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Rolling Stone Resurrects Karl Marx (And No - It Was Not Satire)
Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum of Acting-Man blog,
The Problem of Economic Ignorance
The fact that economic ignorance is widespread is really a big problem in our view. Unfortunately even what is broadly considered the economic mainstream thought is riddled with stuff that we think just doesn't represent good economics. This is not meant to say that there is absolutely nothing worthwhile offered by the so-called mainstream. Often one comes across valuable insights and stimulating ideas. Still, there are a number of very fundamental issues on which various schools of economic thought don't agree – beginning with basic questions of methodology.
Regarding the place economics should have in our lives, Ludwig von Mises once wrote:
“Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man's human existence.”
We agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. There is little harm in leaving astronomy to astronomers and quantum physics to experts in theoretical physics. With economics it is different, because even though it is supposed to be wertfrei (value-free) as a science, economics necessarily has a political dimension, since politics is all about the acquisition and distribution of property by political (as opposed to economic) means. In other words, economic policy is the main topic around which politics revolves.
When Mises wrote the above words, he thought of economics as a more or less unified science, in broad agreement on basic concepts. In a way that is still true, but it is less true than it once was. For instance, to briefly come back to the point about methodology, Mises spent a lot of effort on systematizing the economic method and discussing the epistemological problems of economics. However, while doing so, he never doubted for a moment that it was quite clear to all economists that the science had to proceed by means of deductive reasoning and logic. He probably didn't expect that positivism would eventually conquer economics. As an aside, if one looks closely, one soon realizes that even the most committed positivists and econometricians secretly agree that there actually is such a thing as the laws of economics, and that these laws are not necessarily all derived from empirical observation.
Be that as it may, there is definitely a great deal of economic ignorance out there. Partly it is actually furthered by statist propaganda and obfuscation. For instance, the average citizen is not supposed to question the centrally planned monetary system, and neither is he supposed to actually understand how it works (hence what is actually a pretty straightforward operation has become a fairly complex variation of the Three Card Monte, designed to obfuscate the system's inherently fraudulent nature).
How much ignorance there is regularly becomes evident by things such as e.g. the enduring popularity of protectionism (it is almost as though consumers enjoy harming themselves).
Another glaring example is the still widespread idea that socialism – or rather, communism (i.e., full-scale socialism as opposed to its milder 'democratic' version) – would be 'the best possible system of social and economic organization if only it were implemented correctly', or the variant ' … if only human nature were different and we were morally more advanced than we actually are'.
The main problem with this train of thought is that it is actually completely wrong. When confronting supporters of socialism with the total failure and murderous nature of the communist system in the real world, a common retort is that 'this wasn't real socialism'. In other words, if Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their followers had only implemented everything according to the precepts of Karl Marx, then things would have been perfectly fine, and the communists would have erected a king of land of Cockaigne.
However, not only did they in fact follow the precepts laid down by Marx and Engels, but even if e.g. Stalin had been a veritable angel, the system would still have failed. Socialism is literally impossible as Mises has already proved in 1920. In brief: it is a system in which rational economic calculation becomes impossible, because there are no longer prices for capital goods once private property in the means of production is abolished. A system bereft of economic calculation can no longer allocate scarce resources efficiently. It cannot really be called an economy anymore. It a system that is doomed to break down in short order, and the only reason why it survived as long as it did in the former Eastern Bloc was that the COMECON planners were able to observe the price system in the capitalist countries and so could engage in a rudimentary form of economic calculation. Had the whole world become socialistic, the economy and division of labor would have completely collapsed within a few years and people would have been forced to return to a hand-to-mouth existence, barely able to subsist. Life would once again have become 'nasty, brutish and short'.
No, It Was Not Meant to Be a Satire …
In other words, it seems quite important that people really understand why socialism cannot work. After all, bad ideas have a habit of coming back after a while and an example for this has just been delivered via an editorial in the 'Rolling Stone', penned by one Jesse A. Myerson, a former 'Occupy' movement organizer.
At first many people mistakenly thought it was meant to be a satire, but it soon turned out it actually wasn't. On Twitter, Myerson runs the hashtag #FULLCOMMUNISM (anything less than the 'full' version apparently won't do), so there can be no doubt as to his ideological proclivities.
Anyway, in his article, couched in 'hip' language (the word 'blow' or 'blows' is used frequently, as in e.g. 'work blows'), he argues that millennials should make five economic demands, namely:
1. Guaranteed work for everybody, 2. a basic income for everybody (he calls that 'social security', but he actually means that everybody should get a government salary in exchange for – nothing. Being able to fog a mirror is sufficient reason), 3. the expropriation of landowners (it is not 100% clear if he merely argues for a Georgist land tax or full-scale expropriation), 4. the abolition of private property and nationalization of the means of production, and 5. a 'public bank in every state'.
The last demand sounds like he has picked up the ideas of the Greenbackers and associated monetary cranks, who hold that the monetary system could be improved if money printing were left to politicians directly rather than a central bank (for a trenchant critique of Greenbackism, read Gary North, who correctly notes that the ideology is at the root indistinguishable from Hitler's economic program).
So essentially, this leader/hero of the 'Occupy' movement proposes an economic program that is a jumbled mixture of Marxism/Stalinism, Georgism and National Socialism. Whoa!
Luckily not even the readers of Rolling Stone are falling for this stuff, judging from the comments section below the editorial. However, we have once again come across many comments that show that the problem discussed further above continues to persist – i.e., many people still seem convinced that communism would actually work if only it were 'done right'. That this is a fundamental error needs to be pointed out at every opportunity.
Not surprisingly, Myerson has become a target of ridicule all over the media landscape by now. Especially conservative columnists had a field day. However, Myerson of course stands by his nonsense, and attempted to defend it on Twitter and elsewhere. One of the more interesting conversations revolved around the accusation that what he proposed amounted to a defense of the system practiced by the Soviet Union. Since it has clearly failed there, there was really nothing left to discuss. As one might expect, Myerson retorted that of course, the Soviets never implemented his demands. In other words, the leftist trope that the 'communists never really tried communism' was predictably dug up by him. If only they had done so, they would of course have succeeded, so the story goes.
Unfortunately for him, there are a great many fact checkers out and about these days. One of them proved that not only had every single one of his demands been implemented by the Soviets, but they were actually without exception part of the Soviet constitution. On the Drew Musings blog an article entitled “Advocate For #FULLCOMMUNISM Says Soviet Union Did Not Try #FULLCOMMUNISM” has all the details and quotes from the Soviet Union's constitution. As Drew concludes, the only thing that still needs to be mentioned regarding the communists is that
“They did succeed at one thing…killing million upon millions of people in their efforts to remake society and maintain their control. #FULLCOMMUNISM = #MILLIONSDEAD. Always has, always will.”
That is not exactly an unimportant detail. Since the expropriation of private property necessarily involves force, it cannot be implemented without killing and imprisoning people. Once the system is established, it must continue to use force to ensure that the new ruling class won't be challenged and that the system remains in place.
Conclusion:
It is heartening that so many people, including the readership of the generally leftist Rolling Stone magazine, have vehemently disagreed with Myerson and heaped ridicule on his vile editorial. However, keep in mind that as time passes, the ignominious collapse of the communist system will become an ever more distant memory. In fact, that such an article is published at all is already a sign that this is happening. It is also concerning that the idea that communism would be just fine if only implemented correctly continues to be held by so many people. This is a result of widespread economic ignorance. It is more important to challenge the ideas propagated by Myerson on theoretical grounds than by merely citing historical events. Only if it is widely understood by people that socialism is indeed impossible will the danger posed by the Marxist ideology truly be banned.
