Slashdot Mirror
Greek Government Abruptly Shuts Down State Broadcaster
An anonymous reader writes "The Greek government shut down broadcasting of all TV and radio channels operated by the state-owned broadcaster ERT at midnight local time, with police ejecting journalists and other employees occupying the building. The above link is a prominent Greek economics professor's (and Valve's in-house economist) analysis of the political motivations for the move."
I wonder if that means lower taxes...
This particular article's summary just states the facts. There is no stated point-of-view in the summary! All Slashdot submissions must have a POV! Please, Help! tell me what to think! Heeeeelp!
That's kind of weird. We hear about governments shutting down all broadcast media other than state-owned media so often that the opposite is just...bizarre...
What's the rest of Greece's commercial broadcast media like? What was this organization like? The only analogues I have are NPR and PBS for "state owned" and that's not necessarily entirely accurate, and that private broadcast media here in the US is often very, very heavily biased, even moreso when they make claims to the contrary.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Most European counties have state television next to commercial television. This nothing to do with capitalism and in most cases state television (or state funded independent television) is more objective and has more integrity. For educational and cultural productions, news and documentaries this is very noticeable.
The problem in Greece is mainly due to lack of involvement of the government and too much uncontrolled capitalism.
i should tell you that i feel very happy about that decision
* They said that the "ERT tax" on power bills will be over (it was about 10-30% of the bill, depending on the size of the bill, believe it or not!)
* In the same time that they ask for minimum wage to be lower than 500euros/month, they were hiring journalists with ten times this wage in order to control them. You can read about that in Varoufakis blog.
The problem in Greece is mainly due to lack of involvement of the government and too much uncontrolled capitalism.
This is sarcasm right? It's kind of like looking at a car with a flat and claiming the problem is that the driver hasn't punctured the other three tires too. Greece didn't get into the mess it is in by unfettering capitalism, a thing incidentally that it has yet to do.
ERT was a House Of Corruption. It should have been shut down years ago.
Not only was it a propaganda station, but it was also full of employees that did not have a job description, but they were employed by politicians in order to vote for them.
2500 employees for 3 channels and 1 radio station.
Considering how often we the people in the US have our own votes stolen, I'm a bit miffed you would say they deserve what they get.
State-owned television is too transparent.
Better to have state-licensed, state-influenced, and state-monitored television... It's clearly much more effective.
Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.
... John Adams
Have you? There's lack of regulation in Greece. Multinationals and companies do whatever they like, for example you may find a piece of furniture in IKEA for 100e while the same piece in France costs 40e and the average salary is 30-40% more. Same goes for food, electronics and other stuff. Despite the crisis everything remains insanely expensive in greece and the government is too corrupt and disfunctional to do anything about it
Yeah, because capitalism solves every problem, especially insolvency. Just like magic, right? As opposed to people, especially the rich, actually paying their taxes. That clearly won't accomplish anything because that would be socialism, right?
Captcha: cuckoo.
Indeed.
What kind of regulation would solve this? Companies are allowed to sell their products for whatever they want in every EU country.
And here we have a perfect example of (one of the reasons) why Greece has the problems it has.
People so convinced that the are owed more of everything as to think that goods being sold by
private companies can be price fixed by the government so they can afford them.
Hint: if people are not buying them, the companies will lower the price if they want to sell them, its
called supply and demand.. if people want the products, the price will rise.
Surely you are not going to try and convince us IKEA somehow has a monopoly on furniture that it is
somehow using to force people to pay high prices?
The 'problem' with free markets is people reap what they (and their governments) sow, and greece
has done a lot of sowing over the last few decades (as have many other countries).
Hint: if you want a higher quality of living, you have to be either smarter, or harder working, or willing
to sacrifice more natural resources than others - not always pleasant, just a FACT.
The problem in Greece is mainly due to lack of involvement of the government and too much uncontrolled capitalism.
This is sarcasm right? It's kind of like looking at a car with a flat and claiming the problem is that the driver hasn't punctured the other three tires too. Greece didn't get into the mess it is in by unfettering capitalism, a thing incidentally that it has yet to do.
