It's people, individuals. One day you solve a problem for yourself, next thing you know, you are making a business out of solving that problem for other people, you are making money from it. You are part of the market.
If you decide that there is a business case in building a part of road or a bridge or a gas pipeline or an electrical line or whatever, you can do that because you can make money from it. This works as long as people are free to do business and as long as government is not interfering.
Switzerland is a huge exporter, not only of watches but of machinery, medical supplies, food, all sorts of things are made in Switzerland.
Unfortunately they have pegged the Franc to the Euro, which is the dumbest idea they ever had.
As to having a 'service sector economy', as long as you balance your imports with your exports, it doesn't matter what economy you have, but you are not balancing your imports with your exports. You have a huge trade deficit, you had it for decades now, adding to the debt. 54 or so Billion USD per month.
You don't have enough productive output to pay for those imports, and whatever it is you are producing and exporting today already has all of your services accounted in those numbers.
That's fine if your trade is balanced and you can repay your debts with your services. As it stands, you can't have service economy because your trade deficit is about 50Billion USD per month, and it's been there for decades, growing your debt.
If you can export enough services to cover your imports, then there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to have a 'service sector economy', but you do not export enough services to do that.
- Arrrgh, I take it you have never seen them sea moths, have you? Arrrgh! They will eat your computer and your clothing and whatever is inside the container once they are done devouring the actual container. That's right, they jump out of the sea on their underwater sea wings and then they snatch a container with their huge moths paws and jump back into the sea. Then they swallow the entire container and it forces them to go down onto the bottom of the sea, where they then lay quietly for 300 days, devouring the container and everything in it. They are real sea monsters.
But don't use normal moth balls either inside your shipment, you have to put your entire container into a mothball for them to avoid it.
16Trillion / 300 Million is about 53K, that's true.
However another 222Trillion / 300 Million is another 740,000 in debt per person. Now, those are obligations that include SS and Medicare and various other pensions.
But this doesn't even include all the mortgage guarantees and all the student loan guarantees that the government makes! How about all the bank guarantees? FDIC? If everything is counted in, that's all sorts of money that the government promises to pay in case things go South, and that's all kinds of money that government does not have. There are no assets like that, there is no tax revenue that can cover that either.
In USA the federal taxes cover what, 2.4 Trillion of spending a year? That's just over half the spending, which is 3.8 Trillion (also, not counting various other off-budget items). Oh, and the States and municipalities and counties are fighting for the same tax payers' revenue. The real debt in USA per capita is ridiculous and can never be repaid.
Oh, and by the way, you are right now, living in a country that has what, 54 Billion USD a month trade deficit with the rest of the world? That's the money that is pumped into foreign countries, that produce and give you the products that you enjoy, as you live your 'beautiful life' in a 'beautiful house', driving a 'nice car' in the 'nice city'.
Now imagine that people refuse to accept dollars for the goods that you are buying in your 'nice city' specifically because your Central bank and your government are on the path to destroy your currency and you cannot repay your debt.
Do you own your beautiful house and your 'nice car' or do you have it because the gov't guarantees your mortgage (and maybe even your car loan, especially if it's GM)?
You are living in a dream world, unfortunately such things have an expiry date.
You live in a nice home, good for you. How is everybody else doing?
USA left the gold standard because it interfered with its desire to expand deficit gov't spending and prevented USA from getting into all this debt. The great recession of the early thirties was created by the Fed's policy of saving UK pound, which started in 1925. The great depression resulted from the gov't trying to fight off that recession with even looser monetary policy and with all the economic stimulus resulting from that policy. The depression didn't end until the end of WWII, when the gov't cut 64% of spending and over 30% of taxes.
As to 'little inflation' the inflation is only 'little' if you go by the gov't numbers and if you are not completely gullible you shouldn't go by gov't numbers, the real inflation in USA is 11 to 15% annually.
As to oil, again, you are missing the point. The reason why oil costs more to extract is not due to various technological factors, the technology makes oil easier to extract. Yes, the supplies are not infinite and yes, more has to be done to extract oil, but the costs of extraction are going up not because of that, they are going up because of inflation. There is more supply in the market today than actually ever before in history and yet USA consumes less than 6 years ago, than 5 years ago, than 4 years ago, than 3, 2 and 1 year ago. The reason that USA consumes less is the falling productivity (maybe this avoids you, but you are one of 300,000,000), the reason the USA consumes less is because people are not working. U6 shows 15% unemployment, all that was in the original comment that you replied to.
You get paid dollars, that's why you get robbed by inflation, which part of that is not clear? When the Fed creates dollars out of nothing it devalues your savings and your labour.
How do you think the Fed believes it can control the employment numbers? Its only tool is inflation (interest rate manipulation and money printing, monetising US Treasury debt via the deal with the member banks). It 'controls' unemployment by creating inflation and thus by making your labour cheaper.
If you go to a store and you look at 2 products that are similar and one is 30% more expensive, would you say that you'd mostly go with the cheaper one? Your wage is a price to your employer, so the Fed devalues your prices by inflating the monetary supply, by stealing your earnings and savings basically, that's the simple way to look at it and it's true.
By making you less expensive in the real terms, the Fed is trying to incite employers to hire more workers and maybe it works under certain conditions, but not under the current conditions, because the current conditions are already at 0 interest and very high inflation, which drove the savings and investments out already. There is nobody that can hire more people because the jobs are gone, and they are gone because of inflation, rules, regulations, taxes. At some point creating more inflation will not help to create more employment at all, it will only make the situation worse.
Also if you are not paid in gold you are really being robbed. Wouldn't you rather have an employment contract that stated that you are getting 1 ounce of gold per week (or whatever it is you are worth in the market) rather than getting some dollar amount per week?
