In a free trade situation if you can not afford Chinese goods you certainly can't afford American made goods until America has comparative advantage in it's production... which means similar labour and environmental standards. You have to take into account that even though the US kind of sucks at production, it's still massively subsidized by foreigners in the form of the suppressed oil price. Without debt and the trade deficit it makes possible the oil price in the US would shoot up and cause massive inflation across the board (cue conspiracy theories of artificially suppressed oil production and massive reserves).
Why would anyone invest when consumption is dropping? Left to it's own devices economies will seek hard bottoms in a depression, ie. minimum levels of employment necessary for pure necessities with for the rest only luxury/service industries for the monied class... it's what makes sense. It makes no sense to invest in supplying the bottom 99% if they have no money.
The 99% also can't form an economy amongst themselves, because even if they all personally default they will still need somewhere to live and work. That means going back into debt... because there is no more land to homestead, all land is owned and without government all the fruits of their labour above subsistence level will tend to go towards paying rent until full employment is reached (which it probably won't be, automation and all). Henry Ford was the exception, not the rule.
No, you really haven't... the thing about redistributionism is that if government really wants to do it, it can. Monetary policy is just a side show, they have the guns... and if they want to redistribute they simply do it. FDR did it, the French revolution did it.... the current US government simply doesn't... they go through the motions, they keep old inefficient build to fail wellfare systems going for now, but they are not redistributing wealth faster than it is concentrating... they are just towering debt on debt, preparing a way for a collapse which will leave the 0.1% with all the collateral underlying it.
Not very Keynesian and certainly not very Marxian.
The problem for most of the "socialist" world is that they don't have oil... they require austerity for that simple fact... no amount of capital,free marketets or deregulation will fix that nearly every facet the productive economy is dependent on oil. They can only produce luxuries while other countries sell them necessities, a poor position to be in. Redistributionism or social darwinism are really orthogonal issues to that of the real problem of the modern world... peak oil (it doesn't matter if peak oil isn't global).
You didn't answer my question though... if the US is Marxist/Keyensian why hasn't the Gini coefficient gone down?
Any industrial activity pollutes... who is going to determine when continuing industrial activity should only require compensation and when it is simple beyond the pale? Is it going to be the judges making pure value judgements every single time? Without a value judgement all you would be left with are absolute property rights, with any single downstream property owners able to close down a factory. In the case of AIR that is everyone, any kind of economic activity (including agriculture) instantly becomes impossible... there will always be one person not to agree to the pollution regardless of compensation.
So if not the EPA who is going to regulate... you can say they do more harm than good, but we have plenty of object lessons in third world countries of free market inspired environmental destruction to say that some government agency has to keep the externalities under control. Maybe market forces could be incorporated more, but someone still needs to make the regulations and police them.
A factory owner will never have a contract with every person on the planet breathing the air he pollutes, contract law can't solve everything...
The US doesn't need capital... it needs oil. The US is swimming in capital, the whole world is... there just isn't anything worth investing it in, except for natural monopolies and governments (to protect your ownership of the monopolies).
The only end result possible of anarcho capitalism in the absence of economic growth is feudalism (rent seeking will keep concentrating wealth more and more). It's not a solution for the modern world of natural resource limits and automation.
After 2 years of "creative destruction" nothing will have changed about the fact that an US worker would be trying to compete with a Chinese worker with vastly lower wages...
If the US is Marxist/Keyenesian then why hasn't the Gini coefficient gone down? Sweden and Denmark might be called a Marxist/Keynesian fusion, but most of the west is crony capitalist.
We're only stuck because of the neoliberal/globalist blinders we have on... we need to stop caring about global competitiveness, it won't guarantee full employment either. If we really try to compete with the Chinese who the hell is going to consume any way, austerity is necessary... but it's not sufficient. We need austerity so our economies can become relatively self sufficient (trade balance) giving us the room to rebalance them towards greater overall employment (even if it comes at a hit to efficiency, ie. work week reduction). We don't need austerity so our economies can become competitive, that race to the bottom goes off a deep cliff.
Physical trade is beneficial. Trade in forex and derivatives? Not so much.
Not that physical hedging and actual productive companies protecting themselves against exchange rate fluctuation isn't valuable... but that's such a small part of the market it's irrelevant. Most of it is gambling, fraud and bubble pumping... that the markets are able to pump bubbles for years or even decades doesn't make them any more valuable.
Of course we know traders don't care about society, that's where government and democracy is supposed to come in... to curb greed to beneficial rather than destructive ends.
As long as you enter the domain correctly and your own computer is secure with a correct public root KSK you're golden. No MITM possible, no CA necessary.
Whether FDR had some failed policies or not is besides the issue, none of his contemporaries would have had the balls to devalue the dollar (which required confiscating gold, a incredible move in a country like the US) which basically reset the wealth balance in the US overnight... this more than anything else that he did laid the ground work for resurgence. Without that singular act the US government would have had an extremely hard time ramping up for WW2...