No, endemic levels of tax evasion (come on, you honestly expect me to believe you had no idea Greece was a tax haven) mixed with equally endemic levels of corruption means that Greece's tax revenues have consistently fallen below expectation. So even when the Greek minister balanced the books, the companies in Greece simply didn't pay tax.
It was cheaper to pay off the tax collector than to pay tax. Essentially companies could do what they wanted as long as they kept the right palms greased (which is cheap for any multinational).
Next thing you're going tell me is that your shocked that some Thai girl offered to have sex with you in Bangkok when prostitution is illegal in Thailand.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Didn't investing in Goldman Sachs toxic assets contribute to their problems?
The problem in Greece seems to be an artificial scarcity of money imposed by the EU central bank and the IMF. The solution is to get out of the EU and stimulate individuals to innovate with a basic income, and challenges.
I didn't bring the argument of capitalism into this. The blog post linked in TFA did. Further, the public channels are described as nothing more than a mouth-piece for propaganda - blacklisting voices of dissent - how does this even come close to the picture you paint of "more objective"/"more integrity"? Lastly, no. The Greek crisis was not an issue of rampant capitalism.
Only on
That's a pretty harsh strawman you've put together there. There's a minute a mile between "this isn't working" and "the opposite must be true." It's the realm of rational debate.
On the off chance you're not trolling, but actually looking for a response, here it is: No, I don't think that a single public company turned private would solve the Greek crisis. Nor do I think that the public sector is entirely to blame. But there are two approaches to dealing with revenue shortages. One of them is spending less money. A public television network is hardly the greatest need in a country torn apart by riots - literally the poster child of a EU-style failure. Is that a bash against socialism? Not unless you're contending that public television is the essential form of socialist infrastructure.
So no, not magic. Just common sense. When you're poor, stop spending money on non-essentials. A few people have pointed out that there was/is corruption of an insane degree, cutting into tax collection and undermining the budget. That's not really a counter to my OP. Saying that you've failed in enforcing the law isn't an argument against a free market. It's an argument against continuing to employ your inept police force.
Only on
The problem in Greece seems to be an artificial scarcity of money imposed by the EU central bank and the IMF. The solution is to get out of the EU and stimulate individuals to innovate with a basic income, and challenges.
By EU, I think you mean the Eurozone, which is not the same thing as the EU. The UK, for instance, is in the EU but not in the Eurozone seeing as we still have our own currency.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
In TFA, Varoufakis talks about the value of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, or ERT to Greece.
In light of the well publicised financial problems faced by the government in Greece today, can Greece affored to keep it open?
The government's excuse is thus :-
Government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou – a former state TV journalist – described ERT as a "haven of waste". He said its employees would be compensated.
Kedikoglou said in a televised statement aired on the state broadcaster: "At a time when the Greek people are enduring sacrifices, there is no room for delay, hesitation or tolerance for sacred cows.
"ERT is a typical example of unique lack of transparency and incredible waste. And that ends today," Kedikoglou said. "It costs three to seven times as much as other TV stations and four to six times the personnel – for a very small viewership, about half that of an average private station."
ERT has long been seen as a bastion of quality programming in a media landscape dominated by commercial stations. But it was also used by successive governments to provide safe jobs for political favourites, and, while nominally independent, devoted considerable time and effort to showcasing administration policies.
Source here
Granted the government's self-interest is to spin this story in their favour, but unless they are lying, given the fact that there are more urgent public sector needs that need to be met (eg. hospitals, food kitchens etc) the reasons they gave seem fairly reasonable in the circumstances.
Ok so here's a bigger picture of what led to the shut down.
1) The ERT (National Radio) was a way for decades for the goverment to reward supporters with well-payed tenured jobs.
2) As a result, there are hundreds of people working there who get payed for menial tasks.
3) The Troika has demanded that about 2500 people working for the public sector will be fired before the end of June. 150.000 before the end of 2014.
