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Please read my latest entry and post your comments here:
http://pensionpulse.blogspot.com/2010/05/end-of-welfare-states.html
Thank you,
Leo Kolivakis
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I knew 10 years ago, things were screwed. You guys .... hah ....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixT9fKuWDOw
Think for yourself. If you are still contibuting to the 401K ponzi scheme you are probably in for a big surprise! Stop feeding the beast.
The people that write this drek are amazing. Like the Europeans are just going to let the welfare state be replaced by the klepto state. Short short memories. When faced with major problems Spaniards and Italians historically find appeal in quasi Fascist or outright Fascist solutions. In the current circumstance I bet they adopt the Third Way like Brazil and Bolivia. Then we get to listen to the howling from the klepto crowd.
Paul Bogdanich,
The world has changed with you in it! Debt is the tool of the neoliberal state and goal of the market is to dismantle leveraged positions all over the globe. While I am not naive enough to believe that Europe will fall like Domino's, it is important to watch what happens here with PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) countries... While each have a unique set of debt problems and solutions, the overarching goal of the market is to dismantle all welfare states.... Haven't you heard? Its the YOYO's (You're On Your Own) versus the WITT's (We're In This Together) Barb Ehrenreich....
Don't get me wrong here, I do not want this to happen and openly resist it, but these ideas do not fall into the category of 'amazing drek' just because you think it is unlikely. In fact, Leo's original post on neoliberalism defines this agenda for you. (Try reading David Harvey's: Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oh! BTW, fascism makes free markets more predictable... do not forget that facism by definition is merger of private and state interests to control a population... unfortunately this would fit well dismantling state entitlements... Look at China, they are a perfect example of an end product starting first with state power and co-opting private industry to fit their State lustings...
I can hear it now... owooooooooooo!
It is a lot to ask - an end to the criminal
political class that promised all of this
and an end to the criminal voter class that
voted for all of this.
Oh and I almost forgot, an end to the
criminal "journalist" class that sinned
through ommission during all of this.
I sure hope it's the end of these blood sucking over fed under exercised inept welfare entitlement parasites
Leo, you make no sense. You obviously understand that society is a maxed out credit card, manipulated to look like organic demand. Yet you remain bullish. This is why you get such a hard time on these forums. Every economy mathematically has to contract 10% plus. That is not constructive for equities, especially energy equities.
Yes, because I accept that the game is rigged. They will do everything - and I mean EVERYTHING - to reflate risk assets and bring back inflation. Capitalism doesn't work well under deflation. The power elite know this. You can't fight it. Major asset reflation is on its way and all the doom & gloom in the world won't stop it. Prepare for a series of asset bubbles. Pensions need asset reflation and economic inflation or else they're cooked. With no inflation on the horizon, sweet spot for risk assets is here.
You accept that the game is rigged?
It has possibly been rigged in YOUR favor.
When you complain about benefits for disabilities, isn't that a complaint that the payments don't reflect the degree of disability, not that payments are insufficient for the production delivered? Governments have rigged the game in the favor of the less productive, no doubt about it. Some of that may be OK. It is the degree of the rigging that is in question.
Make the mortgage payment, make the food payment, pay the medical bills, help with utility bills, free cell phone, . . . . No requirement for any work of any kind. Pay no taxes. Drug and alcohol use permitted. Explain how things are rigged again?
Not a trader but have been following the markets since 2001. I lived in the states between 2000 and 2008 when I had to leave because my H1B was running out and my green card processing hadn't gone far along when the parent company decided to ...
Given what has happened since then, I'm pretty happy to be living back in Canada. Well Toronto sucks but whatever.
The game is rigged and I think it is going to crash and burn at some point. But I'm happy that I have health care and (sorry guys) caring for early family stuff works. Vermont showed that - as a government it is a lot cheaper to take of disadvantaged youths when they are 5 versus when they are 15. It is a cost benefit thing which is why I don't understand why so many Americans (especially economists) are against it. (It is math!!!)
