I am unwilling to use anything from their company ever again - no matter how indirectly derived or loosely controlled. It truly is despicable.
- I came to that realisation probably in 2007-8, when I saw the proliferation of their drones disguised as 'contractor architects', whose only real mission was to push Oracle solutions into every single aspect of every business they managed to stick their tentacles into.
It's too bad Oracle bought Sun, it should have been Google or IBM. The fact that Oracle is the owner of Java TM and the reference implementation of JVM is extremely unfortunate (and it's part of the reason there is so much misinformation on Java in general, which I think is a marketing problem).
Put it this way, the rest of the population is even dumber than/., for that reason alone nothing should be regulated, because who do you think comes up with regulations and votes for people that set regulations?
The lucky thing is that Bitcoins cannot themselves be regulated, but the end points can be. Stores, exchanges, those can be regulated, and that's a problem. Bitcoins will be used by people as means of exchange, some may think they are a store of value, I do not know that it is so, they can go up to be 1 million or 1 billion dollars for 1 Bitcoin, they can be 1 cent, I can't say.
However I can say that Bitcoins have value in one very specific way, it is precisely that they cannot be regulated themselves in the sense that the government cannot issue them.
However do not forget, governments can buy up all Bitcoins to try and shut down the idea, they can even drive the prices very high because of it and remove most of the coins from circulation by producing huge amounts of inflation. What they can't do is stop people from cloning the code and restarting it again.
No, you don't understand the point. Government issuing a bond and then holding it by printing money is inflation, it's not an investment. The government has this bond as an asset and a liability, but the money was created out of thin air to 'buy' it.
But the same thing is true about US citizens holding US bonds. You see, if you are an American you owe taxes to pay for the bonds that are sold by your government. You owe the principal and the interest payments. If you purchased a bond and you are getting an interest payment out of it (clipping coupons), then you are paying taxes to pay yourself that interest and then your taxes will be used to buy that bond back from you if you don't roll it over.
I said Chinese and the private pension funds are real creditors.
USA households are not real creditors, neither is any level of USA government. USA households being 'creditors' in this case is negated by the very fact that they have this same exact debt as a liability to themselves, they are on the hook for the debt and the interest payments on it and they hold the bonds, from which they clip coupons and supposedly would want the principal back at some point.
You can't have the same thing being an asset and a liability, it's a wash, that particular money comes from inflation, not from US households.
I would like to note that the Chinese and private pension fund ownership is real but "US gov't and pension funds", "the Fed", "SS", "US households", "State and local gov't" and "State, local pension funds" are not real.
Owing money to yourself in case of USA only means inflation. The only true owners of US debt are private owners and foreign owners.
No, the absence of the moral hazard provided by the government takes care of that particular problem, which by the way has exploded during the half socialist half fascist state of affairs now found in USA given all the regulations and rules that exist, which is exactly why there are so many lawyers - to argue about the rules and regulations.
It is the abundance of government created rules and regulations (and taxes obviously) that provides the endless opportunity for lawsuits, not absence of regulations and only protections of individual freedoms. Protections of individual freedoms don't require much in terms of court time as long as there is no case by government to steal the freedoms (something you are advocating).
Oh, and the depression was caused by the government, the Federal reserve monetising bad UK debt, same as the Fed is doing now monetising US debt, and this monetisation created the bubble in the stock market, which blew up (like the stock market bubble of the nineties and the housing bubble, also caused by the Fed and FDIC and FHA, HUD, F&F, but primarily Fed and FDIC).
But before the Great Depression there was no FDIC, HUD, F&F, there was only the Fed, and that was enough to cause that recession. Then Hoover's and FDR's policies turned that recession into the depression, which lasted until 1947, when USA finally cut its spending by 60% and taxes by overall 30%. Similar to the spending and tax cuts in 1921, when that depression was also ended because gov't spending was cut by 70% by Harding. That depression was also caused by the money printing.
Of-course the fifties and sixties were the time of huge government expansion and terrible suppression of the free market, with taxes that caused people to create entire industries that would help them to avoid being taxed instead of being free to build new industries and businesses. That growth of gov't caused the collapse of the dollar and that's when Nixon defaulted on the gold dollar in 1971. That's when USA started seeing massive outflows of capital, as savers were running for the hills. That's when real GDP growth stopped, that's when inflation truly kicked off, that's when people's real earnings started going down, as they became less and less productive due to the capital outflow.