The stock market is at 40 year low priced in gold. The fact that the stock market value went up in dollar prices only confirms my point about inflation, it doesn't do anything to help your point.
As to the market being at 2x the nominal value from 2009, yeah, first of all you are looking at the 2009 dip, which was pretty steep, so you are comparing 6,626 in 2009 during the crash to today at 13,610. Compare to 2000. It was around 10,000 in the year 2000.
When gold was at 300, the Dow was at 10,000, so that's about 1 to 33 ratio.
Today the ratio is 1778 to 13610, which is 1 to 7.6 The value of Dow went down 4.3 times over since 2000.
Eventually Dow and gold will be 1 to 1. Maybe at 10,000 to 10,000 maybe at 100,000 to 100,000, whatever it may be, nominal values do not matter, what matters is the trajectory.
Oil prices are going up, gold is going up, all of the commodities are going up. The product costs and prices are also going up, not as fast, because the market is good at finding efficiencies and bringing costs down despite inflation, but the market cannot beat the laws of thermodynamics and so inflation catches up.
Today more oil is extracted than ever and yet USA consumes less oil than every year since 2005. The prices are going up in nominal terms, while falling in real terms and this is not about supply and demand. Supply and demand curve pushes prices down, it's the inflation that is pushing prices up.
Think about it, if you and 6 more of your friends all jump out of a window of a skyscraper without parachutes, and all of you are falling down, you are all OK 2 floors down, you are all OK 4 floors down, some of you fall a bit faster than others, some fall a bit slower, all of you are closing with the inevitable. When an outsider asks how you are doing, you tell him: Not bad, I am actually an entire floor above the other 6.
This is not exactly supply and demand issue, this is a shrinking economy and inflation issue. The shrinking economy causes people to use less gasoline and inflation causes nominal prices to rise (while real prices are actually falling due to the deflation, so if you measure oil in gold, then you'll see that the prices are falling, not rising).
As the productivity in USA and Europe shrinks, more of the product is distributed to the productive nations, which are able to buy more of that product, but this causes supply irregularities in the countries with less supply.
The situation is similar to what happens in the meat market due to inflation and other factors (like drought). As the supply of feed is reduced due to higher input costs because of inflation and as less supply is produced due to other factors like drought, the farmers start getting rid of their animals, they slaughter more and the prices can fall temporarily. However once that glut of meat is consumed, the overall supply of the animals is reduced and the prices for meat products will jump up.
I believe you are observing the same phenomena right now with oil prices and it's due to higher nominal cost of oil drilling and refining due to inflation as well as lower purchasing power by the population due to the inflation and due to the shrinking economy.
As a side note, the funny jobs numbers that came out (unemployment down to 7.8%) are indeed quite educating to the political situation in USA. 10,000 jobs were added in government and 16,000 jobs were lost in manufacturing sector in September (22,000 manufacturing jobs lost in August). However a 'household survey' shows that 873,000 jobs were created in September, this is the highest number of jobs added in one months since 1983. 66% of these jobs are part time, so the U6 number is unchanged (just under 15%) in September (number of underemployed people as well of those who are unemployed). Don't forget that every revision that comes out the next month revises the job growth numbers down and elections are in November. Don't forget that Obama's white house pressured the military (and other) contractors not to send out pink slips to their employees, who will be fired in 2 months and who must be notified 60 days prior, the white house promised all those contractors to take care of the penalties that they will incur due to this malpractice, this is clearly a violation and manipulation aimed at winning the elections, which is likely highly illegal.
A week ago GDP numbers came out, not that anybody should actually take those numbers at face value, they are absolutely misreported, but even as they are, they were revised down for the second quarter from 1.7 to 1.3%, and this is after using a completely fake deflator of 1.6%. How is it possible that the economy that is "growing" (officially) by 1.6% is adding all these jobs to take the unemployment down to 7.8%? The truth of course is that the economy is shrinking and if the real inflation number is used, then it becomes immediately obvious. Even if the inflation number is only 3%, then the economy is shrinking, because the pre-deflator GDP is 2.9%. The inflation is a few times bigger than that though, so adding jobs in a shrinking economy sound very fishy.
Politicians shouldn't be in charge, but not because they are non-specialists. Of-course the fact that they are lawyers helps them in figuring out ways to bend the rules a little further every day, being an engineer or a doctor is not a useful skill to somebody who sees his entire job as pushing for more laws and regulations that would help him to advance in his career and make more money.
The reason that politicians shouldn't be in charge is not because they are not-specialists but because it's not up to the government to build any businesses or infrastructure or health care in the first place. It's not up to government to decide what money is, it's up to the markets to decide what money is, what interest rates should be, where the roads should go and how far they should extend. It should be the markets deciding whether infrastructure priorities should be in transit and transport of humans or maybe much of it should be diverted to more efficient ways of transporting cargo and resources like gas, oil, electricity, water and such.
The government is always the wrong answer if the question is: money, a product or a service.
So you are saying that a business owner by definition never does wrong or acts immorally?
- by definition you just built a strawman argument, where did you see anything of the kind in my comment? You just put words into my mouth, let's see if you are going to argue against this very notion that you just ascribed to me.
I mean, you are saying that calling a business owner a robber is always wrong.
- yes, it is always wrong to call a business owner a robber unless he is a robber, which means he stole something.
But do you call all employees robbers because some employees steal something (not always from work, sometimes from work, sometimes from stores and other businesses, sometimes from other people). It is always wrong to call a group of people something that they are not by definition.
