181–190 of 194 posts
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No, it is not. Chile had a socialist president 40 years ago. He was overthrown by a military coup in Sep 11, 1973 (note the date) Now days, Chile is one of South America's most stable and prosperous nations.
They have a left-leaning woman for a president, though.
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Rational actors are more of an assumption then a requirement. Used in conjunction with carefully defining terms, this a powerful way that economists hermetically seal their theories. rational = utility maximising utility defined by consumer choice Basically, they pay anything because it's worth anything.
All this really means is that preferences are transitive. I.e., if I prefer a puppy to a wii, and prefer a wii to cabbage, then I prefer a puppy to cabbage. That's not an unreasonable assumption. It's an easy topology exercise to prove that if preferences are transitive, then a utility function exists (I think you may also need to assume a countable number of goods/services).
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Hmm I've thought about this a bit, and it strikes me that while yes, it does seem to make sense that we should have medicine for everyone, we should also have an area where there is pressure to perform. Essentially what I am positing is that the US should remain a nonsocialist area so that we innovate and provide the necessary advances because eventually they will filter down and become affordable by the average pers…
> Essentially, this is a highly tangled problem and a simple solution won't do. Bingo. There's a nice discussion of just a bit of the economics involved in health care in "The Undercover Economist". It's really a very complicated subject because it is not your typical market for something like shoes, to use someone else's example. Pure capitalist systems will leave at least a few unfortunate individuals to die or suf…
You guys keep thinking about this as if the economy existed in a world where buzzwords & their associated connotations are absolute. You are not choosing between US 2008 & 1963 Soviet Russia. The most radical model likely to ever be proposed in the US is something like the UK's.
The system tries to provide internal pressure to reform (just like big companies do). There will probably be a decline in mean medical care from an economic utility standpoint (to the extent that term has any meaning - I think very little) There will be a dramatic improvement in health to the bottom 25% -30% resulting in huge gains to life expectancy & similar indicators.
As a bonus that the fear Americans have of being left without health cover will lift.
Capitalist evangelists of various sorts are always quick to point out there are no good example of command economies performing well. That's fair. But there are plenty of examples of 'socialist' health care systems that work. They perform well on any meaningful scales at a cost lower then the US's. From Cuba (an outlier but a very interesting one) to the UK to Japan. Pick one.
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Quacking like a duck doesn't make you a duck. God, that was too easy.
Wow. Why did this get downmodded? Just curious. It's 100 percent apropos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test ...used the phrase when he accused the Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán government of being Communist. Patterson explained his reasoning as follows: Suppose you see a bird walking around in a farm yard. This bird has no label that says 'duck'. But the bird certainly looks like a duck. Also, he goes to the pond and you…
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I am happy to report that one element of Obama's tax plan ( http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/taxes/Factsheet_Tax_Plan_FINA... ) is to "eliminate capital-gains taxes for entrepreneurs and investors in small business".
How will eliminating capital gains taxes help me as a small business owner. Lower corporate income tax rates would be intuitive, but lower capital gains taxes is kind of a head-scratcher. Should I invest in stocks via my business?
What harm is there in letting a company that made bad decisions go bankrupt? I don't see how it's pragmatic to pass this burden on to tax payers and the general public. I admit that I am idealistic about such things. I don't see how government is going to solve any of these problems. The government will lessen the pain but that same behavior will also slow any rebound and future growth. It seems naive and narrow mind…
It seems naive and narrow minded to think another company won't step in if there is a continued need for the services that AIG provide{d|s}. But it's unrealistic to think that the vacuum could be filled fast enough to prevent a wave of failures among AIG's clients (banks who bought credit insurance to get around regulatory limits). There's more detail here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2008/09…
What harm is there in letting a company that made bad decisions go bankrupt? I don't see how it's pragmatic to pass this burden on to tax payers and the general public. I admit that I am idealistic about such things. I don't see how government is going to solve any of these problems. The government will lessen the pain but that same behavior will also slow any rebound and future growth. It seems naive and narrow mind…
So far the blood on the streets is almost exclusively from the financial sector, ie. investment banks, hedge funds, etc. They may affect your pension funds but it's mainly institutional investors and others with big stakes in these companies that'll pick up the tab. However AIG obviously isn't an investment bank. A failure of AIG would affect people outside of the financial sector who have purchased AIG insurance pro…
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where does the treasury and fed get the money? THEY PRINT IT a 1982 law lets treasury notes be redeemed with CREATED accounts, as in one of the partner banks of the reserve simply creates a new account by punching in the digits, and they assign it to you once again, this is law since 1982 this is why US treasuries have 100% certainty inside the USA while the US dollar still exists
Wouldn't that increase inflation.
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It seems naive and narrow minded to think another company won't step in if there is a continued need for the services that AIG provide{d|s}. But it's unrealistic to think that the vacuum could be filled fast enough to prevent a wave of failures among AIG's clients (banks who bought credit insurance to get around regulatory limits). There's more detail here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2008/09…
So is this a reasonable system for insuring against the collapse of insurers (and the world's financial infrastructure)? Government rescues? How about limiting the size of companies that are not allowed to die for damage control? Or limiting their ability to become companies not allowed to die?
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So is this a reasonable system for insuring against the collapse of insurers (and the world's financial infrastructure)? Government rescues? How about limiting the size of companies that are not allowed to die for damage control? Or limiting their ability to become companies not allowed to die?
It's not the absolute size that's a problem but rather the degree of leverage. If you've borrowed $30 for every $1 in capital (like Bear Sterns did) and your assets all drop by about 3% then you immediately become insolvent. They thought they could prevent that from happening through clever hedging and diversification but it didn't work. A possible solution might be to set hard legal limits on size versus leverage fo…