Evidently you've omitted conveniently from your arguments Eurozone's disintegration and consequent dissipation of its bond market, which dissipation is necessarily deflationary.
Pension fund bailouts - You ain't seen nothing yet. New bill aimed at guaranteeing the benefits from the mismanaged Union run pension funds. Announced tab about 165 Billion. Likely double. Working guy will have to cough it up to fund the pensions for the triple paid auto workers. Payback to the Obama supporters.
Pay, and pay some more, for the union label
http://faustasblog.com/?p=20514
Chicago School is nothing more than a collection of Bentham parrots used as Bentham for imperial cause. This Kolavakis sees but not observes: financial media commonly castigate Greece for "profligate spending" and "corrupt accounting", but such childish self-righteous accusations deflect from the real matter of general Western overconsumption indisputably demonstrated by continuous trade deficits. China has repeatedly announced to the world its plan to convert itself from a export-based economy with small domestic economy to a self-sufficient economy; thus China has an interest in suppressing Western consumption. All this economic talk is just bullshit: socialism, communism, capitalism, crony-capitalism....who cares? A rose by any other name...
Can corporations evolve to survive their own ascent to ultimate power?
Or can they still be disciplined by a sociopolitical system on the edge of terminal corruption?
The Shadow knows....but he ain't sayin'.
To Carl Spacker,
You are correct that it is multi-factoral change that has occurred, but Leo is quite right in his analysis. If you were to read to David Harvey's (2005) a brief history of neoliberalism you would find that other powerful players helped to contribute to the ascendence of Freidman and the Chicago School: The Heritage Foundation and AEI funded think tanks have been preparing for decades for this moment (often hiring economists to research those questions that serve their larger interests); they have been funded since 1970's by three of the most powerful groups in this country:
1) Business Round Table,
2) Chamber of Commerce and
3) National Association of Manufacturers....
They have given over 700 Billion dollars for the furthering of free-market based research and legitmacy. Friedman was just one of those cogs in a well oiled machine consolidate at the time of Reagan.
The ultimate problem with Leo's argument and your point here, however, is that the discipline of economics does not really revolve around a central political structure like Washington DC (and its vestiges). Nor does it revolve around academia.
Economics is everywhere everyday. It is decentralized in nature, and it's real truth is at each point of resource exchange, where supply meets demand. Everything about economics stems from incentive and disincentive to every human being, as these are the forces that create supply and demand.
This is also where the true power lies, not in some artificial, centralized political-academic structure or its quest to be credited with the correct theory.
Such is also why the Chicago School is not a winner at John Maynard Keynes expense (no pun intended). Both philosophies assume that centralized control and response can bring the correct answer to every macro-economic need.
However, the crisis of today shows us, once again, that a centralized authority cannot wave a magic wand and "fix" the problem. Rather, supply and demand have to be given every opportunity to adapt at every point of exchange.
Only when this happens, will a true equilibrium be found, and the "crisis" ended.
Carl,
Interesting comments; the dispersal of economic phenomena being de-centralized is an assumption I vigorously debate... enjoy debating rather since there are many forms of economic behavior. Your comments do not seem to account for how power works in a system to regulate it.
"Economics is everywhere" notion creates: "a this is just too big or complex to understand", but the history of economics was located in social science (before Freidman and mathematical models, algorythms and derivatives)... Yves Smith has written a book called Econned that discusses how the profession of economics has changed into a sort of legitimizing pronostication forum to keep a profession in good standing while economic collapses were manufactured...
Again, I would debate you that "the Chicago School is not a winner here". Their main objective has been to globalize free-market capitalism and eliminate the vestiges of the New Deal (that private interests fought so hard against after the last depression; in fact hard enought to generate a coup against Roosevelt)... So this worldwide financial crisis serves as a platform from which to eliminate the social safety net in Europe and make it more pallatible to de-leverage social security, medicare and medicaid.... Naomi Klein makes the salient point here that only in crisis (real or perceived) can government/private industry make changes that would be widely unpopular and resisted... Currency crisis, debt talks and our most recent banking crisis provide the real and perceived crisis that we have spent too much and cannot afford to keep going on like this....