He should be sued by the customers of MF Global, MF Global was sued, he should be held personally liable given all the information that came out. Instead the courts ruled in his favour, because he is a political figure. So Jon Corzine is a robber. Does it make somebody else a robber? No. You are assigning guilt by association, but this ways we are all robbers, because people steal, so everybody who is a person is a thief, is that your underlying point?
How about knowingly let workers handle poisonous substances for years, and then firing them when they get sick?
- that's fine, that's what courts are for. In fact the reason why many got away with things like that was the government protection, just like Jon Corzine was protected. The point is that the gov't creates the moral hazard, it starts at the very moment the gov't allows for a special privilege of 'limited liability' to be assigned to an organisation, so then the people who may in fact be directly responsible for bad behaviour get away with it because of government protection.
That's Jon Corzine and whoever else that did similar things.
Insisting that everybody has to live his life as a businessowner is totalitatian.
- another strawman argument, building one more contraption and assigning it to me, while I never said that anybody must be forced into anything. In fact ALL my arguments come on the side of voluntarism and against use of force by government to achieve any results that have nothing to do with the reason why a Republic was established in the first place (to protect individual liberties).
People understand it quite well. By insisting that it is perfect, you show your ignorance and lack of understanding.
- perfect? No, it's not perfect, it allows for various mistakes to happen, it's exactly like evolution.
Is evolution perfect? Is Darwinism lacking understanding and is it evolution theory ignorant?
I have a question on your dash mania. I've seen that in other people of your same persuation so I wonder: is that a bug in the randroid BIOS?
- an ad-hominem, the last refuge of the incompetent and the irrelevant.
I know, it's a euphemism for the people who actually run the businesses, anybody who creates a product or a service that people end up buying because they like the product. This word is an acknowledgement of the fact that people do not understand why running a business as opposed to being an employee often provides somebody with a better life style. Those who call business owners robbers, are people who think something is stolen from them, because they think there is no other way a person running a business can make more money than any one specific worker that is hired by that person.
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It was fine 150 years ago, because capitalism was a fairly knew concept and few people understood it, but what is the excuse today?
I do value freedom to own property more than anything else specifically because all other freedoms are irrelevant if this one freedom does not exist. Actually all other freedoms only exist as long as they support this one specific freedom: ownership of property.
Think about freedom of speech as an example, what does it mean? It means that the government cannot punish you somehow for speaking your mind, but why is it important for you to speak your mind? It is important for you to speak your mind because you want to be able to do with yourself as you please, you want to be able to run your life as you want, and this means you want your property to be free of tyranny.
Freedom of speech exists to support your right to own property, without the right to own property freedom of speech is irrelevant. If you cannot own property than all other freedoms are actually completely fake and irrelevant, because your entire life hits into this barrier: you have to take care of yourself (and whoever else you want to take care of) and this means you must be able to pursue happiness, which really means that you must be able to do with your life as you please.
You cannot do with your life as you please if you cannot provide for your life as you please and being able to provide for your life as you please requires that you have the right to own property. Do you know why? Because if you cannot own property than all your pursuits are irrelevant, because the moment you earn something, you make something, you acquire something, you cannot be sure that it will not be confiscated from you.
The short version is this: you only can pursue happiness if you can pursue your own property. If you cannot provide for yourself you cannot do anything else, there is nothing else you can do, you have no other freedoms if you cannot earn and keep what you earned.
Why would you want a freedom of speech then? Because you need to be able to express your views as your ability to own property comes under attack by various sides, most importantly by the government. If the gov't can prevent you from free speech, then it can stop you from explaining your position and building your case and thus it can stop you from building enough movement around your point to prevent the government from stealing your property.
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Your property starts with your own body. Your body is the result of your parent's giving it to you (thus the right of your parents to leave you with this inheritance) and eventually your body is the result of your own labour.
If you cannot prevent government from taking your body away from you, piece by piece or all at once, then again, you have nothing else. All of your other property is extension of your body because the same concept applies. You have to work, your labour provides you with whatever you earned and without you these earnings wouldn't be there, wouldn't exist. They are as much yours as your body is.
A government that can take your property from you is also a government that can take your body from you.
If you believe in the "from everybody's abilities to everybody's needs", then you have to allow for the possibility that somebody else may present a case that they need your kidneys more than you do, your liver, your heart, whatever.
If you are not turned off by this perspective then I am not in the same plane as you are at all, to me the very idea that you are not the owner of your own body and by extension of everything that you earn by working (whatever that work is) is completely disgusting and unacceptable on every level.
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As to me moving to China, since I moved my business already and I moved myself, I am actually looking at spending more time in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong and I am really interested in the investment opportunities in Burma.
The Bells got into telephony early, and dominated.
- only thanks to the government giving them a monopoly and killing off 3000 viable competitors in the process. Yeah, not AT&T, it was the government that created that monopoly. There are no monopolies without government intervention. Without gov't any sufficiently large business is just an economy of scale moving closer towards its own collapse because of its own weight.
Their 'robber barons'? You mean the companies that moved to China and started production there? Or do you mean the local companies that saved enough money and presented a viable business plan and started working?
Or maybe you actually mean their government, which steals from every Chinese worker by devaluing Chinese money?
Because if you talk about robber barons, you have to make sense, you have to talk about people who take something from those workers without giving them something back that they voluntarily agreed to, and that would be government running inflation and devaluing the renminbi and preventing those very Chinese workers from being able to use their own earnings to buy the very products that they are creating.
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As to a strike - a private union is all fine as long as there are no laws that force the employer into being obligated to work with it. There has to be freedom of association and it must work both ways. No person has a 'right' to a job being provided by any other person.