4) A large privatisation programme that was a requirement from the Troika to continue the Greek bail out failed on Monday (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jun/10/greek-gas-supplier-selloff-gazprom )
As a result shutting down ERT hits two birds with one stone: It allows them to fire more than the minimum 2500 that was required, and also distracts the public opinion from mondays failure that is sure to bring more austerity measures. The goverment claims that the shutdown was justified because of the corruption and thriftlessness of the organization, while the governing party was the one that helped create them.
You mean, covering shortages by printing money can possibly have a positive effect? That's news to me.
The EU works hard to help Greece here, and to stop the politicos' attempts to give handouts right during a collapse (like your average CEO, all they think about is short-term gains). If you're facing an incoming bankruptcy, the solution is not to go on another spending spree.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Don't blame the EU for not throwing even more money into that bottomless abyss, if you want to blame the EU and international finance, blame them for not shutting off the free money 20 years ago when the debt was still manageable.
I do not speak Greek or are able to evaluate the quality of the public TV-station there, but I know that in Germany the public TV plays an important role in fighting dumb TV for the masses with some of their information programs (even though they also provide shows which can only be watched if you had a lobotomy, just like the US TV ;-)). So from that point of view, I think this is a bad move for Greece. The Greek should start a new public TV station funded by the public and controlled by a council where every group of the Greek population has a seat in (no payments) and they have to agree on consensus on elections for directors. that will realize an independent media house, which is in high demand in Greece (and the rest of Europe).
BTW: I personally do not like the way Greece have been treated by the rest of the EU, especially Merkel, but I also think, they should get rid of their present politicians and demand more public influence in all processes. A little like Switzerland.
... which of course is a government-owned broadcaster, so we're back where we started.
You mean, covering shortages by printing money can possibly have a positive effect? That's news to me.
John Maynard Keynes? Heard of him?
The EU works hard to help Greece here, and to stop the politicos' attempts to give handouts right during a collapse (like your average CEO, all they think about is short-term gains).
In the long run we're all dead.
If you're facing an incoming bankruptcy, the solution is not to go on another spending spree.
This is why the reductions spending have produced such a massive improvement in the Greek economy.
Even the fucking IMF have admitted they were wrong!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jun/05/imf-underestimated-damage-austerity-would-do-to-greece
We find that, in advanced economies, stronger planned fiscal consolidation has been associated with lower growth than expected, with the relation being particularly strong, both statistically and economically, early in the crisis. A natural interpretation is that fiscal multipliers were substantially higher than implicitly assumed by forecasters.
It turns out that cutting 1 euro of government spending shrinks the economy by 1.7 euros, not the 0,5 euros they thought.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
There's some problems here. Countries only have so much power to set pricing, without turning into authoritarian states. Australia, for instance, has long had problems with stuff costing much more there than in the US and other places. For a long time, they just accepted it because of the usual excuses of it being a smaller market (1/10 the population of the US), and the long distance away. However, now with so many digital goods and cheap shipping, it's become glaringly obvious that many sellers are just greedy and inflating prices because they can, such as with digital downloads costing more in Australia than in the US, even though it's the same product and there's no extra cost to provide a download to someone in another country as in the US. The Australian government called many software makers on the carpet to explain this ridiculous state of affairs. As I recall, the software makers didn't have much to say about it in their defense, didn't change the prices, and nothing was done. The government can bitch and complain, but the Australian government is still a western democratic country (probably a constitutional republic like most other such countries), not an authoritarian regime, so like most other places, unless there's some compelling public interest for the government to enact specific regulations or worse, a regulatory system (like they do with public utilities), sellers can charge whatever they want for goods and services. It's not up to the government to look at every business and every item their selling and determine if it's fairly priced or not.
The EU could do it with airlines because airlines are already a heavily regulated industry (being so safety-critical, after all). Furniture sales is not a regulated industry.