What of the high tech industry? Has it reduced the Gini coefficient in the US? It's a transitory comparative advantage affecting only a very small part of the population... hell, in the end the tech bubble did more for the American economy than the actual tech did.
The same way the majority have always survived, through the largesse of family and in modern times the working population (necessary because population growth is reducing). Productivity is still rising far faster than the demographics are shifting, there is no human resource shortage preventing us from taking care of our elderly... it's purely a problem of retarded resource allocation and overconsumption of luxuries.
Who's going to do that? Georgism is completely absent in the general discourse, the call for reducing central government and reinforcing state rights is completely dominated by Austrian fucknuts.
Good old Ron Paul is a good example, free trade uber alles, opposed to personal bankruptcy, etc etc... hell I could see him arguing in favour of debtor's prison as a right for individual states to implement. If that's going to be the end result then I think you're better off with the devil you know...
The US is still running a massive oil based trade deficit, and we are getting to the point where foreigners will decide to stop buying US debt... going for massive stimulus runs the real risk of pushing them over the edge and forcing the US into trade balance... at which point you'd be fucked as the one input necessary for every productive part of your economy experiences massive inflation.
Austerity and wage deflation are necessary... at the same time massive reduction in wealth inequality is also necessary and near full employment is also necessary to maintain social stability. This will require a strong non corrupt government and a united citizenship with a strong sense of collectivism, in other words... the US is fucked.
Savings can be locked up both in debt and in equity, and while loans/debt are necessary for business financing and mortgages I don't see why sovereign debt is necessary.
What would saving the Republic do exactly? The US has never embraced Georgism and it's descendants, whether it had a strong republic or a weak one... two forces have opposed wealth accumulation in the US as far as I can see, the growth made possible by the massive availability of natural resources outpacing wealth accumulation (unfortunately that stopped working in the 70s) and strong central government stepping in (Sherman, FDR, etc).
The states have always been locked in by the race to the bottom enforced by internal free trade and no holds barred competition and were never able to make a real fist against the financiers and land owners.
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In a free trade situation if you can not afford Chinese goods you certainly can't afford American made goods until America has comparative advantage in it's production ... which means similar labour and environmental standards. You have to take into account that even though the US kind of sucks at production, it's still massively subsidized by foreigners in the form of the suppressed oil price. Without debt and the trade deficit it makes possible the oil price in the US would shoot up and cause massive inflation across the board (cue conspiracy theories of artificially suppressed oil production and massive reserves).
Why would anyone invest when consumption is dropping? Left to it's own devices economies will seek hard bottoms in a depression, ie. minimum levels of employment necessary for pure necessities with for the rest only luxury/service industries for the monied class ... it's what makes sense. It makes no sense to invest in supplying the bottom 99% if they have no money.
The 99% also can't form an economy amongst themselves, because even if they all personally default they will still need somewhere to live and work. That means going back into debt ... because there is no more land to homestead, all land is owned and without government all the fruits of their labour above subsistence level will tend to go towards paying rent until full employment is reached (which it probably won't be, automation and all). Henry Ford was the exception, not the rule.
"the cure is savings, underconsumption, deflation and debt restructuring."
So ... where exactly are jobs supposed to come from in that scenario? The service industry after minimum wage is removed? (ie. more servants.)
No, you really haven't ... the thing about redistributionism is that if government really wants to do it, it can. Monetary policy is just a side show, they have the guns ... and if they want to redistribute they simply do it. FDR did it, the French revolution did it .... the current US government simply doesn't ... they go through the motions, they keep old inefficient build to fail wellfare systems going for now, but they are not redistributing wealth faster than it is concentrating ... they are just towering debt on debt, preparing a way for a collapse which will leave the 0.1% with all the collateral underlying it.
Not very Keynesian and certainly not very Marxian.
The problem for most of the "socialist" world is that they don't have oil ... they require austerity for that simple fact ... no amount of capital,free marketets or deregulation will fix that nearly every facet the productive economy is dependent on oil. They can only produce luxuries while other countries sell them necessities, a poor position to be in. Redistributionism or social darwinism are really orthogonal issues to that of the real problem of the modern world ... peak oil (it doesn't matter if peak oil isn't global).
You didn't answer my question though ... if the US is Marxist/Keyensian why hasn't the Gini coefficient gone down?
Any industrial activity pollutes ... who is going to determine when continuing industrial activity should only require compensation and when it is simple beyond the pale? Is it going to be the judges making pure value judgements every single time? Without a value judgement all you would be left with are absolute property rights, with any single downstream property owners able to close down a factory. In the case of AIR that is everyone, any kind of economic activity (including agriculture) instantly becomes impossible ... there will always be one person not to agree to the pollution regardless of compensation.
So if not the EPA who is going to regulate ... you can say they do more harm than good, but we have plenty of object lessons in third world countries of free market inspired environmental destruction to say that some government agency has to keep the externalities under control. Maybe market forces could be incorporated more, but someone still needs to make the regulations and police them.