The fathers of the Marxist ideology, Marx and Engels and two important leaders of the Marxist reality, Lenin and Stalin – briefly resurrected by the 'Rolling Stone'. Let us make sure they are interred again.
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WOW! Brilliant rebuttal. NOT.
Actually, while the planet is finite, if supply is sufficiently large than finite reduces to little meaning. The earth is bombarded by energy from the sun daily... harnessed with sufficient efficiency it would keep us expanding far into the foreseeable future... Beyond this lays the stars and a near boundless upper limit.
More constraining is human nature which dictates that 1) humans fare poorly with undue leisure... 2) There will always be those who will harness the means of production while subjugating their fellows...
As a consequence any system, socialist or capitalist, is doomed to fail...
The founding fathers put safeguards in place meant to retard the growth of decadence... But they understood it was only a matter of time before the system would self destruct. Or, in Ben Franklin's words, when asked what kind of government had been wrought... 'A republic, if you can keep it'.
That is why, and contrary to Abraham Lincoln's position that no nation would contain within its charter the seeds of it's own destruction, provisions were left in place for just such a dissolution... hence the second amendment.
Sorry for the long winded response... Someone really ought to take this iPad away from me...
"Actually, while the planet is finite, if supply is sufficiently large than finite reduces to little meaning. The earth is bombarded by energy from the sun daily"
There's more than just energy. Energy is what is used to perform the work on physical resources.
As a farmer, and as an energy buff, I've got a relatively reasonable level of understanding about solar...
The planet USES that incoming energy to work. To prove my point try placing a bunch of reflective material out over an area and measure the temperatures under that area and outside that area when the sun is shining. I don't think that you really have to resort to an actual demonstration to realize that the area under that reflective material is going to be cooler than the surrounding area. My point here is that you affect soil temperatures. And, well, as a farmer, soiul temperatures are very important. It is, therefore, my belief that it is way oversimplified to suggest that it's OK to just plaster a lot of solar panels all over the countryside and not think that there isn't going to be some be some externalized negative somewhere (weather pattern disturbances or such).
I caution for folks to watch out for hubris. Fukushima is a good example of hubris. Go back and read all the materials about how great it was going to be for the people of Japan. Saying "but, techonology today is so much better" fails to note that the very same things have always been stated in an effort to "sell" shit, even shit that fails miserably (and all the apologists blame all sort of things for the failures, everything except their inability to account for unseen, or deliberaly hidden, externalizations).
As noted initially, there's physical resources as well, minerals, wood etc that can be over-consumed/exhausted in which case the amount of available energy would be meaningless.
In no way am I going to propose population reduction as that is not my business, but, clearly, at some point population size will make it impossible to maintain even the best system/solution. We were set up to fail with "go forth and multiply" (with no natural predators, well, other than bacteria and viri and, ourselves)
I understand your point... What I was suggesting is that if limited resources were the real issue, technology would eventually find work arounds... solar was a bit of a simplification...
The real limiting factor is human nature... for which there is no work around...
there will be no technology for "too many". too many will become less. the pendulum swings to its limits. variables constantly changing but adhering to physical properties. these limits are laws and standards set by physical know characteristics. mater, temperature and iteractions between -100c to 100 c plus...at least for us on earth for now.
Obama Credo Mutwa |2009
After you lie, your base supporters turn on you. Your wife is the one who reminds you of the kingdom keys that shall never end. ;)
Politician's job is to lie.
But, yeah, thanks for helping to keep the name "Obama" in my face (even though I've never supported or voted for him), one can never be allowed to just get on with life without the constant reminders...
If RS thinks communism is terrific, why have they not turned that organization over to a commune of "the people" rather than continuing to hold it in private ownership? Eh?
"If RS thinks communism is terrific"
Isn't this getting a bit absurd? Just because a magazine publishes one article covering one subject from one perspective it means that it is totally supportive of that subject?
Fuck, my paper reported a case of rape. They're a bunch of rapists!
I see that someone just doesn't understand logic.
Kind of fucking funny. This occupier rails on about the 1%ers but wants a system where it would be even less. Let's just say the .01%ers but we know it would be even less. If this person was paying attention they would realize we already have central banking in this country and it is fucking everybody more than ever. Then they might even see the obtrusive government fucking everybody.
You are getting it confused, the problem is not that they do not have enough statism, it's that they want to be in charge.
Anyone who wants any kind of govt is wanting "their" brand, the thing that is best for them. What a surprise, yeah?
And this is why I want NO govt. The "smal govt" folks just want something easier to manipulate: those that are trying to be sincere are ignorant to the fact that it's like having someone always stay just a little pregnant. Oh, and there's that "power corrupts thing." When we're WAY too busy trying to survive we'll have little ability to oversee the sociopaths that are climing the ladders of power (and I don't care what system or how good you might think your "person" might be, there's succession, and nothing stays pure*).
I used to not care if other people wanted to build a government and obey it, as long they did not try to force me or my allies to obey their government. However, no government will agree to constrain itself unless forced to do so, and thus it is always a threat - as if some of my neighbors were building a nuclear bomb in the club house. It is no one else's business - but ... it IS a very real and very large and very probable threat to the rest of us.
Yeah, I understand the concern. At this point we're kind of at the point where moving toward any meaningful solution opens us up to exitinction.
Years ago I'd argued to someone that we needed to disarm sooner rather than later as energy to do so would become an issue in the future. The guy was pretty sharp, but he looked at me like I was nuts (well, I am, but let's focus on the message!). Fukushima. It was basically a long-running bomb. It wasn't disarmed. It's looking like there just won't be the energy to deal with it: yes, this is more like a cleanup than just a decomissioning, but there's still a similiarity here.
And on to something a bit more close to home... I knew this guy who was commenting about the horror of his neighbor's house wiring project. This was a suburban environment where your neighbors aren't too far away, so this guy had plenty of be concerned about (especially being a new parent). Where I live it's no concern whether someone fucks up and burns down their house, it's not going to threaten my livelihood (though I'll be concerned for them).
For an example or resiliency in the face of overwhelming governmental intrusions see Afghanistan. Yeah, not exaclty my preferred crowd, but they've demonstrated the ablity to survive despite the force applied against them. There will be a phase, we're always in phases, where we're going to have to manage against some pretty big threats, but that's life, and things come in waves- the point is to perservere and keep on doing what you believe in.
There is plenty of energy for them to clean it up. They just have to be willing to make that leap into space to find it.
Monty Python - Trotsky returns to Russia
There is only one problem and one problem only: over population. Socialism, capitalism ... all the isms in this world put together cannot change the root cause of all problems that is the fact that there are too many people on this planet and not enough natural resources to go around. No economic theory can refill depleted reservoirs to make oil cheap again. All they can do is to change how the problems manifest.
The worst ignorance is to believe economies can create something out of nothing and thus can operate on nothing. Nothing can come out of nothing; there is something for economies to move around only if there are resources to begin with. All economies are the result of natural resources.
So you're not going to invent something new then, I take it?
I think he/she believes the internet & social media created new natural resources.
Connect: A Look At Bulletin Board Systems
In the 18 weeks that you've been a subscriber here have you ever offered up anything for real consideration/debate/discussion?
You sound like me when geopolitics set in. He left plenty of welfare skittles to track down. Tomorrow is another day. :>)
The problem isn't overpopulation. This planet could support a huge amount of people, assuming we could actually start behaving ourselves.
Not much fun in that alternative of behaving ourselves. I wonder how many people could be supported if we all lived the Amish way? I suspect their density of population and footprint isn't as high as modern mans, as their farming and gathering doesn't make use of modern production means which enables much more to get done in a shorter time when tractors and fertilizers get used.