For the last 40 years US government has been pumping and inflating one bubble in the economy after another, and that's what is happening to the economy today - it's on its last legs, can't take anymore pumping. The bond bubble with implode and will take the dollar with it and that's when the era of huge government will come to an end.
Of-course the government won't go that easy, it may even try to implement martial law, declaring a state of emergency. Such things happen as people turn to just about anybody who promises to solve the problems. Last time a major event like that happen it was in Germany in 1933.
- your comments are not just stupid, they are reeking of hate.
No, you don't know anything about the country you live in. Reagan talked a good game, but he never cut any spending, he increased spending and he did also raise taxes. He didn't anything that he promised at all, so there was no 'free market capitalism' during his administration, not even a little bit. Tariffs are one way to fund government, but as a currency or more correctly trade war measure they eventually fail because they are there to protect the falling value of the fake currency.
The real free market in USA existed prior to the Fed's new mandate to monetise Treasury debt, which was given to it by the Congress in 1917. That's when free market capitalism took a serious blow in USA, when the growth of the government became unstoppable. Of-course that was a second blow, the first was IRS with the income taxes, which ensured that both: the government would grow as a percentage of production rather than consumption (which government is, it's all consumption, in fact it's luxury consumption) and destruction of individual freedom not to be property of the State. The income tax immediately changes the status of a person from a free human being to something else entirely, property of the State, and the State decides just how much productivity (labour, work) the person will be forced to give up to the government, the collective.
Energy companies, petrochemical, etc., they were doing just fine in USA prior to 1911, when the government destroyed the largest economy of scale. Standard Oil was the company that drove prices down for over 40 years, from 50 cents a gallon to 5.9 cents a gallon and in the process the owners of the company became some of the richest people in history. Once S.O. was destroyed, the oil prices never went down again. A government with its tariffs breaks your legs and gives you crutches, and now you have to thank it for the ability to crawl again?
As to China, the Chinese government prior to the industrialisation of the country was dumping all the pollutants it ever wanted anywhere it wanted.
It takes a wealthy nation to become aware and to be able to pay for clean environment. China was not a wealthy nation 30 years ago, today it is. Now it can start looking at environment on a case by case basis, clearly they have work to do, but they are some of the freest people in terms of ability to do business and thus in terms of ability to build savings, capital.
They have capital, the CAN take care of their environment and as the government of China will have to drop the fixed exchange rate to the US dollar and the Chinese consumer will become more affluent, the people in China will demand that their industries take care of the pollution, and it will have nothing to do with government.
Government cannot fix anything, it can't build anything, it can't generate wealth, it can destroy it. It will be companies solving the pollution problems.
EPA exists because of complete corruption by the government, which completely abdicated its responsibility to protect private property rights of individuals. Public "property" is the reason for pollution.
In fact earlier in this thread I mentioned this: you are going to talk about 'socialising costs and privatising gains', like you are doing right now, but you are on the side of government socialising costs and privatising gains when it comes to other types of monopolies, like USPS, which you like apparently for some reason.
So you like USPS and yet you don't like other forms of government protection, which lead to the pollution in the environment, because those forms of protection act to protect various large interests, monopoly interests created by the government, but they completely spit on the rights of individual private property owner.
Business does not need to be regulated at all, in fact US Congress does not even have that authority to regulate business, it has
How do you read my comments and come to that conclusion? First of all there shouldn't even be a government provided corporate charter, which abdicates personal responsibility, creates a moral hazard.
The only role for the government is to enforce individual rights and contract law and protect borders against invasion.
Again, none of those places actually have free markets. To have free markets there has to be as little government regulations as possible while having private property rights protected equally. Chinese Communist Party is not the economy in China, obviously they hold the political power, yet the people are allowed to operate in a mostly free market. They would be much better off if they stopped controlling the currency in a central way. And yes, Singapore and Switzerland, seriously. Of-course now Switzerland is also centrally controlling the currency by fixing it against the Euro at a stupid 1.2 level, hopefully we'll have this overturned soon enough.
I don't know if you live in USA, but that was one of the examples where free market capitalism happened, you are the guy 'denying purges and famine in Ukraine', only you don't know USA history of free market capitalism building the productive capacity in America.
Today China has a system much closer to the free market then most of the rest of the world, that's how it was able to bring about 350 million people out of poverty in 30 years, not by the Communist Party building stuff, but by Communist Party letting go of people's desire to satisfy their own demand and allowing them to own private property. Even with all the corruption in China, it is still one of the most preferred places for business in the world today, that's where all the capital has gone.
You're right, that's exactly what I'm saying because that is exactly what history shows us.