A factory owner will never have a contract with every person on the planet breathing the air he pollutes, contract law can't solve everything ...
The US doesn't need capital ... it needs oil. The US is swimming in capital, the whole world is ... there just isn't anything worth investing it in, except for natural monopolies and governments (to protect your ownership of the monopolies).
The only end result possible of anarcho capitalism in the absence of economic growth is feudalism (rent seeking will keep concentrating wealth more and more). It's not a solution for the modern world of natural resource limits and automation.
After 2 years of "creative destruction" nothing will have changed about the fact that an US worker would be trying to compete with a Chinese worker with vastly lower wages ...
If the US is Marxist/Keyenesian then why hasn't the Gini coefficient gone down? Sweden and Denmark might be called a Marxist/Keynesian fusion, but most of the west is crony capitalist.
We're only stuck because of the neoliberal/globalist blinders we have on ... we need to stop caring about global competitiveness, it won't guarantee full employment either. If we really try to compete with the Chinese who the hell is going to consume any way, austerity is necessary ... but it's not sufficient. We need austerity so our economies can become relatively self sufficient (trade balance) giving us the room to rebalance them towards greater overall employment (even if it comes at a hit to efficiency, ie. work week reduction). We don't need austerity so our economies can become competitive, that race to the bottom goes off a deep cliff.
Physical trade is beneficial. Trade in forex and derivatives? Not so much.
Not that physical hedging and actual productive companies protecting themselves against exchange rate fluctuation isn't valuable ... but that's such a small part of the market it's irrelevant. Most of it is gambling, fraud and bubble pumping ... that the markets are able to pump bubbles for years or even decades doesn't make them any more valuable.
Of course we know traders don't care about society, that's where government and democracy is supposed to come in ... to curb greed to beneficial rather than destructive ends.
The money in patents is in preventing competition.
Why? Put a public key in the DNS info, done.
As long as you enter the domain correctly and your own computer is secure with a correct public root KSK you're golden. No MITM possible, no CA necessary.
I happen to trust the guys maintaining the DNSSEC root KSK more than any CA.
Average surface temperatures have had an almost insignificant drop the last 5 years or so ... but ocean temperatures are still on the rise.
Whether FDR had some failed policies or not is besides the issue, none of his contemporaries would have had the balls to devalue the dollar (which required confiscating gold, a incredible move in a country like the US) which basically reset the wealth balance in the US overnight ... this more than anything else that he did laid the ground work for resurgence. Without that singular act the US government would have had an extremely hard time ramping up for WW2 ...
What of the high tech industry? Has it reduced the Gini coefficient in the US? It's a transitory comparative advantage affecting only a very small part of the population ... hell, in the end the tech bubble did more for the American economy than the actual tech did.
The same way the majority have always survived, through the largesse of family and in modern times the working population (necessary because population growth is reducing). Productivity is still rising far faster than the demographics are shifting, there is no human resource shortage preventing us from taking care of our elderly ... it's purely a problem of retarded resource allocation and overconsumption of luxuries.
You mean good central planning and repudiating debt?
Who's going to do that? Georgism is completely absent in the general discourse, the call for reducing central government and reinforcing state rights is completely dominated by Austrian fucknuts.
Good old Ron Paul is a good example, free trade uber alles, opposed to personal bankruptcy, etc etc ... hell I could see him arguing in favour of debtor's prison as a right for individual states to implement. If that's going to be the end result then I think you're better off with the devil you know ...
The US is still running a massive oil based trade deficit, and we are getting to the point where foreigners will decide to stop buying US debt ... going for massive stimulus runs the real risk of pushing them over the edge and forcing the US into trade balance ... at which point you'd be fucked as the one input necessary for every productive part of your economy experiences massive inflation.
Austerity and wage deflation are necessary ... at the same time massive reduction in wealth inequality is also necessary and near full employment is also necessary to maintain social stability. This will require a strong non corrupt government and a united citizenship with a strong sense of collectivism, in other words ... the US is fucked.
The majority of people have effectively negative dollar based assets (ie. they are in debt).
Savings can be locked up both in debt and in equity, and while loans/debt are necessary for business financing and mortgages I don't see why sovereign debt is necessary.
The majority of people is in debt ... they have negative money in their pockets, while deflation while deflation will erode their wages.
What would saving the Republic do exactly? The US has never embraced Georgism and it's descendants, whether it had a strong republic or a weak one ... two forces have opposed wealth accumulation in the US as far as I can see, the growth made possible by the massive availability of natural resources outpacing wealth accumulation (unfortunately that stopped working in the 70s) and strong central government stepping in (Sherman, FDR, etc).
The states have always been locked in by the race to the bottom enforced by internal free trade and no holds barred competition and were never able to make a real fist against the financiers and land owners.
Yes, I think it will deter some idiots.
In the US you have a year grace period after publication, although your patent will become invalid in a lot of other places.