151–160 of 162 posts
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I see no reason it wouldn't happen in the US in areas where term limits might otherwise be needed.
Have you seen it happen where candidates are vetted by the state and only allow those it blesses? I don't see a parallel. I think you're reaching very very far.
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3 would necessarily raise the bid/ask. If you charge everyone 10 cents to transact, then nobody will act as a market maker at a bid/ask narrower than 20 cents.
And that would be good in two points. People will sell less on short term, because the cost of selling will be higher. So stocks will be held longer, which will diminish volatility even more and improve the situation for small investors. What disadvantage will it have for the 99%? I see none.
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I'm not sure it does need that much liquidity. But, at what point are we not liquid enough? Is hourly liquidity enough? It's a good question, but I'm not sure how you measure what 'enough' is.
It depends on how you draw the boundaries for an 'entity'. A sufficiently large company may have many departments trading in different ways fairly independently. If you are going to tell people, "You can't sell/buy sooner than X seconds after you buy/sell.", then large organizations will have a problem being nimble being hindered by regulations about how soon you can flatten a position. Even brokers like Ameritrade a…
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The OP asks for control of wages and working hours. The plan is to use a simultaneous forced raising of wages and restrictions of working hours so that everyone can have a job. Apart from being unworkable and ridiculous, this is the starting point of a completely planned economy. Hyperbole? Maybe a little, but too many people sleepwalk into agreeing with this type of idea without thinking through the full consequence…
I think the last half century of European history proves that the sub-Hayekian argument implying any increased government intervention necessarily leads to dictatorship is even more intellectually bankrupt than those in favour of a fully planned economy. 35 hour working weeks and high minimum wages are not a radical or untried idea. Arguably excessive regulation of working conditions has contributed to many of Europe…
He went to great pains over his career to point out that he never said that imposing increasing controls over people necessarily leads to dictatorship. His point was that, in order for a centrally planned economy to work, you necessarily had to capture increasing amounts of activity under the control of the government. And that increasing control by government was by no means
It's true that Hayeks original ideas have been characterised by many different people and groups to the point where it is impossible to know what they mean unless you go back and figure them out for yourself. It's also important to know that Hayek wrote his original works while socialism was still a bubbling, living idea in the western world, and not the failed anachronism it is (should) now regarded as.
My point here is that you always have a choice in the way you want to run things. Down one path is increasing amounts of control, and there should be no argument about what lies at the end of that path. Of course it's not inevitable that, once you start down that path, that it's impossible to reverse. Down the other path is not increasing amounts of government control over people.
35 hour weeks are not a radical idea, sure, lots of people have agitated for them for a long time. But the way the thread was written was that everyone was going to be forced to work a 35 hour week. Maybe the OP didn't presume to force people, but if it's not forced, it won't be obeyed and thus will be pointless. Besides that, the entire thread showed a complete lack of understanding of what creates real jobs and wealth, with statements like 'we produce too much'.
If the last half century of European history gives us anything, it's that the welfare state is doomed and that you can't magic up productivity and wages growth by government intervention.
Sure, conjuring up mass murder was probably overdone for this forum, probably a case of being a bit hot headed when I originally posted. But whenever I see outbreaks of this type of thinking among what appear to be young people, I get anxious that they get some history and context into the fact these ideas have all been tried and failed in the past.
Second, that the people at the top have made out like bandits over the past few decades, and that now everyone else must pick up the bill. I have no idea what The Economist could possibly mean by "pick up the bill" in this context. They know as well as anyone that wealth isn't conserved. If my company makes twice as much money next year as this one, I've added to the world's wealth, not subtracted from it.
I think everyone understands that companies are creating wealth. The question is: who is capturing that created wealth? Right now the scales are heavily skewed toward the 1% capturing a lot more than they traditionally did.
I think both The Economist and the Occupy Wall Street protestors are conflating two distinct groups: those who get rich by creating wealth, and those who get rich by diverting the revenues of the state into their own pockets. The latter group consists of special interest groups—and certainly includes virtually the entire banking and finance industry. What most of the protesters seem to misunderstand is that their target shouldn't be capitalism, but rather special interest groups—and the system of government that allows such groups to thrive. Unfortunately, the latter is a problem so big it's hard to grasp, and solutions aimed at the actual source are, to put it charitably, off the political map.
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Greed is the most powerful force in the world. If you tie regulation to money, it will be exploited and corrupted. It also shifts accountability from the individual violators to "the corporation". Instead enforce criminal laws against people. Doing the "right thing" doesn't deserve reward. Doing the "wrong thing" does deserve punishment.
