New Guy

[Dalek Prime]

I knew very little about it until I'd seen you refer to it a few times and so I did a bit of background reading on the subject. After doing that I'm confident that I now know even less about it.

It's appreciated that you at least try, Leo. I can't ask for more. And who knows; perhaps I am barkers, and unable to see this. As someone once said to me about mental illness, we, ourselves, are usually the last to recognize it. In which case, I've still done a service to posterity through my belief in antinatalism by not passing those genes on. Win-win, I say.

Camus believed that, in an absurd world ie. an inescapable situation, that ending one's life was the only philosophical question worth considering. I, on the other hand, believe that not perpetuating and condemning others to absurdity is the only question worth considering. And having come to that conclusion for myself, all other philosophical questions have become interesting, but inconsequential, backwaters.

Probably why I spend an inordinate amount of time here posting jokes ie. appreciating the absurdity while I can. Because frankly, I see no point in moping and getting down about it.

[BigWhit]

Oh, I'm not bitching about anything. I'm here to have a conversation not to practice thread necromancy.

And I suppose you wouldn't read any deceased philosophers, because that would be book necromancy, right? That makes so much sense.

My favorite political philosophers at the moment are Aristotle, Machiavelli, and John Stewart Mill although that list will likely grow as I continue to read.

Being criticized by somone for not softing through years worth of dead threads by someone who didn't even read the OP of this one.

By thread necromancy I was referring to posting to a thread that went inactive months or years ago.

[BigWhit]

Trickle-down economics is bullshit and anyone telling you otherwise is either a moron or blowing smoke up your ass. Wealth naturally concentrates at the top. I'm fine with that, but injecting money into that demogeaphic for the purposes of economic stimulus is counter productive. The wealthy only benefit a society when they have to use that wealth to build more capital and create more jobs to earn it. If they get hundreds of billions of dollars from the government their incentive to invest in the market becomes an incentive to invest in legislators, which is doubly bad for the rest of us.

As for saying something intelligent I have posted explanations of my position multiple times in this thread with little more than condecention in response.

[Walker]

BigWhit wrote:

"As for saying something intelligent I have posted explanations of my position multiple times in this thread with little more than condecention in response."

[Hobbes' Choice]

Oh, I'm not bitching about anything. I'm here to have a conversation not to practice thread necromancy.

It is simple enough. Unfettered capitalism allows the polarisation of wealth. That a downwards pressure on wages, and an upwards pressure on profits means that the tendency is for the rich to get richer and the poor poorer. The people who actually do the work on society then have to chase a dwindling pool of jobs whilst the rich compete to out do each other in offering less wages, to get more profits.
Workers reach the point where they can no longer buy the items that they are making. Jobs go to places where the economy is even more depressed in the effort to make things cheap enough to sell.

In Financial markets a damaging situation has also arisen where money can be generated fro doing no work at all. Money makes money. But since this is only fait value, what is in effect happening is that wealth is being draw away from the rewards of production to service the plethora of so-called financial products such as "futures", "easy credit", "sub prime", "Fraudulent underwriting" (as if there were any other kind), "over leveraging", "collateralised debt obligations"; "Falsely secured mortgage backed schemes". This should-be illegal products feathered the nests of thousands of brokers whilst investors - Mainly Joe Public trying to buy a house - lost everything.
Any system that allows money to grow for the sake of simply having money is the assumption of the moral right taken by the rich to have an increasingly bigger share of the cake. It is immoral and damaging.

The role of the government ought to be to mitigate inequality by redressing the natural imbalances of the capitalist system to prevent it rolling over. Tax levied on those who most benefit from the economy needs to be progressive. The myth that you have to allow the rich to be free of tax is one that the rich driven media and the establishment have wanted to promote - especially over the last 35 years since the advent of the Neo-liberal economic model was first tried in Chile with the assassination and CIA based overthrow of Salvadore Allendi on "9/11" 1973, and replaced by the deregulating, union bashing, social program destroying Pinochet: a model copied by Thatcher and Reagan causing mass unemployment, poverty and massive wealth.

The government needs to be democratised, and to recognise that it works for the people not the corporations.
And YOU, rather than swallowing the spunk of the corporate monsters that tell you less government, less tax and all that other self serving nonsense need to understand that the people need to be working for strong government to provide universal education, health and social programs paid for by the profiteers.

[Hobbes' Choice]

I think you probably share my frustration, Dalek. We seem to have plenty of ideologues in this forum willing to pontificate to the effect that the world would be a better place under economic Darwinism but none of them ever show willing to support their ideological position by giving an example of where this has actually worked to produce a less dysfunctional society. All the evidence shows the opposite.