- you are misreading history.
as long as society has relied on the capitalist market to provide them only the wealthy have had such things
- a society without free markets will not provide solutions for everybody, that is true, that is why society needs free markets to allow individuals to try and make their own fortunes by figuring out how to provide people with the products and services they need.
The wealthy never needed free market, they had their services as you correctly noted, it was the free markets, markets free from government intervention that created the capitalist system, which means system of private ownership and operation of property and thus of means of production. The free market allows people to be equal before law, which is what was often missing other types of societies. When you do not have equality before law, when some people are more equal than others because they are part of the ruling elite, that is when you get the wealthy few who get whatever they desire and a very large population who do not have their needs satisfied.
It is exactly the necessary combination of private ownership and operation of property and the equal protections of individuals, their right to operate property without being impeded by the law. The ability not to be discriminated against, protection against government discrimination and thus preferential treatment of some people as opposed to equal treatment under law of all people, this ability is what gave capitalism the boost, the tools needed to allow the majority of people to get the same type of products and services that the wealthy could always afford.
A wealthy member of elite does not care if there is such a product as a washing machine for example. He doesn't care if there is a system to provide clean water to the market. He can pay to have his clean water and have his laundry done by somebody on staff.
It is the capitalism within the paradigm of free market that allowed the rest of the people to enjoy the same services and products as the wealthy always could enjoy. Free market capitalism lifts all boats, without free market, without equal protection under law it doesn't really matter what the system of property ownership is, because most people won't have their right to own and operate property unhindered. They will suffer discrimination, their property will be taken away, they will not be able to keep the fruits of their own labour.
Unfortunately what you are actually advocating for without realising it is exactly that type of a system while believing that you are proposing a 'better' system. It's not better at all, because it doesn't rely on equal treatment by law, it requires discrimination and various types of oppression against most people to allow few to dominate.
The examples that you cite do not include places where people are actually equal before law and have their right to own and operate private property protected against government stealing and redistributing it. The real examples of free market capitalism are not found in Caracas but in Singapore or Hong Kong or Switzerland. Unfortunately USA can no longer boast to have free market capitalism either.
Capitalism for some and oppression is not what I am proposing.
I take it you've never lived on a farm or in a small town.
- I lived in a very wide variety of places, including very small towns, but that's not the point. The point is that you are insisting that in the free market people would not find solutions satisfying demands of potential customers to make money and thus you are supporting an increase in everybody's prices rather than allowing people to pay for their true costs themselves. How come people are against 'socialising costs and privatising gains' when it comes to businesses but can't understand that they are supporting the exact same thing, outsourcing costs, hiding true cost of doing things like living on a farm for example?
Yes, it SHOULD be more expensive for a farmer to get private electrical service and whatever, he would have to price his productive output accordingly. The reason for him living on a farm is either to be a productive farmer or because he likes that type of living.
If he is there because he likes that type of living, he should bear his costs, nobody has to subsidise what he likes, just like nobody should be subsidising people living in coastal cities with government taking care of flood insurance, etc.
If he is on a farm because he is a farmer, he should bear the full costs of being a farmer and price his output correctly, so the food he produces would include the proper costs of running a farm. Of-course there shouldn't be any subsidies to farmers to grow anything particular or not to grow anything at all (as is the case in many parts of the world, where people are subsidised not to grow anything, as long as they exhibited that they 'tried being a farmer' and they failed all of a sudden they get a subsidy at the cost to the entire society.
All prices would be lower for all people if government wasn't in business of subsidising any of those products and services.
So fuck the poor and middle class, civilization is only for the rich. I'd love to see how your phantasmagorical entrepreneurs would compete on price for delivering potable water to a neighborhood.
- Walmart is the largest, most profitable Western retail chain delivering cheapest goods to the largest customer base in the world probably.
A company that sells to the poor becomes extremely rich because that's the market where the most money is and figuring out how to satisfy their demands will make you very very wealthy, this includes water as well.
Wrong on all counts. People would pay for the services delivered and different individual entrepreneurs would deliver them and services would be priced correctly. People wouldn't be subsidised to live in suburbia, which is quite unsustainable once the subsidies are removed, there would be much less pollution, abuse and congestion as well, by the way, if the market were allowed to work rather than having government subsidise all of the bad behaviour.
Interest rates were falling as a result of Clinton's and Greenspan's policy of printing money to prevent any losses to anybody, the term 'Greenspan put' didn't come from nothingness, it was based on Greenspan's willingness to prop up and bail out anybody, never mind inflation.
