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Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

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Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#281

Post by tsotha »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #137
tsotha wrote: post #113

Capitalism works just fine. The problem is throughout Europe and the US we have this weird kind of corporate socialism where governments are more and more involved in their respective economies and then blame "capitalism" when things don't work out. You can't call it capitalism if companies aren't allowed to fail. And banks are so heavily regulated they're de facto agents of the state. The banking crisis isn't an ind…

The banking crisis was a result of de-regulation, caused by neo-liberal government agendas. After the great depression, the banking sector was stable and only became problematic again when the laws that were introduced after the great depression started to be dismantled. Are you saying thats not what happened?

Yes, I'm saying that's not what happened. The banks were forced by the government to make bad loans, to such an extent the government had to buy up 90% of the paper.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#282

Post by PhasmaFelis »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #94
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from? Well, just for starters, they're suffering from entirely treatable diseases and injuries because they don't have health insurance, or don't have non-shitty health insurance. Quite a few of of them are suffering from childhood malnutrition, leading to lifelong cognitive and developmental defects. On the lowest rung, they are suffering from homelessne…

Well, just for starters, they're suffering from entirely treatable diseases and injuries... If that were the case, the increasing access to health care should make them healthier. It didn't. http://www.nber.org/oregon/ Do you have evidence for childhood malnutrition? Once you come up with a definition of "rotting, roach-infested", feel free to check what fraction of poor Americans actually fit that definition. See ta…

> If that were the case, the increasing access to health care should make them healthier. It didn't. http://www.nber.org/oregon/*

What evidence for your position do you see in that article? It seems to say the opposite of what you think it does. I'm looking at "Medicaid increased the probability that people report themselves in good to excellent health (compared with fair or poor health) by 25 percent" and "Medicaid reduced observed rates of depression by 30%."

> Do you have evidence for childhood malnutrition?*

The WHO doesn't seem to have much data on actual malnutrition rates for many nations, including the US, after a few minutes of searching, but "Some 13 million American children live in homes with limited access to food, and an average one in three children receive food assistance via the food stamp program..." (http://www.livestrong.com/article/487412-malnutrition-in-ame...)

It is absolutely true that poverty in India is deeper and more widespread than in America. That doesn't remotely mean that American poverty isn't real or that people aren't suffering. By your logic, a man with a broken finger isn't allowed to complain if a man with a broken leg exists, and that man isn't allowed to complain if a paraplegic exists, and so on down the oneupsmanship scale of wretchedness. Where, exactly, is the cutoff point beyond which we're no longer allowed to care about human misery?

If you want to argue that poverty in India and worldwide is a huge problem, and that the Western world could and should do more to address it, I'll agree heartily. But what you said was that poverty in America is not a problem and that poor Americans aren't suffering, and that's bullshit.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#283

Post by DanBC »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #202
ap22213 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we could always do an experiment to see if you're right. Let's assume that you aren't able to use any existing education or connections, you start off with significant debt, and you are located in an area with high unemployment. If you are able to be back in your apartment in a month, I'll eat this computer. Edit: If we threw the idea up on kickstarter, I'm sure that there would be more than enough support to p…

Move. Get a job, any job. Don't spend any (much) money. Work to get a better job. And what's with the debt-but-no-education? How was that supposed to work? One or the other.

I'd be interested to see how quickly you could get a minimum wage job.

I'm not sure there's an ethical way to set up the experiment where you apply for a bunch of minimum wage jobs to see which ones you can get; and I doubt there's a way you can spend the time to do it.

But I'd be really interested to know if you could get a minimum wage job within a fortnight.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#284

Post by jbooth »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #202
ap22213 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we could always do an experiment to see if you're right. Let's assume that you aren't able to use any existing education or connections, you start off with significant debt, and you are located in an area with high unemployment. If you are able to be back in your apartment in a month, I'll eat this computer. Edit: If we threw the idea up on kickstarter, I'm sure that there would be more than enough support to p…

Move. Get a job, any job. Don't spend any (much) money. Work to get a better job. And what's with the debt-but-no-education? How was that supposed to work? One or the other.

"And what's with the debt-but-no-education? How was that supposed to work? One or the other."

It's not very often in life that the phrase "check your privilege" is appropriate or reasonable, but right here, right now, that's picture perfect.

I mean, you can't think of a single possible way that one could get into debt besides ivy-league loans, and you're saying that you understand what poor people have to deal with?

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#285

Post by tsotha »

collyw wrote: post #147
tsotha wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poverty is a relative thing. Very few actual poor people would recognize American "poverty" as such.

I disagree. I saw a definition of being rich as "never having to worry about money". Now take being poor as "always having to worry about money". Doesn't matter if you have got a widescreen TV. If you sell it off you may eat better for a few weeks, but after that you will still be in the same situation, in constant worry about money.

But American poor people "always have to worry about money" because of the way they spend it. By that definition no matter how much money Uncle Sugar gave them every month they'd still be poor.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#286

Post by dllthomas »

allthatglitters wrote: post #259
jasonwocky wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capitalism still works fine, because it's not a designed system, it's not a central plan. What logic is this? "Anything which is not a designed system works fine"?