Economic Darwinism? One corporation to rule them all, one corporation to find them, one corporation to gather them, and in the darkness bind them. In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Trickle-down economics is bullshit and anyone telling you otherwise is either a moron or blowing smoke up your ass. Wealth naturally concentrates at the top. I'm fine with that, but injecting money into that demogeaphic for the purposes of economic stimulus is counter productive. The wealthy only benefit a society when they have to use that wealth to build more capital and create more jobs to earn it. If they get hundreds of billions of dollars from the government their incentive to invest in the market becomes an incentive to invest in legislators, which is doubly bad for the rest of us.

As for saying something intelligent I have posted explanations of my position multiple times in this thread with little more than condecention in response.

Right now we have a situation where corporate entities and their owners pay no tax.
They are able to move their HQ to avoid tax and owners to domicile in tax havens.
Yet they rely on the infrastructure, pay by ordinary people's taxes, to make their money.
Then they spread the myth that were this to change there would be dire consequences.
Most politicians, millionaires, allow this to persist. Many are directly in the pay of the same corporations.

[Obvious Leo]

In Financial markets a damaging situation has also arisen where money can be generated fro doing no work at all. Money makes money. But since this is only fait value, what is in effect happening is that wealth is being draw away from the rewards of production to service the plethora of so-called financial products such as "futures", "easy credit", "sub prime", "Fraudulent underwriting" (as if there were any other kind), "over leveraging", "collateralised debt obligations"; "Falsely secured mortgage backed schemes". This should-be illegal products feathered the nests of thousands of brokers whilst investors - Mainly Joe Public trying to buy a house - lost everything.
Any system that allows money to grow for the sake of simply having money is the assumption of the moral right taken by the rich to have an increasingly bigger share of the cake. It is immoral and damaging.

I'm amazed at how poorly it is generally understood that it was this fraudulent piracy of making money out of making money which sucked trillions of dollars out of the real economy and plunged much of the world into recession during the GFC. Even more astonishing is the fact that the conditions which allowed such a catastrophe to occur in the first place have now got worse instead of better. Although it is likely that history will repeat itself in the form of another collapse I note that the Chinese are furiously trying to insulate themselves from this possibility by shifting much of the focus of the investment banking world away from London and Wall St and into Asia. Massive amounts of capital is finding its way into developing economies where the prospects of real economic growth are backed by genuine wealth-generating investment.

If the Renminbi becomes the international trading currency of choice in these emerging markets, as it very well might for the sake of stability, then the US will become an economic basket case. Some will argue that it already is but I don't quite see it that way. With the right determination and political will the US could easily release its economy from the stranglehold imposed on it as a result of its monetary policy being dictated by the "too big to fail" banks. Janet Yellen is possibly the brightest star on the US economic horizon, so unless the unthinkable happens and the US elects a Republican president there is reason for cautious optimism.

[Hobbes' Choice]

In Financial markets a damaging situation has also arisen where money can be generated fro doing no work at all. Money makes money. But since this is only fait value, what is in effect happening is that wealth is being draw away from the rewards of production to service the plethora of so-called financial products such as "futures", "easy credit", "sub prime", "Fraudulent underwriting" (as if there were any other kind), "over leveraging", "collateralised debt obligations"; "Falsely secured mortgage backed schemes". This should-be illegal products feathered the nests of thousands of brokers whilst investors - Mainly Joe Public trying to buy a house - lost everything.
Any system that allows money to grow for the sake of simply having money is the assumption of the moral right taken by the rich to have an increasingly bigger share of the cake. It is immoral and damaging.

I'm amazed at how poorly it is generally understood that it was this fraudulent piracy of making money out of making money which sucked trillions of dollars out of the real economy and plunged much of the world into recession during the GFC. Even more astonishing is the fact that the conditions which allowed such a catastrophe to occur in the first place have now got worse instead of better. Although it is likely that history will repeat itself in the form of another collapse I note that the Chinese are furiously trying to insulate themselves from this possibility by shifting much of the focus of the investment banking world away from London and Wall St and into Asia. Massive amounts of capital is finding its way into developing economies where the prospects of real economic growth are backed by genuine wealth-generating investment.

If the Renminbi becomes the international trading currency of choice in these emerging markets, as it very well might for the sake of stability, then the US will become an economic basket case. Some will argue that it already is but I don't quite see it that way. With the right determination and political will the US could easily release its economy from the stranglehold imposed on it as a result of its monetary policy being dictated by the "too big to fail" banks. Janet Yellen is possibly the brightest star on the US economic horizon, so unless the unthinkable happens and the US elects a Republican president there is reason for cautious optimism.

