Hobbes' Choice wrote:
You are a funny guy. You are positing libertarian free market, with low government and minimum taxation. You are best describing the Feudal system.
Feudal System: In a feudal system, a peasant or worker known as a vassal received a piece of land in return for serving a lord or king, especially during times of war. Vassals were expected to perform various duties in exchange for their own fiefs, or areas of land. The term feudal system wasn't used until 1776, and it came from the Latin word feudum, or "feudal estate."
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/feudal%20system
Being what is basically a slave to a Lord is almost the antithesis of free enterprise. In a free enterprise system the individual uses their own labor and resources to achieve their needs and desires.
small government means that some mother fucker is going to get control.
Control of what, exactly? if the government is small then there won't be much to gain control of will there?
In the feudal period it was the RC church how establish the power relations between nations and their justified power over the people. Government was effectively privatised and in the hands of the aristocracy.
I don't think you've been very clear here or at least I don't feel confident enough to call any of my interpretations of these sentences accurate. Are you saying that the RC Church used their influence over Monarchies and aristocracies to shape world politics? If so, I would agree. But this is what happens when large amounts of power are concentrated at high levels. This is what I'm arguing
AGAINST.
BY 1660 proto-communists, communitarians, Levellers and other protestant groups were able to brake the power of the Monarch who guaranteed free market for the Barons. When the head of Charles I was severed from his head the power of Rome and it connection with the rights over the people was also severed.
?
What the fuck do you think happened about "1700"? You are spilling ink but do not really know what the hell you are talking about. When Cromwell took control this was the first major step to democratised Britain. It was the rise of the left that made that possible.
Free markets and more democratic governments were at that time an idea of liberals. Since then liberals, like you, have gone back to arguing for the return of their enslavement to the state.
By the time we get to 1810 is when the real cause of economics being able to sustain larger populations: the Industrial Revolution. Quakers, Friendly Societies, and Unions were instrumental in recognising that sharing the fruits of the machine made goods was a necessary part of creating the demand that made the goods capable of being purchased.
Replace
sharing with
selling and you have your free enterprise system.
Employers such as Cadbury's who built their workers villages, and provided them with education and housing along with good wages were more successful as they avoided employing impoverished workers.
And Henry Ford did similar things as I mentioned previously.
Workers that were dependent on free market of wages, fed up with poverty gathered into Unions and Friendly Societies. This eventually led to the formation of the Labour party.
So you might say the free market, where employers can pay a little as they want will eventually lead to unionisation. The reason this cannot happen in many countries is that people who try tend to disappear..
So you just stated that unionization is a consequence of free market and companies provide more services to employees to increase their standard of living and efficiency.
The free market brought the world's economy to its fucking knees.
Government intervention saved the world's economy by initiating a public works economy without which the US would have starved. And exactly like in 2008 when the de-regulated market once again risked the livelihood of millions across the western world the government was force to bail out you muthas.
The 2008 housing market was created by government meddling in the market. By pushing Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac to lend more money for loans this dropped the interest rate so low that banks were encouraged to lend money to those who they knew could not pay for it. But these mortgages were consolidated into debt packages and sold to others. The amount of money that began chasing houses drove the price up and led to more houses being built. That in turn further secured the idea that houses would only ever gain value meaning that the debt packages continued to be sold en mass. It was only when homeowners started defaulting that the whole system came crashing down. Prices righted themselves and the biggest players were going to be bankrupt but your government bailout saved them. All the big banks who pushed, bought and sold these mortgages and securities were saved on taxpayer dime while the taxpayers themselves were left high and dry with their thumbs up their asses. The bailout didn't save the economy, it saved the big businesses who brought the economy down. But none of that would have ever happened if the Federal Government hadn't been pushing cheap credit in the housing market in the first place. I personally know many people who lost a large chunk of their life savings from that and they never got a bailout. I know people who declared bankruptcy and they never got a bailout. But Goldman Sachs and AEG are doing better than ever and that's all that matters, isn't it?
The trouble is that as the rich control the institutions of the state, this is going to happen all over again, and soon. Criminals need to be punished NOT rewarded. many of the same people who were in control in 2008 are now in key positions on Obama's administration, and the rest have too much money to bother to work for a living. You can find the architects of the 2008 crash living it up tax free in Monaco and Bermuda. So much for the freeing up of the financial markets.
If we limit the control government has then we limit the control of the rich over the rest of us. I don't see how this isn't you taking my side in this...
BigWhit wrote:No one can say that the standard of living for those poor in this generation is not far better than the poor of their grandparent's generation.
not only are you contradicting yourself but you are guilty of
post hoc ergo propter hoc..
You say the government began interfering in the 1930s (the time we were coming out of the depression), then you are trying to pretend that during the period following that living standards improved. DO you really want to make my argument?
Increases in living standards in this time have come from the free market despite or in spite of government intervention. Tell me how many cars, T.V.s, computers, or any other thing the government made or invented? The only government agency that has any claim to any inventions in the US is NASA and they have one of the lowest operating budgets of all of them
I would not take credit for improved living standards wholly on the fact that from 1930-1980 we enjoyed a redistributive system, with progressive taxation, welfare and free education. But hell you can't ignore the facts. That 50 years saw the extension of health provision, free education, building of public roads, libraries, publicly funded schools, etc.