But very few mention that we had a twenty year bull market where we could saved and planned for the exodus away from entitlements... as well as the fact that we have taken on two massively expensive wars and built a couple hundred foreign bases that have only increased our financial deficits... not to mention that we spend more on defense than any thirty countries combined....
Crisis is manufactured to guide us to unpleasant place the oligarchs want to go.... real or perceived.... I would argue that the study of economics is not too big to understand or so all encompassing that centralized power cannot act (see the New Deal)... Glass Steagall was put into place to link the social, political and economic in an effort to prevent the great depression from happening; aligning with the time and economic context... while glass steagall may not be the fix here now for business or economic interests, it sure would meet the standard of political and social change leading us not to believe that economics can intrude 'everywhere'; that there are still some sacred boundaries like our grandmothers' pensions and our children's future employment... Instead these sentiments are used to take away a commitment that was made long ago to generations of people who paid in that will not receive their money back...
This brings me to the fact corporate interests know where they are aligned since many of these plans have been decades in the making. One example is 'Data mining efforts' in corporate america, they know their market, how much to produce and approximately how many will buy within hours now... technology changes the dynamic in the information age.... Kurt Vonnegut reminds us that while history does not exactly repeat itself; it does rhyme.
What an intellectual feast! Just in one discussion thread!
I'll jump in on "people who paid in who will not receive their money back."
This is where rubber meets road for me... my little 401K was strangled in the cradle, my wife's SS is covering our mortgage. The minute I discover there's nothing left for me from the 1000's I've paid into SS is the minute I have no more to lose and pick up my pitchfork.
Attention "cat food" Commission: Cut some entitlements from the military-, pharma-,bankster-, and prison-industrial complexes, and then see if you still "need" to steal from the kitty I've been paying into for the last 36 years. I bet you'll find, sooner than later, that members of all the above-mentioned interest groups have less to lose (and less reason to go all '1789' on you), than millions of Americans simultaneously waking up to how bad you have screwed them.
700 billion? Off by about 6 decimal places perhaps?
Cognitis - Thank you for the edit (700 Billion is a mistake; meant to have written Million, but that also turns out to be off)
Harvey (2005) p.44
900 Million Spent Annually in the 1970's; closer to 9-10 Billion and more recent data is undetermined....
Many animals have highly cooperative social systems involving loyalty, discipline and altruism (tactical altruism? Maybe).
"Nature, red in tooth and claw" was the initial perception of Darwinism but survival of the fittest is a very subtle and delicate thing...albeit extremely violent at times.
The global elites may be about to find out that they are expendable. For the species.
The real question is what social and economic lessons are to be drawn, and with so many biases and existential crises going on there is almost nowhere to turn for an informed discussion that isn't also pushing agendas.
My favorite old anarchist slogan was always "Replace the economy, ignore the government"...
What shall we write upon the tablet, fellows? It is our history to be writ.
And what of Corporate welfare? Why not end all of their entitlements first. Big bank fraud entitlement, no to little tax entitlement, deregulation entitlement, private debt to public debt entitlement, guaranteed profit entitlement, non competitive bidding entitlement, creditor repayment entitlement and revolving government to private door entitlement. Imagine all of the new revenue for the federal government not to mention the savings obtained when we no longer have to bail them out.
By all means let's get rid of any semblance of a welfare state. But at the same time we must fight for higher credit card interest rates and vastly expand the military.
+100 Claws
+ 36.5%
leo are you on a Canadian disability payment of any kind
some where i have come up with the impression that you have a disability ,, if not true excuse ..
I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis almost 13 years ago, and it has progressed (secondary progressive). But I'm lucky, it's progressed slowly, and I still manage to work all day and blog at night. As long as I can type and think, I won't let MS slow me down.