Modern Neoliberal Economics is a form of collective insanity in which greed is allowed to flourish with such intensity that the participants seem blind to the fact that they shall eventually destroy the very economic forces upon which they feast.

It is no wonder that China is beginning to insulate itself from the insanity that they now realise will eat up their capital on the altar of the so-called free market. They are making moves to withdraw their capital from the West and looks like they will only be using the rest of the Wold for the most basic raw materials. This may well involve cashing in trillions of dollars they have accumulated. Some analysts are saying the next crash is already set-up, unavoidable and immanent.

I've not heard of Janet Yellen.

Trump is the apocalypse scenario. His only promising idea it building America's own Wall of China.
During the Irish Famine, wall-making was introduced to give peasant farmers "make-work" jobs to do. These useless walls can go on for long distances and are functionless. But they put money back into the economy by paying workers a living wage to keep their families alive and the shops they spent at going concerns. The paradox of money means that the employer got the money back because of the economic cycle.
The irony will be that Trump will be too plug stupid to understand this, and he'll tender out the job to the lowest bidder, who will probably use Mexican labour to build the fucking thing!!

[Obvious Leo]

I've not heard of Janet Yellen.

Janet Yellen is the chairman of the US Federal Reserve and she is several orders of magnitude smarter than the two fuckwits who preceded her in the job. In principle the Federal Reserve is an autonomous body which operates separate from government and effectively it controls the levers of monetary policy. The previous incumbents were Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke but both these blokes were supply-side ideologues who saw their role as merely to facilitate the agenda of the banks, which they achieved magnificently. The banks hate Janet Yellen with a passion, which is a sure sign that she must be doing something right. However she is severely constrained by inadequate legislation and getting the right sort of legislation through Congress would be so impossible that the executive seems to lack the will to make the attempt. I rather doubt that a change of president will change this situation so this is almost certainly a correct assessment.

Some analysts are saying the next crash is already set-up, unavoidable and imminent.

[BigWhit]

It is simple enough. Unfettered capitalism allows the polarisation of wealth. That a downwards pressure on wages, and an upwards pressure on profits means that the tendency is for the rich to get richer and the poor poorer. The people who actually do the work on society then have to chase a dwindling pool of jobs whilst the rich compete to out do each other in offering less wages, to get more profits.
Workers reach the point where they can no longer buy the items that they are making. Jobs go to places where the economy is even more depressed in the effort to make things cheap enough to sell.

Unfettered capitalism allows those at the bottom to pull themselves up out of poverty while benefiting the rest of society at the same time. That downward pressure is on price, and labor is only one price competition drives down. Competition in the market place also provides a downward force on the price of the products and services while providing a lifting force to quality and quantity. Cars, T.V.s, radios, cell phones, our computers and the internet we're using right now and just about everything else you see has been produced and improved through competition. The quality of cars, the number of which are produced, and the cost have all improved dramatically to the benefit of everyone. Competition happens among workers as well. This drives down the cost of labor and allows the employer to lower the cost of the product or service they're selling. But it isn't always a downward force necessarily. What is valued in a capitalist market is efficiency. Henry Ford was the first automobile producer to shift to 8 hour work days and paid his employees above the industry average leading to increased production. Humans aren't machines and happiness and sleep are factors in their ability to produce (which, along with increasing labor costs, is why those industries have largely switched to automated assembly lines). But an industry losing jobs isn't always a bad thing. Farming has lost hundreds of millions of jobs to increased efficiency and mechanization and we all benefit by not having to pick up a plow or scythe to put food on the table. These newly unemployed can be used to expand the economy and even create new markets or industries. If the rich tried to out do each other by lowering their wages to increase profits the guy who didn't cut wages would be the preferred employer for workers and would likely get more applicants while the others saw their workers quit. The sheer volume of production for the one would allow for lower prices and they could flood the market with more product at an equal or lower cost and choke the competition out. It is in the employers best interest to keep his employees paid and happy, but also use those people who provide the highest cost/benefit within reason. The reason why workers are getting to the point where they can't buy products on the market is because of inflation and the minimum wage. The mean household income in the mid 60s was something like 6500 bucks but back then things were a lot cheaper. Anyone trying to live on 6500 a year today isn't going to have a good time.