Finally, as I understand it, the whole point of the EU was to basically be a trade confederation, where there was free trade between member states, and a common currency, and a few key things done at the EU level, but where the member countries mostly kept their own sovereignty. If you have the EU government setting up regulation for pricing furniture and other such things, then basically you've given up on the idea of member countries having any sovereignty at all, and have decided to make the EU into a single country, just like the US, only worse (our US federal government does not regulate furniture pricing, and AFAIK there's nothing stopping companies from charging 3x as much in stores in Maine as they do in stores in California).
Of course, if it's that much cheaper to buy furniture or other things in other countries than Greece, what's keeping people from setting up new businesses where they buy the stuff from stores in those other countries, then drive it over to Greece and resell it there at a markup smaller than the difference that the original seller has in place? After all, that's exactly what would happen here in the USA if IKEA tried selling stuff at such a severe markup in one state for some weird reason. Heck, you could make a business just advertising IKEA stuff on the internet (without even having any stock), along with appropriate shipping costs, and then when people buy it, you run out to your local IKEA and buy it, then ship it to them.
And here we have a perfect example of (one of the reasons) why Greece has the problems it has. People so convinced that the are owed more of everything as to think that goods being sold by private companies can be price fixed by the government so they can afford them.
The point of regulation is to prevent companies from market manipulation. Companies will naturally move to maximize profits and will, if allowed, perform any action to do so. Competition gets eaten up while at the same time no room is left for new players. Eventually, the market dies.
So regulation is required to facilitate a healthy market. Rules are put in place to ensure that established companies can not prevent competition from entering a market. Limits to what monopolies can do are instigated. Everybody is forced to play fair in an attempt to maximize competition and the benefits of capitalism.
People go on and on about how capitalism and regulation are polar opposites. This is ludicrous. Without regulation the benefits of capitalism do not exist. The invisible hand is an idealized concept which, much like communism, ignores reality and is doomed to failure. A market without sufficient regulation will not optimizes overall efficiency. Of course too much regulation also reduces efficiency - but a certain amount is always required.
So this isn't about the Greek people wanting the government to fix prices - this would obviously not work. It's about opening up the markets that have been sewn shut by the current players. This required effective regulation - far easier said then done.
Next thing you're going tell me is that your shocked that some Thai girl offered to have sex with you in Bangkok when prostitution is illegal in Thailand.
When did that happen? When I spent a year there in the USAF 40 years ago, hookers were respected and honored for their service to society.
Free Martian Whores!
No, supply and demand logic isn't broken at all. If the company found that people on one side of the border are willing to pay more, then that means there's more demand on that side. Simple economics 101 dictates that prices rise with higher demand and a fixed supply. Sounds like everything's working just fine where you are.
If people are that mad about it, what's keeping someone from going to the other side of the border, buying up lots of Nexus 4s, then driving to the other side and reselling them for less than 499EUR?
Which means that shops get less business, which means that more will go bankrupt, which means that more people fall into poverty, etc.
The main problem with austerity is that it creates a death spiral. A government can't save its way out of debt, because every time it cuts spending the economy shrinks even more, cutting income and sending people into poverty. Either Greece stops austerity measures, or there's going to be an open rebellion at some point.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The BBC is not owned by the government. It has a Royal Charter and a Licence and Agreement from the Home Secretary. Parliament set the license fee.
The EU is involved not just the Eurozone. For example, the UK has apparently contributed over twelve billion pounds to Eurozone stabilization.
So this isn't about the Greek people wanting the government to fix prices - this would obviously not work.
But the Greek people have - for a long time - been demanding all sorts of things that obviously don't (and can't) work, and that's why they're in such a mess. Endless entitlement-minded demands from the Nanny State are self destructive, and ... Greece has indeed self destructed.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It turns out that cutting 1 euro of government spending shrinks the economy by 1.7 euros, not the 0,5 euros they thought
So by your logic, setting the tax rate at 100% and giving all that money to whoever pays a cut to the politicians in power, will make us all rich?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
1. It was one of the worst channels on greek TV and I doubt anyone will miss it
2. Since always everyone was complaining about the fee they had to pay for it every month. Saying I dont want to pay for state television is the same as saying it should close down. Now all the people who side with the ones fired from ERT are just a pretentious mass. They didn't support ERT when it was working, now they can't act all high and mighty and on their side because it closed
3. ERT was another corrupted part of the public sector. It was a channel with horrible censorship and with people in higher positions paid more than they should've been. There were more than a few incidents when ERT refused to show things in the news that ALL the other channels were showing. As someone put it "ERT, you weren't there for us when all of that was already happening to us for years now, why should be there for you?"
