81–85 of 85 posts
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"What has DARPA done for me lately?" How about the internet? If that's too last-century for you, you can look forward to the benefits of DARPA funding the development of the basic tech and Open Source software that's driving the rapid development of robots right now.
Easy tiger. The point was not all military spending is a waste.
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It's debatable how much of this we can honestly attribute to the military-- Leó Szilárd and Enrico Fermi patented the idea of a nuclear reactor in 1933. The military didn't invent it. Christian Hülsmeyer was a German inventor and entrepreneur. He was the first to use radio waves to detect "the presence of distant metallic objects"; he got a patent for his "Telemobiloscope" in 1904. The military didn't invent it. The…
Without funding these projects would not have happened, and the inventions would have died. Or at the very least would only have happened much, much slower. An example of this is that however one designs a working fusion reactior, one thing you can be near sure of : the design is in the US patent database (and publicly accessible). Yes, really. Of course, most of them are not getting built (the US is the only country…
Not all economic growth is good growth. There's bad growth too. Like anything else, war has costs:
(1) Price tag. For example, "The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting," quoted from The Washington Post (March 28, 2013): http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-...
(2) Harms/damages. For example, in the Afghan and Iraq wars, we have 6,600 dead Americans. Of the 1.6M veterans of these wars, 670,000 have been awarded disability, and another 100,000 are pending. Source: McClatchy DC (March 14, 2013): http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/14/185880/millions-went-t...
Harms inflicted on US troops include: amputations, traumatic brain injuries, mental illness, suicide, rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment.
Harms inflicted on Iraq include: 150,000 to 400,000 dead, 600,000 orphans living in the streets, 1.3 million internally displaced, 1 million displaced to Syria, 100,000 imprisoned and tortured with no due process, 25% without clean water, 30% unemployment, etc., etc.
(3) Opportunity costs: I think President Dwight D. Eisenhower said it best in 1953--
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
"It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
"It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
"It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
"We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
"We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
"This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
"This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
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I'd hardly call the Fed's response to the current crisis a success-- The U6 unemployment rate for the US is currently 12.6%; when we add back housing, healthcare, food, fuel, and education into the inflation statistics, its been running at 8-9%; and the Income Gini coefficient in the US is about 0.477. Meanwhile, the TBTF banks are even bigger, and the Fed's own balance sheet is a disaster waiting to happen.
Yes - you're right, it isn't a pretty picture. That being said, can you imagine the outcome of letting major institutions fail? It is likely things would be much worse. Otherwise healthy institutions may have been brought down in the process.
(1) Steve Keen suggested a debt Jubilee: "monetary injections by the Federal Reserve not into the reserve accounts of banks, but into the bank accounts of the public--but on condition that its first function must be to pay debts down. This would reduce debt directly, but not advantage debtors over savers, and would reduce the profitability of the financial sector while not affecting its solvency" quoted from http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/07/22/the-crisis-in-...
(2) Mortgage assistance: put a moratorium on foreclosures; freeze rate hikes in adjustable rate mortgages; help homeowners refinance their mortgages; or replace home borrowing with renting.
(3) Ron Paul proposed we abolish the Fed. While the Fed's profits belong to the federal government, the Fed itself is owned by the nationally chartered banks. Therefore, it's power to create money is used to benefit the banks, not the government or "we the people." Take that power away from the banks and put it back in the federal government, where the US Constitution says it belongs. This has many immediate advantages. Here three: (i) The federal government can tear-up the $1.6T of debt on the books of the Fed. (ii) The federal government no longer needs to borrow money. (iii) Eliminate the asset bubbles created by the Fed's artificially low interest rates and quantitative easing. See http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/14-reasons-why-w...
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Can you elaborate on this? I'm not seeing it. If you have someone willing to provide a service, and someone else willing to buy the service that is offered, how is this a problem? If the service provider doesn't provide the service that was agreed upon, the parties work to find a remedy, perhaps by going to court, or arbitration, etc. Are you including more than the buyer and the seller in your analysis?
I think you are presenting a pristine idealization of a free market that doesn't exist in the world.
Yes, the government forces its way into every deal it can, and yes, this is something most people see as a good thing.
I don't still don't see what's parasitical about the original comment, however. Can you speak to that?
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The prices of things are not what they are worth, but what the market will bear. The 30 year mortgage allows a rich man to outbid you on the home that you want to buy to live in, a property that he has no personal interest in, so that you can pay interest on the money you only had to borrow so that it could not be loaned to someone else, such that they could afford to pay more than you. That money pumped into the mar…
OK, so loans taken for purposes of speculation on scarce goods are a Bad Thing. But loans taken to build up real infrastructure and support innovation still seem to be a very valuable service that the financial industry provides.
So what is to be done? The only plan likely to work even a little bit would be to establish a government bureau of capital and infrastructure investment, such that if the financial industry vanished overnight, the small businesses engine would not putter out. But such an agency would be an obvious target for lobbying, regulatory capture, and personnel rotation to and from the financial industry.
They have us over a barrel, and they know it.
If lending were abolished entirely, people who would otherwise lend would be forced to buy shares, with all the associated risks of ownership.