So Greenspan was ready to monetise any debt and he was buying up government debt at an ever increasing rate, he was getting into heavy long term gov't debt, doing Bernanke's Twist before Bernanke's Twist became the thing to do.
My point is the interest rates would not be falling if it wasn't for the inflation that the government was creating, sending fake signals to the market about abundance of savings and capital investment, while in reality savings were destroyed by this and capital investments were in flight away from USA.
In fact the long term interest rates were going up, that's why the government refinanced with short term adjustable rate paper, Clinton wanted to spend more than the government was getting in revenues because of the investment capital flight caused by the inflation. It's a self-perpetuating downward spiral of debt and debt monetisation.
Your last assertion is that the government could behave more responsibly because it became cheaper for the government to borrow money is laughable and completely false. The government only grew its debts since Clinton, the debts never went down and government spending only grew in every way, what 'responsibly' are you talking about FFS?
The only reason that USPS has the monopoly on first class mail in USA (nobody is allowed to compete on that with them) is supposedly to provide a subsidy so that all the people in USA are covered. This shows that even that meagre reason for this monopoly doesn't stand to the scrutiny if your packages are discriminated against by the government.
USPS is government, it's a government protected monopoly and it discriminates against people. This is government discrimination. This is the real type of discrimination. You think UPS or DHL or Fedex discriminate against customers this way? Yet DHL, UPS, Fedex are regulated under law, which makes them liable to lawsuits, to 'provide equal access' and all that nonsense, while in reality they want to provide the best customer service in order to win against competition.
USPS doesn't care about competition, they are a government protected monopoly, they are a perfect organisation to maintain various types of discrimination.
There shouldn't be any government protected monopolies, private sectors deals with people's needs, whether they are atheists or Muslims or whatever. Government will lose your package if you are an atheist, and I don't want to get into what they will do to you if you are a Muslim.
There is no valid science behind Keynesianism. There is nothing valid about it, it was debunked long ago, just like astrology. However there are still people selling horoscopes in either of those 'sciences'.
Your arguments went from sublime to ridiculous in one thread. You are arguing that borrowing from yourself means having 'balance' and now that astrology is a legitimate science because some names came from people who believed in astrology while naming some stars.
So, someone with $10,000 in credit card debt and $100 in his pocket has "no money"
- The Fed does not have 100 dollars in his pocket, he has a fake credit machine, a printing press of sorts.
Saying that the Fed has money because it has a printing press, it's the same as saying any counterfeiter has money. The Fed is in debt, but all that debt is on the books of the US Treasury as of last year. Fed can't be in debt and Fed doesn't have any money. All Fed's debts are automatically debts of US Treasury.
When Treasury 'borrows' from Fed, it borrows from itself. Saying that you can borrow from yourself is completely meaningless. That means you are getting to more debt yourself. Where does the actual money come from then if the Treasury borrows from itself? The Fed prints it. No, the Fed doesn't have 100 dollars in a pocket, the Fed conjures up fake 100 dollars and the Treasury adds it to its liabilities.
Your example has a wife and a husband, where husband actually has money, so the total balance in the household is NOT negative. Borrowing from a household with total negative balance is not borrowing from savings, it's adding to the debt.
You can't understand simplest things obviously. Clinton didn't have any balanced budgets or surpluses, he always added to the debt, regardless which hand holds the debt, both were his hands.
That's right, Fed has no money, what surplus? Clipping 30 year coupons at negative real interest rate? IF Fed had actual money, a surplus you would hsve a point. Now you have nothing.
The married household has separate books but entangled finances. The Wife borrows money from the husband, and neither has a credit card. You are claiming it's impossible for the household to borrow from itself without using a credit card. I claim you are wrong.
- wrong. There are no separate entities, 'the wife' and 'the husband' here, more logical nonsense.
There is one federal government, it cannot borrow from itself, it has nothing to pay for its borrowing with. Whatever federal government "borrows" is money that is conjured from nothingness, there is nothing to borrow from, so what your "wife" (Congress) ends up doing is asking the "husband" (Fed) to print.
There is no borrowing when there are no assets and there is no separate entity with money. The Fed doesn't have money, it creates fake credit by inflating the money supply, your entire example is meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm kind of impressed that so many mods dug this far down into the tree to mod this up. Maybe /. isn't dead after all.
- not unless Netcraft confirms it.
I am unwilling to use anything from their company ever again - no matter how indirectly derived or loosely controlled. It truly is despicable.