Pollution in China is related to the fact that government owns so much property and to the fact that it was such a poor country under the communist rule, so that nobody owned anything and thus huge gain in productivity caused plenty of pollution. Pollution is always front loaded in societies that are moving from pre-industrial to industrial format. So to build your first nuclear reactor you'll have to go through a few stages of other, cheaper forms of producing energy, and they are definitely more polluting. Running a diesel generator or a coal power plant creates more pollution than running a nuclear reactor.
Running a coal powered iron smelter creates much more pollution than running an electric one. A pre-industrial society does not have the resources, the saved capital to allow itself the most expensive and thus the least polluting options, a pre-industrial society will take these steps, it will go through the growing pains.
However if the gov't in China was about real freedom, (which it is not), at least these concerns could be addressed between private land owners. Since the biggest land owner in China is government and there is all this pollution, you'll have to take it with Chinese government - why do they allow so much pollution on the 'public' land? Obviously there is no such thing as 'public property', there is only private property and all so called 'public property' is just a way to abuse the environment with the government not paying attention but instead being interested in the money that it will make from all the transactions and taxes.
However in USA the property rights and obviously many other rights are worse than in China, otherwise the businesses wouldn't be moving to China from USA. I don't have to learn every single detail, why every business moves from USA (and Europe) to China, I only need to see what is easily observable.
What is easily observable is that companies do move to China, they obviously find that property rights are protected better in China, and property rights includes the right to keep the fruits of your labour. The fact that lands in China are polluted is just another proof of my point - there shouldn't be any public property, it's a nonsense idea, it's an oxymoron. All property should be private and that's how pollution will be combated.
However the companies moving to China find that their taxes are much lower and that dealing with Chinese authorities is much easier. Many people think that having an overpowering government that needs to be bribed in a very artsy manner (with lobbyists, etc.) is a better way to do business than simply solving the problem by paying a bribe to a local official. Those people who think that never had to run business and definitely they never compared the two options.
It's much easier to run business if the system has ridiculous rules but on one side the ridiculous rules can be bent quickly and efficiently with a bribe and on the other side it takes much more effort, much more money to do so, which means only the largest monopolies can survive by bending the rules and there is much less competition.
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China has a long way to go before it is actually a Free society (if it ever becomes one), but compared to USA or Europe it is a much Freer society to do business in and it protects your property much better than those 'more developed' societies.
They are not more developed, they are more bogged down in authoritative bureaucracy. I don't know which way China will go from here, but I wish it to go more towards Hong Kong style capitalism with as much Free Market as possible. The Western societies will collapse as their economies collapse and they will have their totalitarian nightmare for a few years or maybe decades and then they will also rebalance and go back to freedoms.
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My point in short is this: China allows more freedom to you as a business today than USA and most of Europe but China still is an authoritative regime, with too much public property rathe
Market says that China has better property rights, that's why companies are moving there.
If dumping of whatever pollutants is happening in China this only means that their property rights are not ideal, it means that there is plenty of property that is 'owned' by the government, and the gov't doesn't care about all that property.
Do you want to take a step back and think about the atrocious behaviour that took place in the former USSR and I know that you know, how much land and water reserves and all the rest was destroyed by the government? Do you want to start comparing what the productive output was back in the USSR and how it compares to the modern day China?
I did not say that property rights in China were top notch, I said that the market prefers China and not USA.
40? Seriously? You've got another 24 years until retirement so you better get your head in the game.
- you really should stop thinking in those terms, there is no more 'years until retirement', that train has passed.
At this point either you do something yourself so that you can retire at some point or you won't ever retire. If you think that SS will be there for you in 24 years and that even if it's there, that you'll be able to afford anything at all with that check, you are fooling yourself.
Stop living in a dream land, treat this as if there will be no SS at all for you even though you are shelling out parts of your income towards the current batch of beneficiaries, you are not going to benefit from it, so start thinking in those terms.
That's what property rights are for (and ensuring that gov't doesn't usurp property and doesn't use the so called 'public property' to allow companies to do business there).
Whether or not China has better property rights than USA....market says it does.
'Truly poor' people are not living within modern societies. A 'truly poor' person is somebody living on a deserted island without access to any modern technology and service.
Anybody living within a large enough society today benefits from all types of technologies of-course that we have, for example they may benefit from GPS systems installed on buses that they take, because those GPS systems allow the buses to be more precise and allow for a better time table. They benefit from GPS systems and radio communications in general, because of how many businesses use that tech, which allows for lower costs of production, which is what all people benefit from, but especially the poor.
Of-course the worst enemy of the poor is a central bank, which causes inflation and prevents deflation, which again, would be beneficial for the poor more than for the rich.
It remains to be seen if this vapourware ends up revolutionising the market space of interactive cloud consolidation techniques. The question on all our minds is: will it ever fly? Will the flatulating satellites help to clean up the space and will it be able to remove the junk left over after years and years of crapshooting trash into the Earth orbit? Nobody knows for sure, but in case it can be done the appropriate measures have been taken by the industry pioneers, such as Boeing. No space will be cleaned of junk without Boeing getting a piece of that space pie.
Bring a small aerosol canister of basically liquid shit and spray it inconspicuously on people's luggage. For better results bring a few cans with you with slightly different composition, mix powder traces of real explosives as well.
Do it as a flash mob across the globe and shut down the entire airline industry.
Slashdot Mirror
It's people, individuals. One day you solve a problem for yourself, next thing you know, you are making a business out of solving that problem for other people, you are making money from it. You are part of the market.
If you decide that there is a business case in building a part of road or a bridge or a gas pipeline or an electrical line or whatever, you can do that because you can make money from it. This works as long as people are free to do business and as long as government is not interfering.
Switzerland is a huge exporter, not only of watches but of machinery, medical supplies, food, all sorts of things are made in Switzerland.