You want to criminalise failure to recycle, or failure to provide a work environment that's unreceptive to disabled persons? How's that going to work? At what point does pollution or energy usage become criminal?
At the point it harms society as a whole.
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Or you could stop all government subsidies to corporations and set up a business tax structure that is heavily favorable to worker-owned cooperatives at the expense of shareholder-owned corporations. Corporations are just machines for extracting productivity from large numbers of people and concentrating the wealth produced by that productivity in the hands of a few. Worker-owned cooperatives do not share that design…
"Worker-owned cooperatives do not share that design flaw. They also have little to no motivation to outsource." You can start a worker-owned cooperative now. Why don't you? You could even make it a non-profit and save on some taxes. What you want to do is make it impossible for corporations as we know them to exist, taking away freedoms. Corporations aren't slave-owners and employees aren't slaves. You have the freed…
Worker owned cooperatives aren't some kind of pie-in-the sky idea tat has never been tried. they make up a large portion of the employment base in Emiglia-Romagna, the Basque territory, Switzerland, and Wisconsin, along with lots of other places. Cooperatives employ 100 million people around the world according to the ILO, so it's not some kind of pipe dream that you would like to make it out to be.
I never said that I wanted to make corporations illegal, just stop using tax dollars to subsidize them, while taxing them in order to balance out the extreme wealth redistribution that they engage in. It seems eminently sensible for a country that likes to call itself a democracy to promote (or at least set up a favorable regulatory scheme for) economic democracy rather than the techno-feudalism that corporate capitalism resembles when capital becomes too concentrated.
re:bitcoin: what?
>Why should someone that takes absolutely no risk get anything close to the owners of a company?
Good question. Why should a rich investor that spends a tiny fraction of his money own the product of the founders and workers who actually create the value? Why should capital own labor, rather than the other way around?
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"Worker-owned cooperatives do not share that design flaw. They also have little to no motivation to outsource." You can start a worker-owned cooperative now. Why don't you? You could even make it a non-profit and save on some taxes. What you want to do is make it impossible for corporations as we know them to exist, taking away freedoms. Corporations aren't slave-owners and employees aren't slaves. You have the freed…
You seem to not know anything about this, so I'll cut you some slack even though your wording is slightly offensive. Worker owned cooperatives aren't some kind of pie-in-the sky idea tat has never been tried. they make up a large portion of the employment base in Emiglia-Romagna, the Basque territory, Switzerland, and Wisconsin, along with lots of other places. Cooperatives employ 100 million people around the world…
If these really worked and made sense, we would have more worker owned cooperatives as opposed to corporations. I haven't heard much about them because they are in the slim minority..and there's probably a reason for this.
"I never said that I wanted to make corporations illegal, just stop using tax dollars to subsidize them, while taxing them in order to balance out the extreme wealth redistribution that they engage in."
Which translates to: taxing the hell out of them so it's no longer profitable to start one. I'm cool with worker owned cooperatives as long as they are taxed exactly the same as corporations.
"It seems eminently sensible for a country that likes to call itself a democracy to promote (or at least set up a favorable regulatory scheme for) economic democracy rather than the techno-feudalism that corporate capitalism resembles when capital becomes too concentrated."
It is a democracy: you can start your own company at any time. You want to prevent someone from having too much money, even if they've earned it honestly. I don't want anyone to limit my success. When this happens, I will either leave the country or become a criminal.
"Good question. Why should a rich investor that spends a tiny fraction of his money own the product of the founders and workers who actually create the value? Why should capital own labor, rather than the other way around?"
Because the rich investor is risking their money. The founders can bootstrap. Many companies do. I personally wouldn't give up that much control to anyone. Most workers don't understand what it takes to run a company. It's more than just collecting a larger paycheck..
"re:bitcoin: what?"
Never heard of bitcoin?
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You seem to not know anything about this, so I'll cut you some slack even though your wording is slightly offensive. Worker owned cooperatives aren't some kind of pie-in-the sky idea tat has never been tried. they make up a large portion of the employment base in Emiglia-Romagna, the Basque territory, Switzerland, and Wisconsin, along with lots of other places. Cooperatives employ 100 million people around the world…
"You seem to not know anything about this, so I'll cut you some slack even though your wording is slightly offensive." If these really worked and made sense, we would have more worker owned cooperatives as opposed to corporations. I haven't heard much about them because they are in the slim minority..and there's probably a reason for this. "I never said that I wanted to make corporations illegal, just stop using tax…
Wow. Circular reasoning much? Try doing some research - you might find that there are thing in the world you didn't already know.