In Financial markets a damaging situation has also arisen where money can be generated fro doing no work at all. Money makes money. But since this is only fait value, what is in effect happening is that wealth is being draw away from the rewards of production to service the plethora of so-called financial products such as "futures", "easy credit", "sub prime", "Fraudulent underwriting" (as if there were any other kind), "over leveraging", "collateralised debt obligations"; "Falsely secured mortgage backed schemes". This should-be illegal products feathered the nests of thousands of brokers whilst investors - Mainly Joe Public trying to buy a house - lost everything.
Any system that allows money to grow for the sake of simply having money is the assumption of the moral right taken by the rich to have an increasingly bigger share of the cake. It is immoral and damaging.

I agree with this, but easy credit is pushed by the Fed's 0% interest rates and quantative easing scheme that is dumping trillions of dollars into the markets. In a truly free market credit would come from savings and investment, not printed money. When credit comes from savings there is a huge incentive for the lower classes to save and interest rates on savings accounts and bonds will be driven up by the demand for credit. The sub prime mortgage market was driven by government backed lending institutions which were encouraged to flood the market with cheap credit for homes. Since more money was following the same amount of homes, the prices of houses went through the roof. There was so much money going around that banks became encouraged to make bad loans to people they knew couldn't pay, bundle them into a security, and pawn them off to the sorry sucker who fell for the AAA credit rating (that was received largely through bribery) and bought the debt. We're seeing the same thing happen with college tuition right now.

The role of the government ought to be to mitigate inequality by redressing the natural imbalances of the capitalist system to prevent it rolling over. Tax levied on those who most benefit from the economy needs to be progressive. The myth that you have to allow the rich to be free of tax is one that the rich driven media and the establishment have wanted to promote - especially over the last 35 years since the advent of the Neo-liberal economic model was first tried in Chile with the assassination and CIA based overthrow of Salvadore Allendi on "9/11" 1973, and replaced by the deregulating, union bashing, social program destroying Pinochet: a model copied by Thatcher and Reagan causing mass unemployment, poverty and massive wealth.

I disagree with the role of the government. Government should be out of the economy as much as feasible. The government's job is to make sure the country is safe, secure, and to preserve the rights of the people through the capturing and punishment of criminals. I don't want the rich to be free of taxes, I want taxes to be as small a burden as possible on everyone. This keeps more money in the economy and allows people to better take care of their needs. Most of the very rich have their wealth not in huge piles of idle cash but in capital. Take the mongrel Trump for example. Most of his wealth is in real estate assets. These assets provide services which people pay for voluntarily and benefit from. If they didn't benefit from it, they wouldn't pay for it. I'm not terribly familiar with the situation in South America other than the fact that people in Brazil are apparently fed up with socialism.

The government needs to be democratised, and to recognise that it works for the people not the corporations.
And YOU, rather than swallowing the spunk of the corporate monsters that tell you less government, less tax and all that other self serving nonsense need to understand that the people need to be working for strong government to provide universal education, health and social programs paid for by the profiteers.

We do have a largely democratic system especially when you get to the lower local governments. But the system was designed to be bottom heavy, where most politics would occur at the local level and the federal gov't would only deal with those things that pertained to the nation as a whole. The federal gov'ts current power is the result of a multitude of very small power grabs in the name of helping the people which actually did nothing more but feed more money into the pockets of the rich. As I said, this then encourages the rich to use their money to buy politicians and get even more hand outs. So much so that we've now got Citizens United.

If the big corporations have the government in their pockets, how do you suppose we are to defeat big corporations with more government?

[mickthinks]

If the big corporations have the government in their pockets, how do you suppose we are to defeat big corporations with more government?

That is a billion dollar question, BW! The answer is not with more government, but with better, as in anti-corporate, anti-oligarch, pro-people, government.

Your analysis seems to be founded on a belief that it is government that tips the scales in favour of the billionaires—that if only we had less government, the billionaires would have no power.

It's a pretty stupid idea when you see it written down like that, isn't it?

[BigWhit]

It's not that the billionaires would have no power, but that they wouldn't have the power of government or easy access to public funds to pad their profits.

But exactly how are we to create a government for the people over the influence of the very rich?

[Dalek Prime]

It's not that the billionaires would have no power, but that they wouldn't have the power of government or easy access to public funds to pad their profits.

But exactly how are we to create a government for the people over the influence of the very rich?

That's why I'm an antinatalist. This world is vastly too imperfect and unjust to bring kids into it. And as resources become more scarce, it's just going to get worse. Human greed always trumps a just system. One may call me negative, but I call it realism.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Unfettered capitalism allows those at the bottom to pull themselves up out of poverty while benefiting the rest of society at the same time.

You've obviously not heard of ancient Rome or feudal Europe.