I chucked everything and bought a farm and actually live by many Amish and Mennonites. It's a wonderful way of life. I wish more people did it.
Well, having enough money to buy a farm puts you in the upper-crust of humanity- pat yourself on the back. NOTE: I'm in the crowd too.
"It's a wonderful way of life."
It's what you make of it. Sliding through shit, bucking bales, bad weather and still having to do things when you're tired, sore and sick. It's LIFE. Passion is what makes things "wonderful," and for that you have to have it, otherwise it just cannot be the "solution" for many a folk...
When I go to bed I never have to worry about not being able to sleep: well, not unless we've managed to stoke the stove to hot!
If not for all the religious stuff I'd have been perfectly comfortable with a community such as these. Not that I can't relate and get along (some of my best friends are Southern Baptists), it's just that I'm just my own person.... (everyone's always recruiting me- and that's how I am able to see/understand a lot about folks; I like talking to folks [face to face])
"wonder how many people could be supported if we all lived the Amish way? I suspect their density of population and footprint isn't as high as modern mans, as their farming and gathering doesn't make use of modern production means which enables much more to get done in a shorter time when tractors and fertilizers get used."
I'm no expert, but the Amish are not all uniform. They tend to vary a bit. Some might use a bit of modernity. Where they are a bit better suited is that they have fallbacks. But don't kid yourself, they absolutely require doing trade with the outside world. There are no "islands."
I don't think that it should be a game of trying to see how many people we can pack on the planet so much as it's an issue of trying to figure out how to live sustainably (yes, this is a somewhat tired word, but I don't know of another one that's more fitting- so I'll state in advance to all the folks who love to knee-jerk over this word as it being some liberal/progressive/environmentalist word, um no, I use it exactly as it means- balanced and something that maintains a way of life). I have no idea what that should be (well, I have thoughts and ideas but these are mine and I have no plans for subjecting others to them) for others/all. I believe that we all need to figure it out.
I'd had this argument withe some grass-fed beef folks (who are about as conservative as you're going to find) about trying to grow to meet "future demands." For how long? I asked. How many people? I pointed out that this was an unfair level of pressure to bring down on all of us grass-fed folks making us believe that we'd have to grow indefinitely even though that is not possible. A couple people got it, though they didn't see the wave of pressure that was being generated (perhaps the notion of being able to increase their operations' size was welcomed, well, until it's not). The "leader" huffed and puffed, falling back on the "we have to do it" mantra. Fucking FAIL. I'd be OK if folks would just admit that they're going to grow until they pop, but way too many folks believe that growth can just continue forever... And the irony here is that this was all no different than with the big commercial CAFO folks: in a way I don't begrudge them as they are likely feeling the same pressures, being brought along to believe that the had to, and that they could, keep up with perpetual growth. Well, at some point when you have such volume it can only be done in a more factory-like manner.
"The problem isn't overpopulation. This planet could support a huge amount of people, assuming we could actually start behaving ourselves."
The PROBLEM is GROWTH. Our population is not static and it's growing, 7+ billion.
At some point as growth continues population WILL exert demands that the planet will not be able to support.
It is hard pressed to believe that we could have gotten to this size of a population by not behaving. And, I'm thinking, to actually continue to increase in numbers it's going to take more of our energies to behave :-() But at some point it won't matter, as in oder to survive one would almost have to steal and kill: desperate times makes for desperate people.
Which is why we should have continued Space Exploration.
Thanks to the Chinese, we may get back into Space.
A species which cannot organize iteself to survive on a planet
will never be able to survive long trips in a spaceship.
Relying on Space Exploration to solve our problems is like moving after you trash your apartment and then moving again cause you trashed that one too.
I am overjoyed when i realize
the self-proclaimed *Sapients* [sic] will not be leaving this planet
and they will not be spreading their version of Sapienism throughout the Universe.
May the indigenous species throughout the Universe be able to live their lives without being overrun by the "ideals" of the Sapients.
That's why governments don't want people to know that aliens have been visiting this planet, imagine the horror when people start to communicate with the aliens and find out that the little grey men don't have a central bank of their own.
I would have to wonder why Aliens smart enough to visit us would bother. Yet.
Then again, evidence does seem to indicate that at one time some pretty smart (?) were here. Maybe they gave up and left.
Exactly, Banzai. The estimated max is 15 billion people but that comes with lots of assumptions. There is also this universal worldwide phenomenon. As countries prosper their birth rates drop dramatically. Most of Europe has negative population growth. Without importing millions of Muslims and immigrants they would eventually perish. Look at Japan with the oldest average population. They are closing schools everywhere.
The flip side is that we invent new things that make us more efficient and can support more people. Worst case there is recycling of current materials which we do in some cases because it is highly cost effective.
If you have pessimism for the future let it be because of the rise and coordination of centrally planned governments leading to a centrally planned world. Then you might get your wish as a few billion starve to death or have to roast rats over burning tires. Left to ourselves with force removed we will find ways and limit our own family size without the help of the Chinese government.
I'm sure there are natural resources on the moon. What is their economy like? Economics is trade. There are people who lived for multiple generations without much of any contact with people outside of their immediate environment. I don't really think you could get much of an analysis of their "economy". Undoubtedly the more natural resources that are at hand, the richer the potential society, but Afghanistan has huge resources and their economy sucks. It is human interaction that makes economies, not resources.
This guy got this exposure because the banks and their controllers think it's a good idea.
The democratic party and it's funders are going full-Marxist thinking they can keep Leroy in the projects and Oscar in the fields, but this is not an agrarian revolution.
The democrat's only choice is to wage war on whitey going forward. But after all the jobs are gone and everyone is living in an Obamaville or their cars, what promises can be kept?
If you can't deliver iphones, xboxes, cannabis and shag carpet then this manipulated Generation Kill are going to light their ovens.
The Fed and it's supporters are doubling (tripling down), but they have 3 years of Obama and another 8 for Hillary.
Imagine what this country will look like then.
Good luck to everyone.
BZZT! You're missing the Big Picture: declining resources- have fun battling others for resources, good luck!
BTW - I imagine a country without party pussies. Me and the folks around me generally are too busy making it to be sucked into the party pussy game...
Even a cursory reading of the Communist Manifesto reveals that the establishment of a Central Bank and centralized streams of revenue which became our present Income Tax are some of its primary tenets. It was no accident that the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 cooincided with the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. Lev Davidovich Bronstein was financed by Jacob Schiff and the bank of Kuhn-Loeb to the tune of $20 million.
Trotsky was actually bankrolled by Schiff during his prolonged stay in New York City where he had all the known amenties of the big bourgeoise he pretended to despise including a limousine and chauffer and was lodged in one of the most xpensive hotels in NYC, prior to his voyage back to Russia to coordinate the so called revolution. It is elemental knowledge that the very basis of the Hegelian dialectic which so "inspired" the communist totems calls for the creation two opposing entities-thesis and antithesis producing the desired political outcome in the awaited "synthesis".
Or as in the simple Polish maxim which grew out of an intimate acquaintance with the depradations of the Hegelian system in practice. "Under communism, man exploits man. Under capitalism, the reverse is true"
Jacob Shiff, interesting guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff
The Polish maxim comes from sarcastic leftists and is not true.
Every Marxist Heaven became a Hell. The premise of each according to his need is faulty.
And how many people served time in hell deliverd by capialist armies.
Not one. There are no capitalist armies. It is the antithesis of free trade. Armies come from States with all kinds of governments and economies.
What drivel.
Socialism and communism are just another version of organized crime by governments.
Yup. And even those govts professing to operate under capitalism's economics are corrupt. Power corrupts: like this needs repeating?
Repeat it every fucking day. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The focus is on the wrong problem which is how the Elites like it. Economics will take care of itself, we all have to trade.