4. Comparing ERT to the BBC/CNN is a horrible insult for both of these channels. ERT was worse than FOX news and people complaining about how greece is left only with private channels don't seem to understand that all those private channels are and have always been much better than the mess that ERT was.
You must live in the USA
No I don't. Around here (Denmark), a liberal is just a slightly less extreme version of a conservative, and both would be placed securely on the right side of the scale. I don't follow US politics very closely, but to me it seems the democrats and the republicans are pretty much the same thing - corporate apologists.
... whatever
Fun fact: According to "thesupraman" people who happened to find lakes of oil buried under their feet were smarter, or maybe harder working, or maybe "willing to sacrifice" more than others. Isn't that great? I thought they were just lucky but that's a naturalistic fallacy on my part. No, thesupraman's God knew those people would be better than everybody else and rewarded them in advance. Cool, huh?
So they shut down the quality-news-broadcast network and set free a pile of professionals, some of them well known I guess.
Will that mean that Greece will now emerge getting a professional quality-news-podcast-network and will that mean that there has to be a reason to shut down the internets, too?
When you're poor, stop spending money on non-essentials.
That's common sense when you're talking about an individual, or a household. The problem is that that people extrapolate that to whole economies, or governments.
Money goes around in loops. At the level of a household, the loops have little significance. If you spend $10 on a movie ticket, that money's spent, and the route that connects it to your next piece of income is so long that it has no bearing on your decisions. At that scale, you might as well think of spending as a sink, and earning as an unending source.
But at the level of corporate and government spending, the loops are very significant. Pay 1000 roadworkers $20,000 dollars each, that money will go into a chain of transactions, most of which are taxed, keeping dozens of people in work.
*Don't* employ those 1000 roadworkers, and they'll spend less, slowing down the entire economy.
*cough* USgasolinesubsidies*cough*
What "logic"? This is the observed behaviour of the system.
You can't trump observation with argument
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Yep, you got it exactly right.
Wow, that's pretty depressing. I thought Denmark was supposed to be a lot better than that. At least you guys have the most bike-friendly city in the world, and a decent healthcare system.
please explain price of digital goods such as music, movies and e-books for which supply is close to illimited and people are "pirating" instead of buying because the prices don't go down ...
That is the result of government regulation. Copyright is really just a government-granted monopoly. By definition, you are minimizing competition.
it's just because some economist found out that in my country people are statistically willing to pay a bit more than our neighbours.
Taking your facts at face value, there is still supply and demand. "Tablets" are the market, not "Nexus 4s". Are all the tablets more expensive right across the border? If so, then either you are correct about supply and demand being completely broken or there is another force at work.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Have you noticed this observation counts money passing through the layer upon layer of shell companies as the volume of transactions? It takes quite a few layers of indirection to skirt the law safely, all without any actual commerce.
No actual productive work comes from most government spending: it's either broken window fallacy, or outright pocketing. The money that changed hands can be just as well spent by its rightful owner as by the crony whom it ended up with. All the extra "economy" was generated only on paper.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
From what little I know about Danish politics (gleaned from Borgen, and from a nice lady who gave us a walking tour of Copenhagen, including Folketing) - the many parties have drifted so far from their original positions over time, that the names of parties are essentially meaningless.
Again, it's simple supply and demand. Sellers will always try to price things as high as they can, to maximize profit. Why wouldn't you? It'd be stupid not to. Sellers are under no obligation to lower prices just to be nice (unless you're dealing with an essential good or service with little or no competition, like a utility, in which case the government jumps in and regulates the market, for the good of society as a whole). But they lower prices in response to lower demand. Excessively-high prices cause low demand, so you reduce prices to increase demand, and increase sales volumes. If you lower prices too much, you get excessively low profits (or at an extreme, no profit, and instead a loss). In the middle of that curve there's a local maximum where profit is maximized.