Unfortunately they have pegged the Franc to the Euro, which is the dumbest idea they ever had.
As to having a 'service sector economy', as long as you balance your imports with your exports, it doesn't matter what economy you have, but you are not balancing your imports with your exports. You have a huge trade deficit, you had it for decades now, adding to the debt. 54 or so Billion USD per month.
You don't have enough productive output to pay for those imports, and whatever it is you are producing and exporting today already has all of your services accounted in those numbers.
That's fine if your trade is balanced and you can repay your debts with your services. As it stands, you can't have service economy because your trade deficit is about 50Billion USD per month, and it's been there for decades, growing your debt.
If you can export enough services to cover your imports, then there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to have a 'service sector economy', but you do not export enough services to do that.
Moth balls? At sea?
- Arrrgh, I take it you have never seen them sea moths, have you? Arrrgh! They will eat your computer and your clothing and whatever is inside the container once they are done devouring the actual container. That's right, they jump out of the sea on their underwater sea wings and then they snatch a container with their huge moths paws and jump back into the sea. Then they swallow the entire container and it forces them to go down onto the bottom of the sea, where they then lay quietly for 300 days, devouring the container and everything in it. They are real sea monsters.
But don't use normal moth balls either inside your shipment, you have to put your entire container into a mothball for them to avoid it.
The total US debt is much higher than 50K per person.
50K per person is only tip of the iceberg, that's just the outstanding public debt. However this does not include the 222Trillion USD of unfunded liabilities.
16Trillion / 300 Million is about 53K, that's true.
However another 222Trillion / 300 Million is another 740,000 in debt per person. Now, those are obligations that include SS and Medicare and various other pensions.
But this doesn't even include all the mortgage guarantees and all the student loan guarantees that the government makes! How about all the bank guarantees? FDIC? If everything is counted in, that's all sorts of money that the government promises to pay in case things go South, and that's all kinds of money that government does not have. There are no assets like that, there is no tax revenue that can cover that either.
In USA the federal taxes cover what, 2.4 Trillion of spending a year? That's just over half the spending, which is 3.8 Trillion (also, not counting various other off-budget items). Oh, and the States and municipalities and counties are fighting for the same tax payers' revenue. The real debt in USA per capita is ridiculous and can never be repaid.
Oh, and by the way, you are right now, living in a country that has what, 54 Billion USD a month trade deficit with the rest of the world? That's the money that is pumped into foreign countries, that produce and give you the products that you enjoy, as you live your 'beautiful life' in a 'beautiful house', driving a 'nice car' in the 'nice city'.
Now imagine that people refuse to accept dollars for the goods that you are buying in your 'nice city' specifically because your Central bank and your government are on the path to destroy your currency and you cannot repay your debt.
Do you own your beautiful house and your 'nice car' or do you have it because the gov't guarantees your mortgage (and maybe even your car loan, especially if it's GM)?
You are living in a dream world, unfortunately such things have an expiry date.
You live in a nice home, good for you. How is everybody else doing?
USA left the gold standard because it interfered with its desire to expand deficit gov't spending and prevented USA from getting into all this debt. The great recession of the early thirties was created by the Fed's policy of saving UK pound, which started in 1925. The great depression resulted from the gov't trying to fight off that recession with even looser monetary policy and with all the economic stimulus resulting from that policy. The depression didn't end until the end of WWII, when the gov't cut 64% of spending and over 30% of taxes.
As to 'little inflation' the inflation is only 'little' if you go by the gov't numbers and if you are not completely gullible you shouldn't go by gov't numbers, the real inflation in USA is 11 to 15% annually.
As to oil, again, you are missing the point. The reason why oil costs more to extract is not due to various technological factors, the technology makes oil easier to extract. Yes, the supplies are not infinite and yes, more has to be done to extract oil, but the costs of extraction are going up not because of that, they are going up because of inflation. There is more supply in the market today than actually ever before in history and yet USA consumes less than 6 years ago, than 5 years ago, than 4 years ago, than 3, 2 and 1 year ago. The reason that USA consumes less is the falling productivity (maybe this avoids you, but you are one of 300,000,000), the reason the USA consumes less is because people are not working. U6 shows 15% unemployment, all that was in the original comment that you replied to.
You get paid dollars, that's why you get robbed by inflation, which part of that is not clear? When the Fed creates dollars out of nothing it devalues your savings and your labour.
How do you think the Fed believes it can control the employment numbers? Its only tool is inflation (interest rate manipulation and money printing, monetising US Treasury debt via the deal with the member banks). It 'controls' unemployment by creating inflation and thus by making your labour cheaper.
If you go to a store and you look at 2 products that are similar and one is 30% more expensive, would you say that you'd mostly go with the cheaper one? Your wage is a price to your employer, so the Fed devalues your prices by inflating the monetary supply, by stealing your earnings and savings basically, that's the simple way to look at it and it's true.
By making you less expensive in the real terms, the Fed is trying to incite employers to hire more workers and maybe it works under certain conditions, but not under the current conditions, because the current conditions are already at 0 interest and very high inflation, which drove the savings and investments out already. There is nobody that can hire more people because the jobs are gone, and they are gone because of inflation, rules, regulations, taxes. At some point creating more inflation will not help to create more employment at all, it will only make the situation worse.
Also if you are not paid in gold you are really being robbed. Wouldn't you rather have an employment contract that stated that you are getting 1 ounce of gold per week (or whatever it is you are worth in the market) rather than getting some dollar amount per week?
The stock market is at 40 year low priced in gold. The fact that the stock market value went up in dollar prices only confirms my point about inflation, it doesn't do anything to help your point.