The problem is we have law. It is law that creates every political and economic problem. Eliminate all systems of law and you eliminate the problem. No structure to abuse and take over. No false justice. No false legitimacy. No coercion. No taxes that are not individially voluntary. No property but what you can use and protect. No patents, no trademarks, no special "people", no legal tender. No politicians or shrines or militaristic death orgasms.
Ugly, raw life lived in liberty and danger, on a knife's edge. People having to cooperate to survive and prosper. Communties looking out for each other and finding ways to grow without some parasite trying to bleed them dry. Personal responsibilty, private charity, tolerance and tar and feathers for the sorry fucks that think they can passify a free man.
We're fighting over the quality of the cell, instead of tearing the thing down.
Yes, "law" can be an "issue," and, certainly, it can be a "problem*".
* Dr. Albert Bartlett says that "problems" are things that are life-threatening, all others are "issues."
At some point there will be aggregations of people. I really don't care what they call themselves, under what "construct," as that's real freedom. And for sure there will be some ugly formations; but, unlike today where a mere handful of people can trigger our total demise, in small clusters the "failures" only have small spheres of influence.
Diversity. That's how nature does survival long-term.
"We're fighting over the quality of the cell, instead of tearing the thing down."
We have the keys. Further, the cell really isn't locked. Just stop being IN the facilty, walk out of the cell. The guards do not expect this: we're all brainwashed into thinking that the cell is life.
Here is the deal: Communism WORKS, as does all forms of collectivism. It works for the elites, that is.
“They did succeed at one thing…killing million upon millions of people in their efforts to remake society and maintain their control"
Just for the sake of argument and playing devils argument on the above quote from the article, at what point in the US history were we considered capitalists? From the git go? Or later? And regarding collateral damage, what about the american indian, or the slaves, or those lost in the civil war? Weren't those numbers high, probably in the 7 figure range too?
Great questions! I was hoping that the knowledgeable capitalists would be able to provide answers.
One could say that the merchantilists, which is kind of how the US formed, brought lots of death to all the various natives as they sought to expoloit all the "abundant" resources.
If there's an army in the background then it really isn't about "free trade," and can therefore not be about true capitalism. Right?
Why the argument over terms and words when we all know, as you clearly stated before, "its corruption stupid". Any system that enables or makes corruption easier to create and harder to control is easily the worst, regardless of what you call it. Socialism, communism, fascism and crony capitalism all seek to concentrate power, and this concentrated power is ALWAYS the single greatest threat to anything resembling freedom. All this shit about fairness or wealth distribution is a red herring, just another way to sell us into slavery. Your empowerment to protect YOUR OWN wealth is the only real freedom and justice that can exist.
I think capitalism in the strict sense in the new world probably started when the Dutch established New York/New Amsterdam as a trading post and excellent harbor and which it is why it's still the "capital" of US finance.
Capitalism is not liberty though and the collateral damage of the pursuit of "life, liberty and (property) happiness" can be placed less on capitalism and more on the human struggle for liberty which as we on ZH can mostly agree is still ongoing.
The Draft Riots were a result of Irish immigrants, who believed free blacks were responsible for their lack of work and their plights and would be an even greater threat to their future prosperity (and had a strong union of laborers), being incensed that they would be drafted to die for slaves. Many Irish died along with many people from all over the "old" world in the Civil War but is humanity not better off for it today; and at it's core does it have anything to do with capitalism?
The same can be said about natives and near genocide. Unlike today the prevailing belief at the time, or at least the propaganda, was that natives were uncivilized savages. Human diaspora to free land and roaming grounds, many animals do that very thing. Can that be attributed to capitalism? I don't think so.
Capitalism is a system of economics that sprouted organically in human society. Greed is a human trait which taints capitalism, socialism, progressivism and other isms.
Socialism/communism was/is very few people in charge of a government actively ordering to kill people in the historic examples. Yes the democratic republic of the United States has done/is doing the same thing.
I don't think any of this was or is attributable to "capitalism."
I do think humans can achieve something greater than capitalism but I don't think anyone in the next hundred years will live to see it and we may kill ourselves before we actually get there. Finite planet and humans are still not evolved enough to not be greedy or dishonest or ignorant in their beliefs. Maybe if humans have a new diaspora into space? Perhaps our origin is from someplace else and we will repeat the process again?
"Full" nothing works.
Not full communism.
Not full socialism.
Not full capitalism.
Not full retard.
This absolutism is meant to divide, distract and conquer. The world is more complex and the truth is, all three of the above systems have some benefit, some quality worth considering and applying.
Full retard is absolutism. And that is a system that never works.
Yup. Don't see it in nature. Nature is the guide. If the goal is to see how long the human race can survive then diversity is the key. Otherwise, if it's to see who can become the dominant group (religious or otherwise), well, it just might mean an earlier extinction.
In a way "full" is "never." And, well, never say never...
+1,000
“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”
-Vladimir Lenin
Neither system is working properly and it is obvious. The conversation above says it. What needs to happen, and it will happen, will be a morphing into something that works. All these things go in cycles. Reading Chinese history has shown for years they have gone through all types of systems.Whatever comes won't be pleasant because people hate change of anytype, especially those that have been doing well. The question asked a wise Chinaman "Do you think that the French Revolution was successful?"......the answer "To soon to tell.
I do not believe in the evolution of mans morals. Or that we are reaching an age of great understanding. Man has not changed at all and greed, lust, and lust for power are the motivators since history started. One thing that I do know is that we are facing something pretty out of kilter. Worldwide.
We've held back on any corrective busts. Can't hold one's breath forever...
A big reshuflfing as it applies to managing resources will occur. I've always been a contrarian as far as NWO goes, stating that I don't believe that it will ever be realized and that instead we'll see greater fragmentation. And unlike the divisions used to maintain us as a "whole" I think that future "divisions" will be more as realized groupings along regionalities.
Revolutions are generally just a change of the opperator. When the real quest lies in gaining power (and this is the case whether wishing to overthrow a "bad" OR "good?" govt) then power is the goal. Lust? Greed?
"I do not believe in the evolution of mans morals."
It's just the story that we tell ourselves. It's the story that TPTB wish to propagate in order to keep us subservient to them. When it's an issue of one's life the notion of "morals" is just a "guideline." And I suppose it's better this way as if most of us were to have eveolved you can be sure that there'd be the mutant non-evolved sociapathic power-seekers who would leverage up on this really well (kind of like they're doing now).
I agree about human nature.
In today's world, global connectivity allows the bad people to exert more control, thus we see the growth of Evil.
so the Internet is Pandora's box? The church said the same thing about the Gutenberg press; especially after it published Luther's 95 Edits!
When it published the first pornographic novel in 1516 by Aretino it was made forever.
To become the sensational thing of future centuries. Literature became the rage.
The devil always wins but for the benefit of Humanitas. Freedom of conscience is no free lunch.
Interesting article. I liked it.
I have long thought that Libertarians should spend more time educating people why it makes sense rather than trying to force people to feel the pain of their wrong decisions from day one.
Ongoing, direct feedback for screwy decisions is always good, but people need the basics first.
everyone chill out, have faith and hope...the invisible hand will sort it all out...everything...
God? Is that you?
As I remeber the teachings of Karl Marx, capitalism is brought down by overproduction swamping effective demand.
Stay tuned.
I think it good to scrutinize everything!
No matter how wicked the messenger if a given message is factual then it's factual.
Growth inevitably leads to overproduction. If you go back and look into US history you'll see that a lot of "opening" of markets abroad was to: 1) Gain access to cheap resourcesl 2) Create dumping markets.