On the subject of disability payments, it's a travesty that we find money to bail out banksters, but we snarl when society's most vulnerable ask for help. Think about the millions of disabled around the world who are discriminated against and struggle to survive on next to nothing. The welfare state has failed them miserably.
it's a travesty that we find money to bail out banksters, but we snarl when society's most vulnerable ask for help.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Amen
And good for you Leo...you go, no slow!
leo best to you.. takes a lot of determination to move ahead like this
is it such that you could qualify for the canadian system
Leo,
I couldn't agree with you more! I think something happens to the business persons' brain where they start viewing people as things or numbers to exploit (until it happens to them).
Our culture breeds this type of dominance where by the age of 5, our young have been exposed to over 1 million media message asking them to open up to buy some thing.
Empathy is discussed more frequently here lately, but I am always amazed at our capacity to opt out of caring for another...
No pension for you LEO.
Prepare to live the Socialist Paradise.
wow..I wake up and the Euro got hit by a truck and asian markets look just plain nasty...what happened the masses realize the whole game is a farce?
What Leo is really advocating is marxism where no-one is a loser and no-one is a winner. Does nature operate on such a inefficient and wasteful foundations?
No it doesnt. progress only occurs because the cream rises to the top. In evolution, only those suited best to the enviroment go on to successfully reproduce thereby creating more of what was successfull, not more of what was a failure.
The bloated (no one can lose) welfare states will kill humanity because it presuposes that humans with their new found fake altruism know better than mother nature.
There is no universal truth or morality other than nature's own. We would do well to listen to her.
Coldcall -
Actually evolution simply says that organisms will change in such a way as to become the most efficient entity at balancing out energy inputs and energy outputs over a sufficient period of time as to permit for the reproduction of that organism, within a specific given environment. In the case where that environment remains mostly static, so too do the organisms within that environment. When the environment is in a constant state of flux, then the organizations that survive will be the ones who are most adapted towards change. Once that change stops, they will lose their advantages, because being a generalist is more expensive in terms of energy consumption than being a specialist.
Pure socialism and pure capitalism are different energy organization strategies. Socialism distributes the benefits of the work of the collective populace to that populace, providing a general improvement in the quality of living that effectively translates into insuring that people will survive long enough to contribute to the general weal. It's weak point is that it provides less incentive for innovation, and can be relatively easily captured by authoritarian figures who essentially establish the distribution.
Capitalism rewards those that are best able to receive the maximum energy efficiency per transaction (make the most profit consistently) and punishes those that don't. It's a strategy that often provides strong incentives to innovate, but it is also a system that, if not checked, can result in oppression of the less efficient and the rise of an oligarchy.
Most companies actually have a synthesis of both forms of economies, including the United States. The US is somewhat less socialist than the typical European country, but includes medical subsidization, unemployment compensation, extensive subsidies that promote the development of infrastructure and transport and so forth, as well as a base-level retirement program. It also has an extensive "investor class" which are capitalists in the extreme - they "earn" money by the manipulation of the monetary system, effectively extracting value out of the system.
In theory the investment class exists in order to provide capital for the formation of new businesses, but it can be argued fairly effectively that this role is increasingly being eclipsed by the investor as gambler metaphor. Companies engaged in HFT are a prime example of this, as they exist in order to shave off micropennies off of transactions without adding to the value of the transaction in any way. At the individual level, this is a highly evolved organism - for a small energy investment, the companies doing the HFTs gain a huge amount of energy (money) as the result of these transactions. However, this is the same strategy that parasites take, and in most cases such parasites ultimately end up depleting so much energy from their hosts as to kill them, but not before moving on to new hosts.
What this implies is that, by your argument, Goldman Sachs and similar organizations are the most evolved form of business because they are most efficient at propagating themselves while diminishing the rest of the ecosystem. Given, however, that the end state of being captured by TBTF banks seems to be regular economic collapse for the rest of the world, while most balanced states do seem to manage to survive unless parasites like these are given free rein, I'd actually argue that the socialist states (which have a higher per capita standard of living than the US does) may in fact be the better mechanism for the survival for countries overall, even if the potential for "making lots of money" is more diminished there.
Kurt you should teach a class on this!
Made me laugh. In nature, the status winner and loser is not known. That is just anthrocentrism.