As to the market being at 2x the nominal value from 2009, yeah, first of all you are looking at the 2009 dip, which was pretty steep, so you are comparing 6,626 in 2009 during the crash to today at 13,610. Compare to 2000. It was around 10,000 in the year 2000.
In the year 2000 gold was 300 and today it's 1778.
When gold was at 300, the Dow was at 10,000, so that's about 1 to 33 ratio.
Today the ratio is 1778 to 13610, which is 1 to 7.6 The value of Dow went down 4.3 times over since 2000.
Eventually Dow and gold will be 1 to 1. Maybe at 10,000 to 10,000 maybe at 100,000 to 100,000, whatever it may be, nominal values do not matter, what matters is the trajectory.
Oil prices are going up, gold is going up, all of the commodities are going up. The product costs and prices are also going up, not as fast, because the market is good at finding efficiencies and bringing costs down despite inflation, but the market cannot beat the laws of thermodynamics and so inflation catches up.
Today more oil is extracted than ever and yet USA consumes less oil than every year since 2005. The prices are going up in nominal terms, while falling in real terms and this is not about supply and demand. Supply and demand curve pushes prices down, it's the inflation that is pushing prices up.
Think about it, if you and 6 more of your friends all jump out of a window of a skyscraper without parachutes, and all of you are falling down, you are all OK 2 floors down, you are all OK 4 floors down, some of you fall a bit faster than others, some fall a bit slower, all of you are closing with the inevitable. When an outsider asks how you are doing, you tell him: Not bad, I am actually an entire floor above the other 6.
Do you understand what I am saying?
Here is the chart (you can put 1 over it for a more appropriate view) of how they are all progressing towards that pavement.
This is not exactly supply and demand issue, this is a shrinking economy and inflation issue. The shrinking economy causes people to use less gasoline and inflation causes nominal prices to rise (while real prices are actually falling due to the deflation, so if you measure oil in gold, then you'll see that the prices are falling, not rising).
As the productivity in USA and Europe shrinks, more of the product is distributed to the productive nations, which are able to buy more of that product, but this causes supply irregularities in the countries with less supply.
The situation is similar to what happens in the meat market due to inflation and other factors (like drought). As the supply of feed is reduced due to higher input costs because of inflation and as less supply is produced due to other factors like drought, the farmers start getting rid of their animals, they slaughter more and the prices can fall temporarily. However once that glut of meat is consumed, the overall supply of the animals is reduced and the prices for meat products will jump up.
I believe you are observing the same phenomena right now with oil prices and it's due to higher nominal cost of oil drilling and refining due to inflation as well as lower purchasing power by the population due to the inflation and due to the shrinking economy.
As a side note, the funny jobs numbers that came out (unemployment down to 7.8%) are indeed quite educating to the political situation in USA. 10,000 jobs were added in government and 16,000 jobs were lost in manufacturing sector in September (22,000 manufacturing jobs lost in August). However a 'household survey' shows that 873,000 jobs were created in September, this is the highest number of jobs added in one months since 1983. 66% of these jobs are part time, so the U6 number is unchanged (just under 15%) in September (number of underemployed people as well of those who are unemployed). Don't forget that every revision that comes out the next month revises the job growth numbers down and elections are in November. Don't forget that Obama's white house pressured the military (and other) contractors not to send out pink slips to their employees, who will be fired in 2 months and who must be notified 60 days prior, the white house promised all those contractors to take care of the penalties that they will incur due to this malpractice, this is clearly a violation and manipulation aimed at winning the elections, which is likely highly illegal.
A week ago GDP numbers came out, not that anybody should actually take those numbers at face value, they are absolutely misreported, but even as they are, they were revised down for the second quarter from 1.7 to 1.3%, and this is after using a completely fake deflator of 1.6%. How is it possible that the economy that is "growing" (officially) by 1.6% is adding all these jobs to take the unemployment down to 7.8%? The truth of course is that the economy is shrinking and if the real inflation number is used, then it becomes immediately obvious. Even if the inflation number is only 3%, then the economy is shrinking, because the pre-deflator GDP is 2.9%. The inflation is a few times bigger than that though, so adding jobs in a shrinking economy sound very fishy.
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Think about this: the official deflator for the GDP is 1.6%. Here is a chart of CPI. That's the reported number. The revised GDP is 1.3% Which is down from 1.7% earlier, before the revision. The U6 unemployment number is 15%.
Politicians shouldn't be in charge, but not because they are non-specialists. Of-course the fact that they are lawyers helps them in figuring out ways to bend the rules a little further every day, being an engineer or a doctor is not a useful skill to somebody who sees his entire job as pushing for more laws and regulations that would help him to advance in his career and make more money.
The reason that politicians shouldn't be in charge is not because they are not-specialists but because it's not up to the government to build any businesses or infrastructure or health care in the first place. It's not up to government to decide what money is, it's up to the markets to decide what money is, what interest rates should be, where the roads should go and how far they should extend. It should be the markets deciding whether infrastructure priorities should be in transit and transport of humans or maybe much of it should be diverted to more efficient ways of transporting cargo and resources like gas, oil, electricity, water and such.
The government is always the wrong answer if the question is: money, a product or a service.
The land of the freeeeeee.........
the home of the non-smokers.
So you are saying that a business owner by definition never does wrong or acts immorally?
- by definition you just built a strawman argument, where did you see anything of the kind in my comment? You just put words into my mouth, let's see if you are going to argue against this very notion that you just ascribed to me.
I mean, you are saying that calling a business owner a robber is always wrong.
- yes, it is always wrong to call a business owner a robber unless he is a robber, which means he stole something.
