pays off, and advancement based on merit is impossible?
In South Korea, apparently they treat foreigners as pets. That’s why they all work so hard to learn to speak English. Because they see us as dogs.
Sled dogs have the same view except one.
What I am responding to is what she is describing and what I hear from friends who worked in Asia. It’s all second hand, of course, but yes, reports are the racism toward the non-Koreans is very intense. So even if the hand is kind, as discussed here often, it isn’t worth being indentured on a plantation, IMO. Others will have different opinions. It seems to work for Fiona.
What I take away is that universal health care can be of benefit to any industrial society.
Sled dogs have the same view except one.
What I am responding to is what she is describing and what I hear from friends who worked in Asia. It’s all second hand, of course, but yes, reports are the racism toward the non-Koreans is very intense. So even if the hand is kind, as discussed here often, it isn’t worth being indentured on a plantation, IMO. Others will have different opinions. It seems to work for Fiona.
What I take away is that universal health care can be of benefit to any industrial society.
Sled dogs have the same view except one.
What I am responding to is what she is describing and what I hear from friends who worked in Asia. It’s all second hand, of course, but yes, reports are the racism toward the non-Koreans is very intense. So even if the hand is kind, as discussed here often, it isn’t worth being indentured on a plantation, IMO. Others will have different opinions. It seems to work for Fiona.
What I take away is that universal health care can be of benefit to any industrial society.
South Korea is hardly a socialist paradise and the racism that I have read about appears to be prevalent in the larger cities but then I have lived in a great many places in the US and found the worst racists in my life living in Chicago (and that was after ten years in the deep South)- I can only speak from my experience but I have found this to be one of the most generous societies that I have ever lived in – as in any close society, outsiders are subject to speculation and much rumor mongering – yesterday I heard that the local doctor has said that all foreigners have H1N1 which was news to me and the other teachers who aren’t sick
I can’t complain and I’m having the time of my life
South Korea is hardly a socialist paradise and the racism that I have read about appears to be prevalent in the larger cities but then I have lived in a great many places in the US and found the worst racists in my life living in Chicago (and that was after ten years in the deep South)- I can only speak from my experience but I have found this to be one of the most generous societies that I have ever lived in – as in any close society, outsiders are subject to speculation and much rumor mongering – yesterday I heard that the local doctor has said that all foreigners have H1N1 which was news to me and the other teachers who aren’t sick
I can’t complain and I’m having the time of my life
South Korea is hardly a socialist paradise and the racism that I have read about appears to be prevalent in the larger cities but then I have lived in a great many places in the US and found the worst racists in my life living in Chicago (and that was after ten years in the deep South)- I can only speak from my experience but I have found this to be one of the most generous societies that I have ever lived in – as in any close society, outsiders are subject to speculation and much rumor mongering – yesterday I heard that the local doctor has said that all foreigners have H1N1 which was news to me and the other teachers who aren’t sick
I can’t complain and I’m having the time of my life
“I can’t complain and I’m having the time of my life”
That’s all anyone can ask. Peace.
“I can’t complain and I’m having the time of my life”
That’s all anyone can ask. Peace.
“I can’t complain and I’m having the time of my life”
That’s all anyone can ask. Peace.
Oh screw it altogether. It’s not to take heads but to preserve them. The Roosevelts both were ridiculed for this, but they both fed off the past. (so did John Kennedy do daily).
We’re idiots concerning the past. My late
mentor used to warn that this might happen and now bigawd it has done.
Oh screw it altogether. It’s not to take heads but to preserve them. The Roosevelts both were ridiculed for this, but they both fed off the past. (so did John Kennedy do daily).
We’re idiots concerning the past. My late
mentor used to warn that this might happen and now bigawd it has done.
Oh screw it altogether. It’s not to take heads but to preserve them. The Roosevelts both were ridiculed for this, but they both fed off the past. (so did John Kennedy do daily).
We’re idiots concerning the past. My late
mentor used to warn that this might happen and now bigawd it has done.