F.A. Hayek wrote in The Fatal Conceit, “the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

We need to be careful that this differs materially from "the curious task of auronautics engineers" circa 1900. One place it surely does differ is that we've quite a few more people on this plane of the economy than on any test flight. We should, indeed, be correspondingly more careful.

That said, "be careful" and "do nothing" are two very different propositions. Being careful may motivate doing nothing, or it may motivate doing quite a lot. While I don't think it was present in Hayek's reasoning, this frequently spills over into something that looks like "We're dealing with people's lives/rights here! How can you be so crass as to talk about numbers and make decisions?" When things are difficult and important, that's precisely the time you need to be most careful in your reasoning.

Abstaining is still an action. Proposals for reduced or constrained intervention are still proposals, and only deserve reduced scrutiny to the degree that they are supported by "we've done that before and it worked out well".

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#287

Post by atmosx »

collyw wrote: post #149
brc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It most certainly is not a zero sum game. Any reading or thinking that led you to that conclusion is wrong.

Like the politicians, another believer in the theory that shuffling money about "creates wealth". People working, manufacturing and creating things are what creates wealth. Not a magic money tree.

Totally agree.

An over-valued financial asset is thin air and creates nothing only the illusion of money. Add to that the ability of our current banking system to give Y-times more debit then their deposit (where Y -> OO+ ) one the one hand, on the other hand there are people producing items of value that we can actually use.

The rate at which over-valued asset are sold and re-priced + banks giving away loans that they will never get back and didn't had the money to support them anyway is orders of MAGNUTUDE bigger than the primary sector and secondary sector can produce.

There's also the problem of automation of the mainly the primary sector which makes things even worst. Now we have to create virtual scarcity in order to maintain this totally insane system because, let's face ... With today's technology 1 country could produce enough wheat for 5 planets.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#288

Post by msandford »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #279
msandford wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, only the people making up to the amount of the basic income would be willing to quit their jobs- anyone making more than needed to survive would certainly continue wanting to maximize their earnings You've made two assumptions here: 1. People are ENTIRELY rational (they're not) 2. No black market exists If you could guarantee that those conditions could be met, I would be much more willing to engage in the r…

Are US salaries anything near a big part of the economy? I thought the 99% controlled most of the money. Its unlikely that fiddling around with salaries (even minting money to pay a basic income) will affect the value of money, if we're only talking about 1% (or less) of the money.

Your question is really confused. The top 1% hold a lot of wealth but not all that much purchasing power. Everyone else has relatively speaking a lot of purchasing power even if the wealth is less.

In other words, there is one guy with $1mm in the bank and 99 people that make $50k per year. Which is more important to you if you make and sell stuff?

The guy with $1mm in the bank could theoretically buy $1mm worth of your stuff but after that he'd be out of money. The 99 people who make $50k a year collectively could buy just under $5mm of stuff EVERY YEAR. So while the guy with $1mm has more power from any one instant to another, everyone else has a lot more power over any longer time-scale.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#289

Post by JoeAltmaier »

msandford wrote: post #288
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are US salaries anything near a big part of the economy? I thought the 99% controlled most of the money. Its unlikely that fiddling around with salaries (even minting money to pay a basic income) will affect the value of money, if we're only talking about 1% (or less) of the money.

Your question is really confused. The top 1% hold a lot of wealth but not all that much purchasing power. Everyone else has relatively speaking a lot of purchasing power even if the wealth is less. In other words, there is one guy with $1mm in the bank and 99 people that make $50k per year. Which is more important to you if you make and sell stuff? The guy with $1mm in the bank could theoretically buy $1mm worth of y…

Not about purchasing power. About the value of money. That's not gonna change by fooling with 1% of the availability.

The reason so many are unemployed, after all, is that it takes fewer people to sustain a given 'standard of living', right? So now, with our free market, those unemployed drop into poverty since their bank account of imaginary points goes to zero.

Put points back into those bank accounts, and what happens? Those small tallys are not going to affect what the big folks are doing with all those trillions.

Re: Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

#290

Post by dllthomas »

allthatglitters wrote: post #254
badname wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of going on but the point is to single out symptoms from root causes. Otherwise we will wallow trying to deal with symptoms forever. Dunno if anyone has yet mentioned one of the basic contradictions inherent in capitalism which could very well be at the root of what we experience. Means of production are private (factories, etc) and the owners as almost all players in capitalism take care to maximize…

>Means of production are private (factories, etc) and the owners as almost all players in capitalism take care to maximize _their_ profit and not society's well being. No one forces you to purchase what's "produced". If you purchased a Windows computer - and so helped Mr. Gate's well being - that was your choice! The list of examples is long. As to "Windows" - whether society is better off ...

Though for a time, because of crapware subsidies, often computers with Windows installed would be cheaper than the identical computer without it. I think this is no longer the case but TBH I haven't actually checked in a while. In that case, "forcing" is probably too strong a word, but I'm being asked to pay if I want to avoid helping Mr. Gate's net worth (I think his well-being was plenty taken care of before I started making any purchasing decisions). I'm not sure to the degree this changes any of the reasoning above, but it was at least a little strange.
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