I would really like to hear how capitalism can manage in a long-term depressionary enviornment, what kinds of ways in which it (as though it's a "living thing") can survive the pressures of massive struggle without being shit-canned (as all the snake-oil salesmen make all sorts of promises for things that can never be delivered, except "in the future" [which never happens]).
So, it all boils down to the issue of growth. People just don't seem to want to discuss this aspect. Ignoring growth means no hope for establish a solid fundamental base.
And so it is. Demand absolutely positively must never be satisfied by supply. There must always be the poor, the needy, the have nots.
Look what happened when demand for houses was being met. Huge financial crisis. Melt down. The value of the houses dropped below the mortgage values. Almost killed the entire system. They had to bulldoze thousands of houses to reduce the supply.
This Meyerson asshole needs his ass kicked. Fuck these people.
Fuck Bernake. Fuck Yellen. Fuck Bush, Fuck Greenspan. Fuck Obama. Fuck Dimon. Fuck Blankfein. Fuck Uncle Sam. Fuck them all, fuck green eggs and ham.
-Dr. Seuss
Jesse Myerson is a ginormous hypocrite and well known commie total nutjob. He is one reason the OWS movement devolved into disgraceful choas with crabs and herpes. Myerson should voluntarily and immediately give up all his possessions to the state and practice what he preaches. But Gulagheads like him won't because they don't even believe their own shit.
Another cluck is Tom Friedman, of NYT, who said two years ago we should become more like Communist China. Said democracy is too slow and messy for Obama and the elites to deal with. Thing is, Friedman is set for life -- he is married to a woman who inherited a billion dollars from her father who built strip malls all over America. Friedman's carbon footprint is probably bigger than the city of Miami (you can google an ariel view of their huge mansion) but thinks everyone else should just burn candles to keep warm.
Karl Marx was a pedophile and a mooch who never worked a day in his life. He mooched off of Engels who, in turn, mooched off of his rich parents. a 19th century failed kooky idea that officially died in the 20th century. Not even the Chinese believe in communisim anymore.
Yeah, Northern Europe is suffering horribly under the yoke of socialism. With the highest standards of living, health and happiness in the world.
But with our mighty "capitalist utopia" we lead the Western world in... crime, murder, and incarceration rates. And we got football. (The dumbest sport in the world?)
Did you know that fat people are happier with ther body than people who exercise?
Huh?
I get "exercise" around my farm. I'm not "fat," and I'm fine with my body (even though it's regularly banged up and getting old [still in better physical shape than an overwhelming majority of people]).
In other words, people with low expectations (Europeans) will be more satisfied than people with higher expectations (Americans).
Right, I forgot about American exceptionalism. My god man! This is how the Oligarchs keep us barefoot and dumb.
Free markets work every time. When you do not have Law Enforcement of the business class and corruption as we see today, you end up with 'crony capitalism' or a version of fascism.
I understand your frustration, but rhetorical warfare does no good.
What free markets that work every time are you referring to? I must have missed them in all their glory.
You can only have a true free market if humans are rational actors in that market.
I think we all know better.
You think wrong, when the numbers of corrupt individuals overwhelms the innocents, you are not out gunned, but are out manned. You soon shall see just how large a sinner you is.
So you have the human condition all figured out?
Northern Europe, like other socalist nations, suffers the typical set of problems. Near zero or negative birth rates (So they can pay for their government-funded ponzi programmes to run), very hard to maintain a small business/large companies get lots of government protections just to keep jobs, influx of immigrants destroying national culture (See reason for near zero/negative birth rates), no morality or sense of religious purpose, ideas/businesses rarely come out of their countries, high public/private debts although they have higher savings than the rest of Europe, and other reasons relating to free human movement/thinking/pursuit of happiness (owning a business, buying/exploiting property, etc.) without being taxed to death.
roadlust, you were doing so good, then you went and threw football under the bus
You are an idiot. All of Europe has suffered with socialism. They had the national socialism of Germany, Italy and Spain. They had the Soviet Socialism of the Russians. You want to say they were the happiest and healthiest? Currently, the PIIGS of Europe have narrowly avoided collapse and may yet do so taking the rest down with them. All of Europe is dependent on a prosperous USA which puts up with their selve serving bullshit protection. I have a brother in Switzerland. They have a completely different lifestyle financed by what you would probably call the "oligarchs" of the world. It is an artificial economy and you had better make six figures to enter.
Europe does as well as it does in any place because of the greater liberty they have allowed, not because of the greater government. Most, like Sweden have had to seriously reform their libertine socialism because it was breaking the piggy bank and creating permanent dependent classes. Anyone remember Thatcher and Britain? Privatized coal mining and a dozen other things before it sunk the island.
Yours is a romantic hopeful view that does not bear out.
Cluster fucks never improve the human condition.
marx was a bankster tool....they hired him to write all of his vacuous drivel so that they could invent the boogeyman of 1000 wars.....banksters laugh everytime the trogladyte right wing neocons, nazi republicans and nazi democrats call for another war to make the world safe for democracy , or safe from communism, or safe from terrorism or some ism they have invented for making war....and communism was until 1991 that catalyst for bankster control of amerika...the red menace while they were planting at home in the form of the fed, homeland security, fema, and other gestapo organizations.
now terrorism has supplanted communism as the bankster's (rockefeller nazis, bush crime syndicate's) favorite tool for whipping up the under 120 iq morons into a rabid lather for another war to make someone safe from the something...oh yes, attacking someone with nuclear weapons as was done at the fallujah and in lebanon is the patriotic thing to do...
On planet q99x2 we are not ruled by anything. Somebody fucks up we kill them.
No one has screwed up in recent memory.
At one time we had a government to administer the rule of law. That ended disasterously when everyone became the enemy of the government.
I tend to think about the traffic in Manila as a "teaching aid." Well, when I see asshole drivers I think how great it would be to drop them smack in the middle of Manila's traffic to see just how hot-shit they are! OK, anyway...
What I marvelled at was that in the outskirts (of the downtown core) traffic signs were pretty much just suggestive: they do have cops scattered here and there, but only so many intersections, and they don't control what happens all over leading up to them. People would drive (car, jeepney, motorcycle, pedicab, bicycle you name it) anywhere and everywhere- total chaos! But, if people obeyed all traffic signs things would back up and just stop. And pedestrians didn't just casually stroll across the street with some near-dare to hit them; no, folks paid attention, rushed here and there to remove themselves from harms way as quickly and attentively as possible: this was the same way people operated motor vehicles and bicycles. People were PAYING ATTENTION to their surroundings. Sure, folks are all everwhere texting, but they seem to manage and to understand that texting is secondary.
And it was in Manila where I met my "match." Rode with one taxi driver (of many) that was the only person I can say could out-drive me! I'm still thinking that I'm dead and all of this is a dream, that we really didn't make it past that veering bus and the other traffic, but... My thought after this adventure was that I needed to rob a bank and that this person would be the getaway driver and that he couldn't be caught!
Go to forced motorcycle driver training in any state that requires it. When you graduate you are minimally qualified to make a few circles around the parking lot. You then go out in traffic and die. In Florida Motorcycle riding schools have become a high dollar industry creating extra income for motorcycle cops and "rights advocates" receiving state money?
Hello, Fed, ECB & BOJ, et al., are you listening?
"A system bereft of economic calculation (aka economic planning) can no(t) allocate scarce resources efficiently....the only reason it ... did... was that the COMECON planners were able to observe the price system in the capitalist countries"
Or maybe CUSIP ids in the secondary market????
Do you think RS will roll out a 2+ hour apology between now and Monday? We can watch the new Marxgate term used to explained concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin.
ah for fucks sake..........