If a seller finds that buyers in one country are apparently gullible fools and are willing to pay excessively-high prices for a product (more so than in another country), why shouldn't they raise prices there? If you don't like it, you're free to not buy the product. You do not need a Nexus 4 to live. You can buy a competing device, or an older device, or just do without. Or you can just go to another place where it's cheaper and get it there (or just order it on the internet from someplace cheaper). As long as the government doesn't put up artificial trade restrictions preventing you from exercising these options, there's no problem. If people continue to be stupid and willingly pay higher prices, that's their problem.
In fact, why aren't more people just buying on the internet? We've had the same problem in the USA: local brick-n-mortar shops charge high prices on consumer electronics, especially in more rural areas. So, people just go to amazon.com or newegg.com and buy it at a much lower prices. The brick-n-mortar shops bitch and complain, but too bad. If I can buy something from Amazon for so much less than locally, that I end up saving a lot of money, even after paying sales tax (Amazon charges it now) and shipping fees, then obviously the local shop is charging too much. In the end, the local shop goes out of business, and I really don't care. Of course, a bunch of people bitch about how this is driving the "wonderful" local mom-and-pop shops out of business, that people should be happy to pay 50-100% more for the same product just to get the "service" that local shops offer (yeah right), it's "unfair", etc. Do people say the same things in your country when people drive over the border (or order on the internet) to avoid paying local prices?
This nothing to do with capitalism and in most cases state television (or state funded independent television) is more objective and has more integrity.
Like the BBC and Jimmy Savile, right?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
As it happens (as it 'appens) although I strongly support the BBC, I think Top of the Pops, an echo chamber for music that was already popular, is exactly the kind of thing that should be on a commercial station.
But do you imagine for one moment that if, in the 1970s, a commercial broadcaster had handled Top of the Pops, and the country's main pop music radio station, that Savile and the others would have had less access to young girls, or taken any less advantage of them? No. That unfortunate culture was nothing to do with the BBC's funding model.
The closest thing to this in the US was PBS, which a few years ago went like this:
Republicans: We dislike this is serving as a government-funded think tank for the Left. We wish to cut government funding, which amounts to a whopping 18%.
Democrats: Why do you want children to die crossing the street because Big Bird won't be able to teach them to look both ways?
And that was that.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Interestingly both sides claimed both that the 18% was vital and simultaneously irrelevant, depending on various points they were trying to make.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Well the naming part is very much true, but that is because the people naming parties are idiots. The parties don't drift, the scale changes beneath them.
We have a party named "left" that is very much on the right. Originally they were the left party, and their opposition was named "right" - but then came those pesky communists and their labor unions and all of a sudden, left was on the right and the commies were on the left :) At least the original "right" party had the good sense to change name to "conservative". Left was just left with left, on the right.
... whatever
You mean "Dansk Folkeparti"? The Republican Party would condemn it as wildly racist.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
You assume this is due to a lack of regulation, when there are other possible factors that are directly due to government interference in the market:
- Taxes and tariffs (the latter probably doesn't apply in the EU in this case)
- Subsidies
- Price fixing to support local merchants
I mean, didn't you just say the government was corrupt? And you wonder why libertarians oppose big government.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Again... is there no competition to IKEA?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Tax evasion !== tax avoidance. If Greece is a tax haven, it's probably because they have favorable tax laws. If they aren't enforcing their own tax laws, that doesn't make them a tax haven, but a corrupt state and it's no wonder they are broke.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You mean "Dansk Folkeparti"? The Republican Party would condemn it as wildly racist.
No, I don't mean DF. What I mean is, that if you project the entire political spectrum in Denmark (or any country inside the EU, I suspect) over onto a line, and plot in all the parties you get a line with pretty evenly spaced dots on it. If you then take the republican party and the democratic party and plot them on the same line, they would both land somewhere to the right of the middle.