But do you call all employees robbers because some employees steal something (not always from work, sometimes from work, sometimes from stores and other businesses, sometimes from other people). It is always wrong to call a group of people something that they are not by definition.
You want to call somebody a robber? That's fine. Jon Corzine is a robber, he stole money from clients of MF Global while he was the CEO of the company.
He should be sued by the customers of MF Global, MF Global was sued, he should be held personally liable given all the information that came out. Instead the courts ruled in his favour, because he is a political figure. So Jon Corzine is a robber. Does it make somebody else a robber? No. You are assigning guilt by association, but this ways we are all robbers, because people steal, so everybody who is a person is a thief, is that your underlying point?
How about knowingly let workers handle poisonous substances for years, and then firing them when they get sick?
- that's fine, that's what courts are for. In fact the reason why many got away with things like that was the government protection, just like Jon Corzine was protected. The point is that the gov't creates the moral hazard, it starts at the very moment the gov't allows for a special privilege of 'limited liability' to be assigned to an organisation, so then the people who may in fact be directly responsible for bad behaviour get away with it because of government protection.
That's Jon Corzine and whoever else that did similar things.
Insisting that everybody has to live his life as a businessowner is totalitatian.
- another strawman argument, building one more contraption and assigning it to me, while I never said that anybody must be forced into anything. In fact ALL my arguments come on the side of voluntarism and against use of force by government to achieve any results that have nothing to do with the reason why a Republic was established in the first place (to protect individual liberties).
People understand it quite well. By insisting that it is perfect, you show your ignorance and lack of understanding.
- perfect? No, it's not perfect, it allows for various mistakes to happen, it's exactly like evolution.
Is evolution perfect? Is Darwinism lacking understanding and is it evolution theory ignorant?
I have a question on your dash mania. I've seen that in other people of your same persuation so I wonder: is that a bug in the randroid BIOS?
- an ad-hominem, the last refuge of the incompetent and the irrelevant.
I know, it's a euphemism for the people who actually run the businesses, anybody who creates a product or a service that people end up buying because they like the product. This word is an acknowledgement of the fact that people do not understand why running a business as opposed to being an employee often provides somebody with a better life style. Those who call business owners robbers, are people who think something is stolen from them, because they think there is no other way a person running a business can make more money than any one specific worker that is hired by that person.
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It was fine 150 years ago, because capitalism was a fairly knew concept and few people understood it, but what is the excuse today?
I do value freedom to own property more than anything else specifically because all other freedoms are irrelevant if this one freedom does not exist. Actually all other freedoms only exist as long as they support this one specific freedom: ownership of property.
Think about freedom of speech as an example, what does it mean? It means that the government cannot punish you somehow for speaking your mind, but why is it important for you to speak your mind? It is important for you to speak your mind because you want to be able to do with yourself as you please, you want to be able to run your life as you want, and this means you want your property to be free of tyranny.
Freedom of speech exists to support your right to own property, without the right to own property freedom of speech is irrelevant. If you cannot own property than all other freedoms are actually completely fake and irrelevant, because your entire life hits into this barrier: you have to take care of yourself (and whoever else you want to take care of) and this means you must be able to pursue happiness, which really means that you must be able to do with your life as you please.
You cannot do with your life as you please if you cannot provide for your life as you please and being able to provide for your life as you please requires that you have the right to own property. Do you know why? Because if you cannot own property than all your pursuits are irrelevant, because the moment you earn something, you make something, you acquire something, you cannot be sure that it will not be confiscated from you.
The short version is this: you only can pursue happiness if you can pursue your own property. If you cannot provide for yourself you cannot do anything else, there is nothing else you can do, you have no other freedoms if you cannot earn and keep what you earned.
Why would you want a freedom of speech then? Because you need to be able to express your views as your ability to own property comes under attack by various sides, most importantly by the government. If the gov't can prevent you from free speech, then it can stop you from explaining your position and building your case and thus it can stop you from building enough movement around your point to prevent the government from stealing your property.
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Your property starts with your own body. Your body is the result of your parent's giving it to you (thus the right of your parents to leave you with this inheritance) and eventually your body is the result of your own labour.
If you cannot prevent government from taking your body away from you, piece by piece or all at once, then again, you have nothing else. All of your other property is extension of your body because the same concept applies. You have to work, your labour provides you with whatever you earned and without you these earnings wouldn't be there, wouldn't exist. They are as much yours as your body is.
A government that can take your property from you is also a government that can take your body from you.
If you believe in the "from everybody's abilities to everybody's needs", then you have to allow for the possibility that somebody else may present a case that they need your kidneys more than you do, your liver, your heart, whatever.
If you are not turned off by this perspective then I am not in the same plane as you are at all, to me the very idea that you are not the owner of your own body and by extension of everything that you earn by working (whatever that work is) is completely disgusting and unacceptable on every level.
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As to me moving to China, since I moved my business already and I moved myself, I am actually looking at spending more time in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong and I am really interested in the investment opportunities in Burma.
The Bells got into telephony early, and dominated.
- only thanks to the government giving them a monopoly and killing off 3000 viable competitors in the process. Yeah, not AT&T, it was the government that created that monopoly. There are no monopolies without government intervention. Without gov't any sufficiently large business is just an economy of scale moving closer towards its own collapse because of its own weight.
Their 'robber barons'? You mean the companies that moved to China and started production there? Or do you mean the local companies that saved enough money and presented a viable business plan and started working?
Or maybe you actually mean their government, which steals from every Chinese worker by devaluing Chinese money?
Because if you talk about robber barons, you have to make sense, you have to talk about people who take something from those workers without giving them something back that they voluntarily agreed to, and that would be government running inflation and devaluing the renminbi and preventing those very Chinese workers from being able to use their own earnings to buy the very products that they are creating.