Again, Pater can lash out at this but yet he's incapable of answering the problems inherent in his belief system. Really, that people are spending their time here lashing out at Karl Marx, at the Rolling Stone for having an article about Marx?
Brings hits to ZH...
No introspection, it's always someone else, some other "system" that's to blame...
This guy sounds like he's trying to turn back the hands of time 40 years and debate Noam Chomsky. All the while turning a blind eye to the horrors of free market capitalism and what it's done to this country. I smell the rotten odor of nervous sweat pouring out of him with each keystroke as he desparately tries to ignore the tens of millions who've lost their jobs, the thousands of factories of closed, while he decries the evils of (gasp) protectionism. He should be scared and nervous. You put enough people out of work, make enough people homeless, and hungry, and you will get a storming of the hedge privets at Marthas. Occupy made some fundamental mistakes embracing Marxist socialism when a much better idea would have been to hybridize the platform of National Socialism (i.e., exclude race and keep all the other platform points) and call for the creation of an American Nationalist Party. Anyone with the vision and guts to create such a party would quickly form a union between the lefties of Occupy and the Righties of Tea Party. Then watch the tired, tendentitious, 50 year obliquy of cold war fhetoric falls flat on its fucking face. Free market carpetbaggers trying to suck the last bit of juice out of this dying system have every reason to fear and tremble. They're going down.
BTW: Modify a couple of points in the Occupy platform and they work quite well and are economic and sensible. Namely:
That's a starter kit of platform points for the ANP.
Most excellent.
More artificial man made systems to be put on our head. Who will run this, who will decide who is disabled, the national health services? What happens if you don't work, do they come haul you away to a "work camp" or let you starve? We have laws that cover most of your issues except they have been expanded or corrupted to become meaningless. We used to have manageable immigration but that was expanded and the borders received a blind eye. Everything you suggest we used to have. Everyone worked....they had to or starved. But you want a centrally controlled government to make us do the right thing instead of allowing a society to exist that actually incentivises doing the right thing by allowing them to actually experience the consequences of choosing poorly. Maybe instead of trying to make a world safe for idiots we should have a world where reality is embraced and the delusion of utopia is laughed at.
The only thing I liked was "guaranteed work". Work is rewarding and it is important for people to work. You should have replaced unemployment checks (which do not require work) with a government jobs program in 2008. Get people to work for a limited time on the government's tab instead of sending them a check and telling them to conduct a hopeless search. I think it would have fixed the economy faster.
The first thing you do is stop the bleeding. There's no point in trying help the patient to a full recovery if he's hemmoraghing blood. Wrest control away from the IBs and the Fed. First step. De-tank, de-plane and de-warship the MIC and stop all foreign colonial wars (like the one we just stopped in Syria). Stop closing down factories. End free trade. You have to do that first before you can start putting people back to work.
wow, burning planet. my new favorite ZHer. bringing fight to the temple.
But the people in power like it just the way it is. It's not accidental. It has taken years of careful manipulation to get the state where it is now.
Then you end up paying for labor the private sector should be payng for. Not that, that isn't happening already.
Yeah, that's the problem, and a judgement can be made as to what is appropriate. You risk creating more guys like this.
For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Ah that lovely wonderful system where everybody gets the same socialist / communist rubbish.
Don't work mankind is only where it is today because it advances and by advancing there must be a reward for progress. For this definition to continue there must be a high and a low position where if you fail to make the grade you do not achieve the loftiest of heights CALL IT A BANKSTER BONUS!
The thing is we even screwed up this so simple a system, where those at the top can never fail TBTF! That would have then relegated them for not being good enough to a lower level and let somebody else do the job, voila we have progress. Economically the system has been hijacked by a load of parasites who should have failed and they still get the BANKSTER BONUS.
The current system now breaks all of the simple concepts above and now we have crony capitalism that really is just a parastical system. Then others present the opposite crap of all being equal WHERE IF EVERYBODY HAD THE SAME AT THE SAME INSTANT EVERYBODY WOULD REALISE THEY WERE POOR! Certain stagnation that way.
Mr Elite, you are the problem, you failed and only by self legislated income streams do you now get to be TBTF whereby you should have lost and somebody else taken over. This is the blockage / denial of human progress and to break out of the parasitical system we now have as a species they have to be removed them so we can progress once more. On such a sweet cushty number however they are not going to go quietly neither and now as they continually crush the population to keep them in the lifestyle they believe they are entitled too drives the thoughts of revolt.
By achieving this position it has to be broken to allow the progress to continue and it is almost like mankind is doomed to repeat it over and over. Mankind will keep fucking up forever a dumbass species.
YOU CAN DOWN VOTE ME ALL YOU WANT LEFT AND RIGHT SHEEP BECAUSE THE ONLY SYSTEM THAT WILL WORK IS THE ONE OUTLINED ABOVE break that you are fucked either way.
Trying to assure equality of outcome is impossible.
Pretending to protect "equal opportunity" is a fraud.
Every individual must pay the price demanded by their conduct or get another to pay for them.
Isn't the opposit of ' free market' - 'central plannification?
And the opposit of 'libertarian' (democratie?) - socialisme (communism)?
This Von Mises lecture affirms the same thing as Marxism : Economics is the modern day philosopher's stone.
Starting from this PREMISE, which is debatable in itself BTW, Marx demonstrated that all Capitalism has done is to EXACERBATE the Class War in Society; in its evolution from tribal form to Imperial form under Caesar, then to Feudal form under divine rights king and Pope; aka Charles Magnus construct, then to Nation state form; by using the INORDINATE leverage that industrial technology has put at rich man's disposal when married to the Money thread.
So Marx maintained that industrial evolution gave the NEW rentier feudal oligarchy huge leverage to use and exploit the new industrial serfs in order to make capitalist profit by debasing more and more the value of human labour all through the industrial chain using the Ricardo comparitive advantage principle applied to cheap colonial labour arb. : from extraction of RM to the finished product in the market and then on to R&D and next round of further capitalistic specialisation and monopoly exploitation of the human resource meme. In the final analysis Capital is nothing but storage of higher class labour in technology to exploit lower class labour in manual tasks. But its 100% labour input; that is the basic tenet of Marxist philosophy.
IMO that is factually pretty close to our current reality over the two and half century time line of industrial age.
By and large, as the current crisis has shown, as all the previous capitalist bubbles have also shown, this crisis of capitalism translates itself into bubble formation either of material overproduction of industrial goods or of hyper inflation of paper asset classes in all its forms.
In a market where oligarchy or monopoly strong arm plays increasingly dominate; like we see today with the TBTF cabal.
The end of the road for each cycle of boom and bust seems the same : capital uses labour to the bone if left to its own unshackled rentier desires, as the neoliberal rampage of the last thirty years of Reaganomics cum NWO have shown.
Time and again we see these bubbles form and society then trudges down the road to Armageddon. The SAME serfs who served the production chain as labour arb. slaves now serve again as canon fodder. Rinse and repeat.
To close the chapter on MArx : his analysis of reducing the conundrum to ONE issue; that of CLASS war; is too MAnichean; his solution worse than the disease. History has proven that, and within the democratic non totalitarian Marxist construct, since the October Revolution, the division between capital and labour found another compromise in the welfare state construct.
What does Von Mises have to offer that Keynes did not to extract humanity from this infernal cycle that is now destroying the planet?
Welfare state construct was a reasonable balance between supply side power elites and demand side lower echelon deniers in society ( the 20/80 split now gone viral to 0.01%/99.99%).
This is where the limits of the Economic philosophical meme shows its limits. Power is NOT just about having the best economic paradigm. Its about USING it for SPECIFIC objectives; a MEANS to an END.
ANd... if the END stays : Power to the 1%, aka return to a new neo oligarchy, then where there is a will there will be a way ! Its all about power not economics when push goes to shove!