The redistribution here in the US was very light between 1930 and 1980 and had little impact. The expansion of public roads, schools, libraries, and health care are all results of demand and the expansion of the economy, not redistribution. There was much less demand for roads before the automobile. There was less demand for schools when most kids only went through the 7th or 8th grade. There was less health care because there was less health care tools and knowledge. There were less libraries because there were less who were literate.
What is also important here is the massive changes and progress in technologies from transport to health to home appliances. All made possible due to a government dedicated to the improvement of its people (LOL, wat?), public provision of education water, sewerage, street lighting, too many things to list. All of which would NEVER be provided by a free market, small government economy.
All those things are paid for by government but most of them are provided by private companies on government contracts, at least here in the US. The only difference between what we have now is that the taxpayer would pay the provider directly, instead of paying the state to pay the provider. And all too often in the US people have fixed their own roads by themselves because the state refuses to do so. In my home town there is an intersection which has been mired in potholes for YEARS and despite being in the middle of one of the economic centers of the city it has still not been fixed at all and only continues to get worse.
The apogee of the technological revolution which culminated in Man on the MOON, by PUBLIC funding.
If that was the apogee of the technical revolution then I don't know what you're using to access this forum because my cell phone has more computing power than all of the electronics used to get man to the moon combined. The advances that have been made in just the last 10 years have eclipsed the advances of the previous 75.
A public sector protected by unionised wage demands that have provided workers with a living wage has provided the necessary competition for labour that has maintained the low end economy.
This means that free marketeers to get the best workers have had to match the living wage for jobs they create. The result is that the bottom end of the economy - THE PEOPLE THAT ACTUALLY BUY THE FUCKING GOODS - have enough to live on.
Without that, the downwards pressure on wages simply leads to poverty, and low demand.
This is what you seem to forget.
This is you:
Every one hates tax.
Gummints tax, so Ah hate gummit.
The low end of the economy, like illegal aliens and teenagers, especially teenage black males in America, see the highest rate of unemployment of any demographic because things like the minimum wage price them out of the market. If you have to pay $10/hr to someone for it to be economically feasible to employ them they must produce more than $10/hr. The people with the least skills being those from impoverished nations and the young produce less than the rest of the labor market and are harder to employ. This is why illegal immigration is so huge in the US. If they were legal they'd be priced out of the market because minimum wage laws would apply to them. Those who employ them would be forced to charge higher prices or produce less or both. And when you're producing food, less production and higher prices mean someone isn't going to eat.
Low wages mean that those businesses can lower the cost of their products and more people can buy that product. Which in turn means that more people can enjoy that product and enjoy a higher standard of living. Once, only the rich could buy cars but today you'd have to be truly piss poor to not afford one. That is the result of car companies trying to make better and cheaper products so they can sell more of them. The more they sell the more they can afford to make, which means the more people they can afford to employ, and the more people who can afford the product.
Go back even two hundred and fifty years and the "dirt poor" are literally living on dirt floors. There are pople today who are even making wooden homes for the homeless in a major city (LA I think it was) that are even portable.
Reason for change: technological revolution and a good public sector provideding a population adequately educated and healthy to run the machines, and paid well enough to buy the good.,
We have far more than enough resources to feed everyone on the planet.
A free market ensures that the few get that whilst the rest starve.
See above...
1) Here you moan about credit and pretend that this will disappear with a free market. It won't.
In a free market people are capable of making as much credit as they want; that's why they call it "FREE" numb nuts!
In an economy where one must have money to loan before you can loan it you don't have free credit. You have free credit in a system where an institution like the Federal Reserve can print money and hand it out at no cost. It's called a "free" market because you're free to do what you want with your time and money.
2) A stable market??? Why then are you advocating a free market? A free market is not stable, by definition.
No market will ever be perfectly stable because it involves humans who are nothing if not imperfect. Some investments will fail, inevitably. There will be periods of boom and bust but a monetary system built upon savings will at least have the reserve capital needed to smooth out the busts.
SAVINGS= CREDIT.
one man's savings is another man's credit. You simply do not understand what money is.
You view of money is naive, and you have adopted the money myth provided by the establishment that want to rip you off.
I can only suggest you get yourself a MMT primer so as best to understand the nature of money and its relationship to wealth.
Money is a facilitator of trade. Nothing more. And yes, one man's savings is another man's credit, even in this system. The difference is that most credit comes from printed fiat money which comes at the cost of inflation. Money has been around for a very long time and it isn't that hard to understand...
This is exactly the opposite thing you want to have a healthy economy.
There is a good reason why interests rates are so low.
Do you have any knowledge why that is?
Let's see if we can get on the same page. Tell me how you think interest rates are so low ATM?
Like I've stated before in this response, interest rates are so low because the central bank is printing money at full speed and lending it at 0% interest. It's economics, not rocket science.