- I came to that realisation probably in 2007-8, when I saw the proliferation of their drones disguised as 'contractor architects', whose only real mission was to push Oracle solutions into every single aspect of every business they managed to stick their tentacles into.
It's too bad Oracle bought Sun, it should have been Google or IBM. The fact that Oracle is the owner of Java TM and the reference implementation of JVM is extremely unfortunate (and it's part of the reason there is so much misinformation on Java in general, which I think is a marketing problem).
Put it this way, the rest of the population is even dumber than /., for that reason alone nothing should be regulated, because who do you think comes up with regulations and votes for people that set regulations?
The lucky thing is that Bitcoins cannot themselves be regulated, but the end points can be. Stores, exchanges, those can be regulated, and that's a problem. Bitcoins will be used by people as means of exchange, some may think they are a store of value, I do not know that it is so, they can go up to be 1 million or 1 billion dollars for 1 Bitcoin, they can be 1 cent, I can't say.
However I can say that Bitcoins have value in one very specific way, it is precisely that they cannot be regulated themselves in the sense that the government cannot issue them.
However do not forget, governments can buy up all Bitcoins to try and shut down the idea, they can even drive the prices very high because of it and remove most of the coins from circulation by producing huge amounts of inflation. What they can't do is stop people from cloning the code and restarting it again.
No, you don't understand the point. Government issuing a bond and then holding it by printing money is inflation, it's not an investment. The government has this bond as an asset and a liability, but the money was created out of thin air to 'buy' it.
But the same thing is true about US citizens holding US bonds. You see, if you are an American you owe taxes to pay for the bonds that are sold by your government. You owe the principal and the interest payments. If you purchased a bond and you are getting an interest payment out of it (clipping coupons), then you are paying taxes to pay yourself that interest and then your taxes will be used to buy that bond back from you if you don't roll it over.
I said Chinese and the private pension funds are real creditors.
USA households are not real creditors, neither is any level of USA government. USA households being 'creditors' in this case is negated by the very fact that they have this same exact debt as a liability to themselves, they are on the hook for the debt and the interest payments on it and they hold the bonds, from which they clip coupons and supposedly would want the principal back at some point.
You can't have the same thing being an asset and a liability, it's a wash, that particular money comes from inflation, not from US households.
I would like to note that the Chinese and private pension fund ownership is real but "US gov't and pension funds", "the Fed", "SS", "US households", "State and local gov't" and "State, local pension funds" are not real.
Owing money to yourself in case of USA only means inflation. The only true owners of US debt are private owners and foreign owners.
No, the absence of the moral hazard provided by the government takes care of that particular problem, which by the way has exploded during the half socialist half fascist state of affairs now found in USA given all the regulations and rules that exist, which is exactly why there are so many lawyers - to argue about the rules and regulations.
It is the abundance of government created rules and regulations (and taxes obviously) that provides the endless opportunity for lawsuits, not absence of regulations and only protections of individual freedoms. Protections of individual freedoms don't require much in terms of court time as long as there is no case by government to steal the freedoms (something you are advocating).
Precisely, not having an owner is the problem. I have made comments on this very issue previously (a number of times), here is a thread on the same topic so I don't have to repeat it again.
Oh, and the depression was caused by the government, the Federal reserve monetising bad UK debt, same as the Fed is doing now monetising US debt, and this monetisation created the bubble in the stock market, which blew up (like the stock market bubble of the nineties and the housing bubble, also caused by the Fed and FDIC and FHA, HUD, F&F, but primarily Fed and FDIC).
But before the Great Depression there was no FDIC, HUD, F&F, there was only the Fed, and that was enough to cause that recession. Then Hoover's and FDR's policies turned that recession into the depression, which lasted until 1947, when USA finally cut its spending by 60% and taxes by overall 30%. Similar to the spending and tax cuts in 1921, when that depression was also ended because gov't spending was cut by 70% by Harding. That depression was also caused by the money printing.
Of-course the fifties and sixties were the time of huge government expansion and terrible suppression of the free market, with taxes that caused people to create entire industries that would help them to avoid being taxed instead of being free to build new industries and businesses. That growth of gov't caused the collapse of the dollar and that's when Nixon defaulted on the gold dollar in 1971. That's when USA started seeing massive outflows of capital, as savers were running for the hills. That's when real GDP growth stopped, that's when inflation truly kicked off, that's when people's real earnings started going down, as they became less and less productive due to the capital outflow.