Some awesome oligarchical spike! Consequences bitchezzz !
Its time for the bottom up heritage of three hundred years of social construct to manifest itself againt this criminal expropriation of POWER. Von Mises is but an irrelevant shaman in this geopolitical domain. This is pure class war now that has been declared on a global scale. Nothing to do with Economia. Tinkering with paper to PMs back up will not solve human nature's willful affirmation that greed is good for us and tuff shit for you !
As for the issue of what is the opposite to Zionism /
...Zionsim is a regression into TRIBAL ethnicity and elitist power behind the Templar religious cum ethnic state that protects the new Jerusalem of OIL.
So its a two component construct. To take down the tribal cum religious component we have History's example; aka the nation state and human rights. Ethnicity and religion do not belong as criteria for elitist power in a nation state. This has been proven in all viable secular minded nation states, whose LAWS reflect that since the Enlightenment of 18 th Century.
Mainstream America has to wake up to this hard historical reality from its current "selfie" slumber.
The other component is PURE geopolitics of Machiavellian nature; aka "might is right" Pax Americana plays since fifty+ years to protect selfishly the OIL monarchies and western priviliged access to its fount of cheap densified energy.
It will die as all empires do and we see it right before our eyes. Pax AMericana does not enlighten the world community in its current form; quite the contrary.
People don't relize that when you stop short of getting your doctorite, you are no longer interested in helping society as a whole. You now become one of the crapitolists who wants to pay for everything, with just the one job. But in order to do so you must make a killing at everything which passes through your hands. We've turned into a kill or be killed society which never has ended well, and won't this time either.
"Kill or be killed society" is one where Rule of law, as guaranteed by State and its Constitution, has been hijacked by crony politicians who decreed in libertarian rage of 1981 that " THe Only Rules are there are no Rules!"...
The legacy of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, as applied to the financial sector; the opposite having been decreed for the salaried sector, as Unions were disbanded and factories asset stripped and outsourced
THese situations just don't happen by CHANCe. These situations are CREATED by ambition gone mad, as Power is NEVER exercised innocently but by DESIGN.
A fish always rots from the head.
"In a market where oligarchy or monopoly strong arm plays increasingly dominate; like we see today with the TBTF cabal.
The end of the road for each cycle of boom and bust seems the same : capital uses labour to the bone if left to its own unshackled rentier desires, as the neoliberal rampage of the last thirty years of Reaganomics cum NWO have shown."
TBTF, To big to prosecute, to big to hold accountable. One must read anything from "mises" very closely and watch for the circular word games. Also compare to Adam Smith.
"Trickle down economics" meant the exact opposite as we see today. A totalitarian government by any name is a totalitarian government.
The pendulmn swings back and forth back and forth. As the commenter below asserts, "it is all about power". Nothing more, nothing less. Anytime you seek power politics, philosophy, theories, ideolgy, idealism ................ takes a back seat to personal gain as other puppet masters pervert all and name it a "grand plan".
RESIST the power hungry whereever they may come from and whatever they may profess to believe.
They actually do not require a force of law. They require terms of trade and the absence of force. Trade is only by agreement. Governments get in the way and begin torturing the whole process.
The only people who like Marxism are idiots who have never lived under it, or sociopaths who wish to derive Power from it.
You just described a good 70+% of the population.
The socialism mantra is mainstream already. I hear it from east coast based media all the time. The weirdest sources are financial media, like Bloomie and Marketwatch. I guess the pie in the sky bullshit just sells itself.
Very nice article. I'll make one comment:
"How much ignorance there is regularly becomes evident by things such as e.g. the enduring popularity of protectionism (it is almost as though consumers enjoy harming themselves)."
I'm not sure that people like to harm themselves. It's much more common for their political leaders to obfuscate the subject and only ever mention the apparent advantages of protectionist policies whilst ignoring the very many downsides for the consumer.
Chief among these are: a) the nation's big money is almost always supportive of protectionist policies because it allows them to reduce investment in productivity and b) to charge higher prices for their 2nd quality goods in domestic markets. A win-win for domestic corporates. The consumer only gets told that protectionism protects jobs. Of course they support it without realising that their choice of goods is limited and far more expensive.
Brazil is one of the most protectionist countries and protects its domestic industries by a very complex array of import taxes. Of course all this is from full-in-your-face-socialism. The population has not woken up.
In the face of mercantilism, protectionism is warranted. Where yiou have america, china, asia, germany et al trying to export their way to wealth through currency manipulation and subsidies,it's perfectly reasonable to stick some tarriffs in the way to even things up.
Or put another way. Everyone is trying to cheat.
Exactly. This is not some theoretical bullshit game. There never has been a real "free market" and there never will. The market is always being manipulated. Stop with the circle-jerk adulation of Von Mises. This is how the Oligarchs win.
Either that or it's the vise-versa circle thing.
And ultimately it ends the same: War.
It is the cycle of survival: I, You, We, They.
Good point ... but ...
The example I gave for Brazil (import taxes) is way above any justification to "even things up".
Brazil operates a very complex set of protectionist policies imposed by its socialist government (first Lula, now Roussef), supported by industrialists and big money and justified by the govt to "protect jobs". This results in a serious lack of choice for consumers.
As I alluded to, this not only makes imported goods VERY expensive - 2 or 3 times the price of outside of Brazil is normal, even where there are no Brazilian produced equivalents - it also drives up locally produced product prices for the reasons I described.
Why would a manufacturer of widgets in Brazil choose to invest money to improve the design/quality of his products to world class standards when he can simply feed the government with bribes and brown envelopes to maintain high import taxes to kill the competition? There are plenty of examples of foreign companies not setting up business in Brazil because of import taxes and other regulations.
Brazil goes even further: when a Brazilian travels abroad and uses his credit card to buy stuff at far lower prices, a 6% transaction tax is imposed by the Brazilian government.
It was a Guardian journalist who described Brazil as "the world's most corporatist economy". Corporatism being the merger of socialist politics with big money, as we saw in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany.
Brazil's socialist government has achieved the dual goals of a) some of the lowest wages possible and b) some of the highest prices possible. It is no wonder that many millions of Brazilians live permanently on revolving credit. IE they have become debt slaves.
Well, said smacker. I have some Brazillian friends and they will tell you parts of this, yet the favor leftist positions here in the USA. There is no real cure for economic ignorance.
Many others here talk about protectionism being necessary in the real world of trade. This is not quite true.
Protectionism should be thought of as a form of economic war. That is what it actually is. It attempts to fix the economic game for the benefit of the home country and those connected to the rulers in that country. In the "free" USA we keep sugar at three times world price to make Florida happy and the voters of the soon to be third largest state.
What I would like our dear Congress to do is recognize economic war for what it is. Then you make choices as to whether you will fight or ignore it. I will say, like war, when you engage in it you take lots of casualties yourself. You cannot engage in economic war without hurting yourself, as well.
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Aye.
Brazilians have bought into socialist trash economics, hook, line and sinker. When it all comes crashing down - as it surely will - they'll be in despair and vote for even more socialism. They're mostly incapable of understanding free market economics.
Seems to me the only justification for protectionism is for a limited period while their own industry gets its act together. Rouseff needs to put the industrialists and big money on notice that protectionism will be lifted incrementally over a 3-5 year period.
But she can't do it; they'll screw her PT party, and stop handing over brown envelopes stuffed with cash.
Agreed, Smacker. I would also add that Statism always comes with corruption. I talked to someone who gave me the inside story on lobbying in the good ole USA. It comes with brown envelopes that come after the speeches. They are never given to the Senator or Congressman directly and have no fingerprints on them. It is not everyone, but enough.