... whatever
The point of regulation is to prevent companies from market manipulation....So regulation is required to facilitate a healthy market. Rules are put in place to ensure that established companies can not prevent competition from entering a market.
A couple of points, first, the effect of regulation is to make it harder for new companies to compete with established companies in a particular market. So, in reality rules are put in place to ensure that new companies cannot enter a market to compete with established companies (unless the new companies are larger than the existing companies in the market).
Second. how exactly do established companies prevent new companies from entering the market to compete with them? Please list only those which are not illegal without market regulation (for example, breaking someone's legs is already illegal).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
So regulation is required to facilitate a healthy market.
But in Greece, too much regulation has destroyed the economy. The World Bank Doing Business Index had Greece's "distance to frontier" (a measure of 0-100 where 100 is scored by the countries easiest to do business in) was 62.0 (compare with the US at 85, or Azerbaijan at 62.8). This measure is not just about tax rates, but more about the bureaucracy required to run a business. Even high-tax countries like Norway and Sweden scored in the 80's.
The Heritage Index of Economic Freedom scores Greece at 55.4, behind Senegal at 55.5. Again, Norway, Sweden, and the US score in the 70's.
Here is some text from the Economic Freedom index regarding Greece:
A great anecdote about doing business in Athens can be found here:
I'm curious about the ability he had to do this. The Prime Minister in the UK could push a bill through parliament cancelling the BBC's charter and/or its funding, but couldn't actually shut it down. If he sent police in to clear the building then the police would be acting illegally and I'd expect them to refuse.
So it's interesting that the Greek PM didn't face such barriers.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quidquid_latine_dictum_sit,_altum_videtur
CAPTCHA: "damned"
Doctor Who has a number of things going for it. One, it's about fifty years old, so it didn't have an awful lot of television competition. Two, it did build up a cult following over the 1970's and early 1980's. Doctor Who *did* get axed. It got axed because the Controller didn't much care for the show, it got scheduled against Coronation Street (the #1 TV show then in that particular time-slot) and using the excuse of low audience numbers, the axe fell. Though officially the show was "resting".
That cult following actually led to Doctor Who coming back again. Funny when the children who grew up on Doctor who become Television Producers. .
This actually doesn't have to be answered in the theoretical, it was common a century or so ago. Companies used to control their markets in a variety of was. One common one was vertical integration, a large company would buy up all producers for its source material, and all distributors for its product. Any new comer to the market then either had to either produce an entire supply and distribution chain before marketing a product, or had to purchase from and sell to their biggest competitor. Another common ploy was price fixing. The prices were kept high when there was no competition, but as soon as another company came into the market they'd sell below cost just long enough to drive the competition into bankruptcy. In other cases the company would offer kick backs to retailers to not sell a competing product, or would increase their wholesale cost if they did offered a competitor.
<gir voice> I love this sig... </gir voice>
Ok, yes, those things can affect the equation greatly, but (I don't know if you're the same AC as the one above) the person above was complaining about sellers charging "too much" for items on one side of the border. Well, the first three things you listed are all things that are solely under the control of the government, so if you don't like the prices you're being charged, and you think government policies are the cause, then you need to take it up with your government, not the sellers. With the last two things, I don't see how they'd have anything to do with a big difference in prices between tablet computers in two neighboring countries. They definitely artificially limit supply in certain situations, but not this one, or any one where we're comparing the prices of consumer goods in different countries.
I think what he means that the term "liberal" itself means "conservative" over there, and also that American abuse of that term to refer to Democrats actually has meaning with that interpretation of the word. Not that Denmark only has less right-wing and more right-wing parties (but their left-wing party probably calls itself "labor" or "socialist").
No, the problem is due to unproductive people.
What makes unproductive people? People aren't inherently extremely productive. Nor are they required to be in order for a society to thrive. There's a pretty low threshold for someone to be "unproductive" in a society. So if your society happens to have a lot of so-called "unproductive" people, it makes sense to ask why they're unproductive.