For the last 40 years US government has been pumping and inflating one bubble in the economy after another, and that's what is happening to the economy today - it's on its last legs, can't take anymore pumping. The bond bubble with implode and will take the dollar with it and that's when the era of huge government will come to an end.
Of-course the government won't go that easy, it may even try to implement martial law, declaring a state of emergency. Such things happen as people turn to just about anybody who promises to solve the problems. Last time a major event like that happen it was in Germany in 1933.
Damn, so much stupid in such a short post.
- your comments are not just stupid, they are reeking of hate.
No, you don't know anything about the country you live in. Reagan talked a good game, but he never cut any spending, he increased spending and he did also raise taxes. He didn't anything that he promised at all, so there was no 'free market capitalism' during his administration, not even a little bit. Tariffs are one way to fund government, but as a currency or more correctly trade war measure they eventually fail because they are there to protect the falling value of the fake currency.
The real free market in USA existed prior to the Fed's new mandate to monetise Treasury debt, which was given to it by the Congress in 1917. That's when free market capitalism took a serious blow in USA, when the growth of the government became unstoppable. Of-course that was a second blow, the first was IRS with the income taxes, which ensured that both: the government would grow as a percentage of production rather than consumption (which government is, it's all consumption, in fact it's luxury consumption) and destruction of individual freedom not to be property of the State. The income tax immediately changes the status of a person from a free human being to something else entirely, property of the State, and the State decides just how much productivity (labour, work) the person will be forced to give up to the government, the collective.
Energy companies, petrochemical, etc., they were doing just fine in USA prior to 1911, when the government destroyed the largest economy of scale. Standard Oil was the company that drove prices down for over 40 years, from 50 cents a gallon to 5.9 cents a gallon and in the process the owners of the company became some of the richest people in history. Once S.O. was destroyed, the oil prices never went down again. A government with its tariffs breaks your legs and gives you crutches, and now you have to thank it for the ability to crawl again?
As to China, the Chinese government prior to the industrialisation of the country was dumping all the pollutants it ever wanted anywhere it wanted.
It takes a wealthy nation to become aware and to be able to pay for clean environment. China was not a wealthy nation 30 years ago, today it is. Now it can start looking at environment on a case by case basis, clearly they have work to do, but they are some of the freest people in terms of ability to do business and thus in terms of ability to build savings, capital.
They have capital, the CAN take care of their environment and as the government of China will have to drop the fixed exchange rate to the US dollar and the Chinese consumer will become more affluent, the people in China will demand that their industries take care of the pollution, and it will have nothing to do with government.
Government cannot fix anything, it can't build anything, it can't generate wealth, it can destroy it. It will be companies solving the pollution problems.
EPA exists because of complete corruption by the government, which completely abdicated its responsibility to protect private property rights of individuals. Public "property" is the reason for pollution.
In fact earlier in this thread I mentioned this: you are going to talk about 'socialising costs and privatising gains', like you are doing right now, but you are on the side of government socialising costs and privatising gains when it comes to other types of monopolies, like USPS, which you like apparently for some reason.
So you like USPS and yet you don't like other forms of government protection, which lead to the pollution in the environment, because those forms of protection act to protect various large interests, monopoly interests created by the government, but they completely spit on the rights of individual private property owner.
Business does not need to be regulated at all, in fact US Congress does not even have that authority to regulate business, it has
How do you read my comments and come to that conclusion? First of all there shouldn't even be a government provided corporate charter, which abdicates personal responsibility, creates a moral hazard.
The only role for the government is to enforce individual rights and contract law and protect borders against invasion.
Why is it named "Maria" DB? She only provided access to herself for money (well, Mary, same thing). Why not "Jesus" DB, at least he saved?
Again, none of those places actually have free markets. To have free markets there has to be as little government regulations as possible while having private property rights protected equally. Chinese Communist Party is not the economy in China, obviously they hold the political power, yet the people are allowed to operate in a mostly free market. They would be much better off if they stopped controlling the currency in a central way. And yes, Singapore and Switzerland, seriously. Of-course now Switzerland is also centrally controlling the currency by fixing it against the Euro at a stupid 1.2 level, hopefully we'll have this overturned soon enough.
I don't know if you live in USA, but that was one of the examples where free market capitalism happened, you are the guy 'denying purges and famine in Ukraine', only you don't know USA history of free market capitalism building the productive capacity in America.
Today China has a system much closer to the free market then most of the rest of the world, that's how it was able to bring about 350 million people out of poverty in 30 years, not by the Communist Party building stuff, but by Communist Party letting go of people's desire to satisfy their own demand and allowing them to own private property. Even with all the corruption in China, it is still one of the most preferred places for business in the world today, that's where all the capital has gone.