One interesting field is to stufy how the rules of sports game were crafted ever and ever again to produce an outcome winner/loser.
The most popular game in the world, football, in this regard, was poorly coded as it allows stalemate.
Environment is the key word. Unfortunately it is artificial (welfare state).
A better analogy is a parasite evolving within a host. The parasite is successful and multiplies until the host dies. The only difference is there is no other host to latch on to so natures order is that any host that cannot defend against this parasite will die and any parasite that kills its host will also die.
Ergo we're all fucked.
excellent!
Good one.
One of the founders of the USA pointed out <paraphrasing ON> that our project will be fucked once the voters discover they can vote themselves endless goodies from the Treasury. Here we are.
This was, by the way, the platform of the The One. It worked because the population was educated by public schools and universities and media dominated by true believers in such redistribution.
Wrong..... Any movement away from Free-market capitalism gets labelled Marxist as if balance between individuals and collective interests couldn't be American... This is such complete drivel Coldcall! It totally misses the direction our whole political system has taken in the last 30 years to the right... Moving back towards the center is not becoming socialist or communist; it is acknowledges that we as a country have not prepared our population for the inevitable changes that are going to occur in the next two decades....
However, to keep people ignorant of these changes, blame them for their lack of information and to extort profitable asymmetries that result from this transition only creates anger and more violence... I will say this again, the bloated welfare state is only bloated because our industry and government have been in partnerships to extract whatever resources they could from the middle class as a structural EXTERNALITY... To miss this, is to participate in the divide and conquer notions between left and right, Keynes-Friedman and communist-capitalist deterioration of conversation among ordinary people who are uninformed of their interests...
To miss this, is to participate in the divide and conquer notions between left and right, Keynes-Friedman and communist-capitalist deterioration of conversation among ordinary people who are uninformed of their interests...
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Fascinating and accurate
Well-said.
Look around. Whose doing the reproducing? Do they represent the success you speak of? It's puzzling isn't it. Doesn't seem right. Contrary to popular opinion, evolution doesn't progress. Species adapt to suit the environment that is available at the time and it would appear a lazy parasitic strategy has been very successful.
Winisk--
I think your diagnosis of the current state of affairs is correct. But what of the prognosis of those that employ the "lazy parasitic strategy"? Will evoloution continue to reward such parasites when the hosts become unwilling?
No. Evolution occurs when random mutations in a species are reproduced in that species because the mutation increases the ability of the mutated organism to survive. The modern welfare state interferes with this process because the mutations which would lesson the chance for survival and reproduction in a natural state are allowed to remain in the gene pool. In fact in our current state of affairs, it appears that the least favorable mutations, for example the ones which lead to a lessening intelligence, are being increased in the gene pool, because it is the carriers of these mutations which are breeding at a greater rate. See the Mike Judge film "Idiocracy", which follows this trend to its logical extreme. When the welfare state collapses due to its unsustainability this process will stop.
Ditto on every single sentence.
That speaks to a misunderstanding of Evolution. Evolution is a word that describles natures (God's if you will) brutal way of determining which particulars are best adapted to survive. If an unsophisticated primate survives better than a sophisticated one, then the unsophisticated primate is the winner, especially when the sophisticated primates skills no longer work for survival.
Devolution is just evolution working against you, it is a value statement from a particular point of view. For example, from his point of view, Ghengis Kahn and the Mongols were quite evolved.
Indeed; the cockroach, the shark, and the fern are all highly evolved in the sense that they haven't had to change in hundreds of millions of years and will most likely outlast humanity.
Ohhh and the horseshoe crab....now that's an evolved organism.
What do you mean?
Cockroachs, sharks, everyform of life is evolving...
Evolution is nothing that is stopped at a certain time.
but that raises and interesting point. Is it better for a species to find a stable environmental niche which allows it to flourish without any new changes, or a species which is constantly adapting through mutations found to be beneficial because of a changing environment?
I think the one changing is likley to progress faster towards complexity, intelligence etc...than the stagnant species.
hell that might spell the end of humantiy since it can be argued we are in a rut :-)