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As to a strike - a private union is all fine as long as there are no laws that force the employer into being obligated to work with it. There has to be freedom of association and it must work both ways. No person has a 'right' to a job being provided by any other person.
Pollution in China is related to the fact that government owns so much property and to the fact that it was such a poor country under the communist rule, so that nobody owned anything and thus huge gain in productivity caused plenty of pollution. Pollution is always front loaded in societies that are moving from pre-industrial to industrial format. So to build your first nuclear reactor you'll have to go through a few stages of other, cheaper forms of producing energy, and they are definitely more polluting. Running a diesel generator or a coal power plant creates more pollution than running a nuclear reactor.
Running a coal powered iron smelter creates much more pollution than running an electric one. A pre-industrial society does not have the resources, the saved capital to allow itself the most expensive and thus the least polluting options, a pre-industrial society will take these steps, it will go through the growing pains.
However if the gov't in China was about real freedom, (which it is not), at least these concerns could be addressed between private land owners. Since the biggest land owner in China is government and there is all this pollution, you'll have to take it with Chinese government - why do they allow so much pollution on the 'public' land? Obviously there is no such thing as 'public property', there is only private property and all so called 'public property' is just a way to abuse the environment with the government not paying attention but instead being interested in the money that it will make from all the transactions and taxes.
However in USA the property rights and obviously many other rights are worse than in China, otherwise the businesses wouldn't be moving to China from USA. I don't have to learn every single detail, why every business moves from USA (and Europe) to China, I only need to see what is easily observable.
What is easily observable is that companies do move to China, they obviously find that property rights are protected better in China, and property rights includes the right to keep the fruits of your labour. The fact that lands in China are polluted is just another proof of my point - there shouldn't be any public property, it's a nonsense idea, it's an oxymoron. All property should be private and that's how pollution will be combated.
However the companies moving to China find that their taxes are much lower and that dealing with Chinese authorities is much easier. Many people think that having an overpowering government that needs to be bribed in a very artsy manner (with lobbyists, etc.) is a better way to do business than simply solving the problem by paying a bribe to a local official. Those people who think that never had to run business and definitely they never compared the two options.
It's much easier to run business if the system has ridiculous rules but on one side the ridiculous rules can be bent quickly and efficiently with a bribe and on the other side it takes much more effort, much more money to do so, which means only the largest monopolies can survive by bending the rules and there is much less competition.
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China has a long way to go before it is actually a Free society (if it ever becomes one), but compared to USA or Europe it is a much Freer society to do business in and it protects your property much better than those 'more developed' societies.
They are not more developed, they are more bogged down in authoritative bureaucracy. I don't know which way China will go from here, but I wish it to go more towards Hong Kong style capitalism with as much Free Market as possible. The Western societies will collapse as their economies collapse and they will have their totalitarian nightmare for a few years or maybe decades and then they will also rebalance and go back to freedoms.
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My point in short is this: China allows more freedom to you as a business today than USA and most of Europe but China still is an authoritative regime, with too much public property rathe
Market says that China has better property rights, that's why companies are moving there.
If dumping of whatever pollutants is happening in China this only means that their property rights are not ideal, it means that there is plenty of property that is 'owned' by the government, and the gov't doesn't care about all that property.
Do you want to take a step back and think about the atrocious behaviour that took place in the former USSR and I know that you know, how much land and water reserves and all the rest was destroyed by the government? Do you want to start comparing what the productive output was back in the USSR and how it compares to the modern day China?
I did not say that property rights in China were top notch, I said that the market prefers China and not USA.
40? Seriously? You've got another 24 years until retirement so you better get your head in the game.
- you really should stop thinking in those terms, there is no more 'years until retirement', that train has passed.
At this point either you do something yourself so that you can retire at some point or you won't ever retire. If you think that SS will be there for you in 24 years and that even if it's there, that you'll be able to afford anything at all with that check, you are fooling yourself.
Stop living in a dream land, treat this as if there will be no SS at all for you even though you are shelling out parts of your income towards the current batch of beneficiaries, you are not going to benefit from it, so start thinking in those terms.
That's what property rights are for (and ensuring that gov't doesn't usurp property and doesn't use the so called 'public property' to allow companies to do business there).
Whether or not China has better property rights than USA....market says it does.
'Truly poor' people are not living within modern societies. A 'truly poor' person is somebody living on a deserted island without access to any modern technology and service.
Anybody living within a large enough society today benefits from all types of technologies of-course that we have, for example they may benefit from GPS systems installed on buses that they take, because those GPS systems allow the buses to be more precise and allow for a better time table. They benefit from GPS systems and radio communications in general, because of how many businesses use that tech, which allows for lower costs of production, which is what all people benefit from, but especially the poor.
Of-course the worst enemy of the poor is a central bank, which causes inflation and prevents deflation, which again, would be beneficial for the poor more than for the rich.
It remains to be seen if this vapourware ends up revolutionising the market space of interactive cloud consolidation techniques. The question on all our minds is: will it ever fly? Will the flatulating satellites help to clean up the space and will it be able to remove the junk left over after years and years of crapshooting trash into the Earth orbit? Nobody knows for sure, but in case it can be done the appropriate measures have been taken by the industry pioneers, such as Boeing. No space will be cleaned of junk without Boeing getting a piece of that space pie.
Imagine the IRL DDOS of an airport.
Can you see it?
Bring a small aerosol canister of basically liquid shit and spray it inconspicuously on people's luggage. For better results bring a few cans with you with slightly different composition, mix powder traces of real explosives as well.
Do it as a flash mob across the globe and shut down the entire airline industry.