You're right, that's exactly what I'm saying because that is exactly what history shows us.
- you are misreading history.
as long as society has relied on the capitalist market to provide them only the wealthy have had such things
- a society without free markets will not provide solutions for everybody, that is true, that is why society needs free markets to allow individuals to try and make their own fortunes by figuring out how to provide people with the products and services they need.
The wealthy never needed free market, they had their services as you correctly noted, it was the free markets, markets free from government intervention that created the capitalist system, which means system of private ownership and operation of property and thus of means of production. The free market allows people to be equal before law, which is what was often missing other types of societies. When you do not have equality before law, when some people are more equal than others because they are part of the ruling elite, that is when you get the wealthy few who get whatever they desire and a very large population who do not have their needs satisfied.
It is exactly the necessary combination of private ownership and operation of property and the equal protections of individuals, their right to operate property without being impeded by the law. The ability not to be discriminated against, protection against government discrimination and thus preferential treatment of some people as opposed to equal treatment under law of all people, this ability is what gave capitalism the boost, the tools needed to allow the majority of people to get the same type of products and services that the wealthy could always afford.
A wealthy member of elite does not care if there is such a product as a washing machine for example. He doesn't care if there is a system to provide clean water to the market. He can pay to have his clean water and have his laundry done by somebody on staff.
It is the capitalism within the paradigm of free market that allowed the rest of the people to enjoy the same services and products as the wealthy always could enjoy. Free market capitalism lifts all boats, without free market, without equal protection under law it doesn't really matter what the system of property ownership is, because most people won't have their right to own and operate property unhindered. They will suffer discrimination, their property will be taken away, they will not be able to keep the fruits of their own labour.
Unfortunately what you are actually advocating for without realising it is exactly that type of a system while believing that you are proposing a 'better' system. It's not better at all, because it doesn't rely on equal treatment by law, it requires discrimination and various types of oppression against most people to allow few to dominate.
The examples that you cite do not include places where people are actually equal before law and have their right to own and operate private property protected against government stealing and redistributing it. The real examples of free market capitalism are not found in Caracas but in Singapore or Hong Kong or Switzerland. Unfortunately USA can no longer boast to have free market capitalism either.
Capitalism for some and oppression is not what I am proposing.
I take it you've never lived on a farm or in a small town.
- I lived in a very wide variety of places, including very small towns, but that's not the point. The point is that you are insisting that in the free market people would not find solutions satisfying demands of potential customers to make money and thus you are supporting an increase in everybody's prices rather than allowing people to pay for their true costs themselves. How come people are against 'socialising costs and privatising gains' when it comes to businesses but can't understand that they are supporting the exact same thing, outsourcing costs, hiding true cost of doing things like living on a farm for example?
Yes, it SHOULD be more expensive for a farmer to get private electrical service and whatever, he would have to price his productive output accordingly. The reason for him living on a farm is either to be a productive farmer or because he likes that type of living.
If he is there because he likes that type of living, he should bear his costs, nobody has to subsidise what he likes, just like nobody should be subsidising people living in coastal cities with government taking care of flood insurance, etc.
If he is on a farm because he is a farmer, he should bear the full costs of being a farmer and price his output correctly, so the food he produces would include the proper costs of running a farm. Of-course there shouldn't be any subsidies to farmers to grow anything particular or not to grow anything at all (as is the case in many parts of the world, where people are subsidised not to grow anything, as long as they exhibited that they 'tried being a farmer' and they failed all of a sudden they get a subsidy at the cost to the entire society.
All prices would be lower for all people if government wasn't in business of subsidising any of those products and services.
So fuck the poor and middle class, civilization is only for the rich. I'd love to see how your phantasmagorical entrepreneurs would compete on price for delivering potable water to a neighborhood.
- Walmart is the largest, most profitable Western retail chain delivering cheapest goods to the largest customer base in the world probably.
A company that sells to the poor becomes extremely rich because that's the market where the most money is and figuring out how to satisfy their demands will make you very very wealthy, this includes water as well.
Wrong on all counts. People would pay for the services delivered and different individual entrepreneurs would deliver them and services would be priced correctly. People wouldn't be subsidised to live in suburbia, which is quite unsustainable once the subsidies are removed, there would be much less pollution, abuse and congestion as well, by the way, if the market were allowed to work rather than having government subsidise all of the bad behaviour.