I disagree, because as above: the Greek people are not competitive to survive under capitalism. [...] You know, things that government is an expert at.
You seem to be proposing that we "fix" what you see as the problem not by forcing them to grow up and becoming "competitive", but by adding factors that would make the perceived problem worse.
All of the issues you are discussing are not stopped by regulations of a particular market, but by anti-trust laws that apply to every market. We could discuss whether or not anti-trust laws are good for the economy and/or the consumer, but that is another discussion. The poster I was replying to said that markets must be regulated and I suppose he might have meant things like anti-trust laws, but usually when we discuss market regulations today we are talking about things like the Louisiana State Board of Funeral Directors regulating the sale of caskets or the federal Raisin Marketing Order,
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Not only taxes on the sale, but differences in income taxes between states or nations can explain a lot on it too. Suppose area A has an income tax of 10% and area B is 12%. Suppose area B also has a digital tax of 5% on media storage like Canada does and the US partially does.
Now, if I want to make $10 profit per unit sold, I would price my widget differently in area A then I would in area B. Companies don't reach in their pockets to pay taxes, they pass the costs onto consumers for the most part. In the US, this can be seen by multi state fast food chains. I have noticed differences in prices of Mcdonalds and Wendy's in different states when I visit them and it all has to do with the local economies and taxing structures. If you travel, seriously look at that. You will be surprised at how much different the prices can be.
Your Danish friend is a little confused by your use of "liberal". In the United States, the meaning of liberalism has parted significantly from classical liberalism, it has been renamed libertarianism.
When a Danish person talks about liberals it's safer to assume he means his "economically conservative" and "socially liberal" political parties.
- The biggest party in Denmark is the pro-free market Liberal Party.
- The Liberal Alliance Party of Denmark is even more Libertarian.
Yeah, it's the American use of "liberal" which has shifted away from classic liberalism (libertarianism).
Our "socialist" parties are usually called Social-Democrats, at least in Northern Europe.
I really don't see how basic economics isn't working here. For music, ebooks, and other digital goods, there's really an infinite supply, since these things can be reproduced at zero cost on demand, so pricing is really set solely by the demand side: if there's high demand (i.e. people are willing to pay more), then prices will go up. If people weren't willing to pay high prices, sales would drop and sellers would lower their prices in response.
It's not too much different for tangible consumer electronics, since those can be manufactured in huge quantities at fairly low cost.
It all comes down to: sellers will charge what buyers are willing to pay. I don't see how this isn't obeying supply-and-demand.
And still, no one's answered my question of why people aren't just buying this stuff over the internet. We're talking about two EU countries, right? Where there's no trade restrictions between countries any more? What's the problem?
No, it is required. You think food just falls from the sky and then magically appear in your supermarket? Productivity is required to create everything society needs to survive, let alone thrive.
I wonder what you think "productivity" is. Productivity isn't required. It's just a measure of how efficient work or a worker is. One doesn't require very efficient work in order to move food and other things around.
OTOH, infrastructure is required. But modern infrastructure doesn't require a high fraction of productive people in a population in order to work.
For anyone interested, a balanced view by a journalist working at ERT who'll likely be losing his job now: http://www.eyedoll.gr/ngine/article/1779/%CE%B4%CE%B5%CE%BD-%CF%80%CE%AC%CE%B5%CE%B9-%CF%83%CF%84%CE%BF-%CE%B4%CE%B9%CE%AC%CE%BF%CE%BB%CE%BF-%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B9-%CE%B7-%CE%B5%CF%81%CF%84 I'm sure the non-Greek speakers among you can google translate or babelfish it. the tl;dr is he realizes that the broadcaster is a morass of mediocrity and corruption (dozes of "special advisors to the CEO" being paid extravagant salaries for doing nothing), he says that much simpler solutions to the broadcaster's problems that did not involve shuttering it had been proposed and ignored, and that therefore its closing must be motivated by the government's cosiness with private broadcasting interests.