It is sad in a way because people unwittingly support their own oppression.
And we contributed to their agenda when we paid Brazilian cotton farmers not to plant cotton.
Industrial Workers of the World.
The IWW.
Also known as 'I Won't Work'.
Hapeas corpus Mr Jesse Meyerson. I know where the body is buried. I'm sure we can find room for you in the grave, to commune with the fallacious and the damned your idol Mr Marx. However, due to escalating costs of accommodating the intellectually challenged, my village will require substantial monetary compensation that your heirs may reclaim on their VAT rebate when exiting to return or is that roll as a stone to your native domicile.
Protectionist thought is put forward by any number of DC politicians on each and every day. Its likely one of the more populist of ideas of economic idiocy infecting this country today. Even here at zerohedge there's a relatively large minority of commenters that will propound protectionism in any number of ways. Yes, economic ignorance is all the rage in this country. Sigh!
part of being a man is protecting what's yours, duuude
and protecting the rights of others with the hope that yours t will be protected.
Was it economic ignorance when we funded almost our entire government with protectionist import tarrifs, prior to creation of the Fed? We were comparitively debt free and had a trade surplus. Today we only tarrif domestic manufacturers through corporate taxation and seldom tarrif any imports. Should we wonder where all our jobs went? Èven if a trade war were to stop all trade, given we run a year after year trade deficit, would it not be a net positive? Please enlighten my ignorance.
Marxism doesn't merely fail. It DESTROYS -- economically, financially, morally, spiritually, and eventually, militarily!
Socialism should be banished from politics as it is not politics. It is a proto religion based on faith and not on fact or reality. It should also be classed as a crime against humanity, as proponents are fully aware it does not work, and seek to socialy engineer people to make them fit with their socialist system. If they can't be engineered via beatings, prison or rape - http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-sexual-revolution-and-..., then they get murdered. Thats what happened in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Burma etc etc
Absolutely a religion, based on faith in a theory of an elevated humanity that casts off all human traits that until this time we have been burdened with. Further it is a religion that can tolerate no other, which places it firmly in the ranks with all other religions. There is only one true God and it is the State. The State shall decide who gets what and when, what is just and what is to be cast out. And only those who are privy to the voice of God..er..the State can speak for him/them. This may be part of the reason the left has such empathy for radical muslims as no other religion comes as close to the strict orthodoxy of Marx. Non believers end up re-educated or dead.
hello I am for socialism because I am a loser and jealous that you have a better life please give me what you produce and work harder so there will be more for me and BTW eat shit and die
is this the basic idea?
I want to congratulate the author on an excellent article.....I teach economics and have written articles for mises.org. I wish this article was republished everywhere...congratulations! you deserve it!
As he stated. they are coming out of the woodwork. Wait until one big name goes on TV and tells everyone they are in CPUSA.
Progressives=communists=socialist=NWO
We'll then that big name gets to relinquish their wealth to the peons and suffer like the rest.
Makes (for the big elite winners) perfect sense, with perfect timing of announcement.
We had trickle down economics, endless war and deregulation stratifying wealth and valuable holdings into fewer and fewer hands. Now that that is accomplished, we get communism imposed through democratic choice between narrowly defined options presented to us in order to lock in that stratification.
Genius........... not only does the middle class continue to shrink, it disappears entirely, with no chance of return. It's back to feudalism with fiefdoms organized under one world domination of the new nobility.
Meet the new domination, same as the old domination. Nothing new under the sun kiddies, civilization has been here before.
Middle class does not disappear.
It becomes the government class as in
Italy, France, England, Argentina, Japan.....
Say what you like about Communism as a econ/political system but you have to admit they had a snappy sing-a-long tune to go with it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpvwh292VKI
Heelllooo-we are living with the results of 0bozo & Co. socialist experiment right now!
How's it working out-record levels of real unemployed, record debt, the only thing keeping the economy going is the Fed pumping fiat into the system. A virtual police state (n$@, etc.) IrS used as a political weapon; daily propaganda lies from the WH and media. (remember Pravda and Isvestia?)
Record people on welfare, and the cherry on the top is the totally f-ed up 0bamacare. Those who fail to learn from history are indeed doomed to repeat it. Are these fuckheads at Rollingstone blind, ignorant or both?
PS: as most of you know, we haven't had real capitalism in the USSA for quite a while.
"Heelllooo-we are living with the results of 0bozo & Co. socialist experiment right now!"
The economy crashed in 2008. The New Deal came about from the crash in 1930. Amazing how history rhymes.
Another good way to remind folks is stuff like this "Hipster/Diversity Hitler" vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiIAjI7W96Q
ALL THE *JARGON* TO CATCH THE YOUNG'S ATTENTION...with the message banging them over the head again and again.
While communism is retarded, so is giving a private cartel the monopoly power to create money. Unlimited leverage anyone?
It's your work and promisary note that has *value*. All the bank does is publish a list of your indebtedness. Money = debt, if more ciruclation is required, it can only come about by issuing more debt. All your productive effort will in the end be owed back to the bank.
Without "geenbacks" or continentals *the USA would not exist*. Think. Of. That. The European powers laughed at the nascent USA since it had no real money or gold to pay for war.
So what if a system is simillar to that employed by the third Reich. Is this article some sort of playground debate. Someone in the bad country did so and so, so it must be bad...neeeah...neeah?
By that argument we should stop using rocket power, free-ways, the Heisenberg uncertainty theory, paid holidays and social welfare? Please stop using the simplistic term "Hitler" - he was just one totalitarian man; so did all Germans become retarded the minute he came to power? If he came to power in the USA, would all Americans (including the author) and everything they did become retarded? What's retarded is the low level rhetoric being used in the article.
We should all remember that a Central Bank is one of the planks of the Communist Manifesto.
Centralized everything!
“Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man's human existence.”
The writer assumes from the get go that few understand the obvious (unfortunately that may be close:) and he is about to set us all straight.
"We agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. There is little harm in leaving astronomy to astronomers and quantum physics to experts in theoretical physics. With economics it is different, because even though it is supposed to be wertfrei (value-free) as a science, economics necessarily has a political dimension, since politics is all about the acquisition and distribution of property by political (as opposed to economic) means. In other words, economic policy is the main topic around which politics revolves."
Astronomy and physics do not escape economics. This is semantic gobbldey gook designed to look as if it is intellectual. As is most of the rest of it.
"In other words, if Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their followers had only implemented everything according to the precepts of Karl Marx, then things would have been perfectly fine, and the communists would have erected a king of land of Cockaigne."
Under "any" form of totalitarianism the only thing that is fine is the top 1%. THe contollers.
"Socialism is literally impossible as Mises has already proved in 1920."
If one read Adam Smith they did not have to wait on the "wisdom" (?) of Ludwig.
Jesse A. Myerson, is a douche bag, is no leader and hero. But Occupy and Tea Party are lighting rods and are good to throw into articles. Many in Occupy were only looking for accountability. Unfortuanately it, like the "tea Party," became a circus.
"Not surprisingly, Myerson has become a target of ridicule all over the media landscape by now."
Which contradicts his own premise that "communism" is widely popular.
"It is more important to challenge the ideas propagated by Myerson on theoretical grounds than by merely citing historical events."
I repeat, Myerson is a douche. Using his name to state that theory should take precedence over history is intellectual dishonersty. In other words suspend historical facts and believe my theories.
This article could have used capitalism or whatever in place of the term communism and still been crap. Because crap by another name....................
ECONOMICS is the creation of WHAT .... POLITICS decides who get WHAT...Therein lies the conflict.
They keep conflating "morals" with "accounting."
Most all of this based on the idea that regardless of the value that you provide as a worker, you are "entitled" to a job.