In this case it means go green of jealosy that you don't have bitcoins at this moment.
Interest rates were falling as a result of Clinton's and Greenspan's policy of printing money to prevent any losses to anybody, the term 'Greenspan put' didn't come from nothingness, it was based on Greenspan's willingness to prop up and bail out anybody, never mind inflation.
So Greenspan was ready to monetise any debt and he was buying up government debt at an ever increasing rate, he was getting into heavy long term gov't debt, doing Bernanke's Twist before Bernanke's Twist became the thing to do.
My point is the interest rates would not be falling if it wasn't for the inflation that the government was creating, sending fake signals to the market about abundance of savings and capital investment, while in reality savings were destroyed by this and capital investments were in flight away from USA.
In fact the long term interest rates were going up, that's why the government refinanced with short term adjustable rate paper, Clinton wanted to spend more than the government was getting in revenues because of the investment capital flight caused by the inflation. It's a self-perpetuating downward spiral of debt and debt monetisation.
Your last assertion is that the government could behave more responsibly because it became cheaper for the government to borrow money is laughable and completely false. The government only grew its debts since Clinton, the debts never went down and government spending only grew in every way, what 'responsibly' are you talking about FFS?
The only reason that USPS has the monopoly on first class mail in USA (nobody is allowed to compete on that with them) is supposedly to provide a subsidy so that all the people in USA are covered. This shows that even that meagre reason for this monopoly doesn't stand to the scrutiny if your packages are discriminated against by the government.
USPS is government, it's a government protected monopoly and it discriminates against people. This is government discrimination. This is the real type of discrimination. You think UPS or DHL or Fedex discriminate against customers this way? Yet DHL, UPS, Fedex are regulated under law, which makes them liable to lawsuits, to 'provide equal access' and all that nonsense, while in reality they want to provide the best customer service in order to win against competition.
USPS doesn't care about competition, they are a government protected monopoly, they are a perfect organisation to maintain various types of discrimination.
There shouldn't be any government protected monopolies, private sectors deals with people's needs, whether they are atheists or Muslims or whatever. Government will lose your package if you are an atheist, and I don't want to get into what they will do to you if you are a Muslim.
There is no valid science behind Keynesianism. There is nothing valid about it, it was debunked long ago, just like astrology. However there are still people selling horoscopes in either of those 'sciences'.
Your arguments went from sublime to ridiculous in one thread. You are arguing that borrowing from yourself means having 'balance' and now that astrology is a legitimate science because some names came from people who believed in astrology while naming some stars.
So, someone with $10,000 in credit card debt and $100 in his pocket has "no money"
- The Fed does not have 100 dollars in his pocket, he has a fake credit machine, a printing press of sorts.
Saying that the Fed has money because it has a printing press, it's the same as saying any counterfeiter has money. The Fed is in debt, but all that debt is on the books of the US Treasury as of last year. Fed can't be in debt and Fed doesn't have any money. All Fed's debts are automatically debts of US Treasury.
When Treasury 'borrows' from Fed, it borrows from itself. Saying that you can borrow from yourself is completely meaningless. That means you are getting to more debt yourself. Where does the actual money come from then if the Treasury borrows from itself? The Fed prints it. No, the Fed doesn't have 100 dollars in a pocket, the Fed conjures up fake 100 dollars and the Treasury adds it to its liabilities.
Your example has a wife and a husband, where husband actually has money, so the total balance in the household is NOT negative. Borrowing from a household with total negative balance is not borrowing from savings, it's adding to the debt.
You can't understand simplest things obviously. Clinton didn't have any balanced budgets or surpluses, he always added to the debt, regardless which hand holds the debt, both were his hands.
That's right, Fed has no money, what surplus? Clipping 30 year coupons at negative real interest rate? IF Fed had actual money, a surplus you would hsve a point. Now you have nothing.
The married household has separate books but entangled finances. The Wife borrows money from the husband, and neither has a credit card. You are claiming it's impossible for the household to borrow from itself without using a credit card. I claim you are wrong.
- wrong. There are no separate entities, 'the wife' and 'the husband' here, more logical nonsense.
There is one federal government, it cannot borrow from itself, it has nothing to pay for its borrowing with. Whatever federal government "borrows" is money that is conjured from nothingness, there is nothing to borrow from, so what your "wife" (Congress) ends up doing is asking the "husband" (Fed) to print.
There is no borrowing when there are no assets and there is no separate entity with money. The Fed doesn't have money, it creates fake credit by inflating the money supply, your entire example is meaningless.