co-opting the government to get what they want from the public at large.
- since the gov't steals the power from the people, the best way to make money in such a system is to be the first in line to buy that stolen power from the gov't, why is that a surprise?
The problem is that the gov't shouldn't be allowed to steal the power from the people, but people vote based on short term gain, the politicians offer free bread and circuses and people give up freedoms that then can be sold to those, who are first in line to buy those freedoms.
That's what corruption is, it's nothing else but gov't stealing freedoms from people, because then the power over the people who lost those freedoms can be sold to the highest bidder.
Can't stop the businesses from trying to succeed by buying the power from the gov't, this has to be stopped at the source. But if the source relies on the people's votes, then the problem is of the process, by which the freedoms can be taken away.
The problem is that democracy begats tyranny, all voluntarily, all with voting.
That's why it was given to you as a Republic and you couldn't keep it.
But not necessarily alternatives which will allow the same kind of consumption growth the past couple hundred years has allowed
- right, and everything that could be invented has been invented already, and we can't build nuclear power plants if there was profit in them and we can't desalinate water if there was profit in it and we can't grow food, etc.etc.
This is all nonsense. Here is the problem: gov't is standing in the way of people, that's the problem, and the unfortunate situation is that so many people support the system, that's why it is in power.
When you say: worker productivity is still growing. Qualify where. Where is it growing? I KNOW where it is growing, and its' not in USA, not in manufacturing in any case. Worker productivity is growing alright, but it's growing in Asia and other places.
What do you think productivity is (many people here are very very very confused, so excuse me for asking what you believe it is).
Productivity of a worker doesn't depend on worker's ability to flail hands around faster, it's the investment that is applied to increase worker's output, so it's new tools, new hardware, new software, new types of automation that allow 1 person to do the job of 10, 100, 1000, 1000000 people. That's what productivity is, it's the application of investment capital, which comes from savings, to the labour force by building, buying tools that make a person more productive.
A more productive person enjoys higher standard of living, he can work shorter hours and he can do more in those hours, that's why Henry Ford cut the working week to 8 hours a day and 5 days a week and still paid his workers 2x what others were paying in factories, and he ended up increasing the output by a factor of 2 in a year as well, while dropping the prices for his cars. He hated unions, by the way, did it because it was economically the right thing to do in order to achieve higher profit.
The RICH make things CHEAPER by using INVESTMENT and sell to the POORER people to make MORE profit - and this point is so lost on people, it's crazy.
Sam Walton didn't sell to the rich, he became a multi-billionaire by selling to the poorer people.
The gov't doesn't make people more productive, the savings and the investment capital makes people more productive, and gov't destroys the savings and drives out the investment capital with inflation, regulations and taxes, and how is that supposed to make people more productive and affluent?
Well obviously, the gov't isn't concerned with outcomes, it's concerned with the process. Gov't is a process by which wealth is transferred from people who make it to people who can take it by force.
The market is concerned with getting things that people want by using whatever methods that are available, and private ownership of production (capitalism) is a method that the humanity has discovered that is best suited for delivering that goal - getting people the things that they want at the lowest possible prices and at the highest quality that is reasonable to achieve given the state of technology and manufacturing at those prices.
Gov't isn't about making a product that is useful, it's about extracting money and perpetuating itself.
So for example is the gov't interested in actually eradicating problems? Of-course not! The pharma developers are often faulted for not looking for cures but instead looking for ways to manage the disease, supposedly it makes them more money.
How about gov't? It's not interested in getting rid of poverty, who would vote for these politicians that are campaigning on the message of redistribution of wealth from some to the rest?
What if there were no poor people, what would the liberals do? Shoot themselves in despair? Gov't isn't looking for solutions to problems, it's not the goal, that's what free market capitalism does.
Gov't is looking for one thing: power. And power is not in solving problems, it's in taking over the process by which these problems are continued forever in a way that prevents them from ever being solved.
natural resource exhaustion is not the question right now, of-course there is less oil every day, but this can be solved by the market if the gov't steps away, the market can come up with alternatives, but it's not going to be gov't that creates true market solutions, gov't can only create subsidies by destroying large parts of economy.
Wages must drop, by the way, USA is unproductive that it lost all of this investment capital, so once the US dollar is destroyed by the gov't, the wages will be very low, but again, it's not about wages. The real cost of production in a non-free market is due to the gov't involvement - inflation, regulations and thus taxes (regulations cost money, and debt is also a tax, just a tax plus interest that must be paid eventually).
I wonder what type of goods can be produced by 3D printers and robots if there is a situation that we can't have any more natural resources though?
If there are no natural resources left, we better come up with something, because if for some reason we were left without any natural resources, we'd quickly die off as a species (and as most of the life on this planet would die) if all of a sudden there were no natural resources.
Basically your question can be compared to this: if the humans all of a sudden were thrown into the deep space, everybody had a space suit on and 30 minutes of air and energy in every suit, and we were all just hanging there, orbiting Jupiter, what would we do? We'd all die, that's what we'd do.
the U.S. has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China because of the vastly cheaper labor pool. But now, se
- this is false.
There are always people who can sell their labour cheaper, but this does not at all mean that factories will just appear there, it's not only about wages.
It's about taxes, and taxes are not only the rate, taxes are the size of gov't spending and debt, which by definition is the future tax + interest that will have to be paid on it.
The real reason that people move their productivity out to other locations is the destruction of their savings via inflation and growing gov't, which is the real tax. It's the inflation, the gov't regulations, taxation of income.
The lower wages are only the icing on the cake and they don't last, the wages will go up as the labour force becomes more productive as it becomes more experienced and more specialised.
It is a huge lie that the motivator behind outsourcing is wages. Labour costs are much broader than wages. Labour costs include all of the regulations that deal with labour, it's all the potential liabillity lawsuits. Every time gov't says: you must hire this way and you cannot hire this way, you cannot fire this way, you must have this ratio of whites to blacks or you must do provide this minimum wage to all people, regardless of the job, you must, you must, you must, you must.
Every 'must' costs money. In the free market wages purchasing power of the worker rises either with higher wages OR with lower consumer prices. In 19th century USA (and in the early 20th century, before the Fed was introduced), the prices for consumer goods in USA were constantly falling.
Prices for energy (oil, coal, etc.) were falling. Prices for all things were falling, dollar was gaining strength. Nobody needed higher wages to become gradually more affluent and have gradually increasing standard of living, and it did increase gradually.
Nobody needed to tell Henry Ford to start paying 2 times as much to his assembly line workers as any other factory did at the time, he did it because the market made him do it. He cut the working week to 5 days and working hours to 8 and he still doubled productivity that year and pushed prices for his cars DOWN.
Gov't can't do that, gov't doesn't do that, that's not what it does by definition. Every regulation pushes prices up, sure sure, they can pretend to help you to hold wages above some silly minimum, but it's done to cover the gov't inflation (money printing) and the fact that the growing gov't causes shrinking private sector, it takes away the savings that are the investment pool.
Savings are used as the investment capital that is used to create new businesses. Savings is what creates new businesses, people take risks to try and make much more money than by being an employee.
But all employees WANT high level of investment, it makes them more productive, like the Ford assembly line made his workers productive (and he started hiring some disabled people on his own, he could use them, while nobody else could).
Employees want a lot of choice of businesses when they are looking for jobs, because that's competition for their product - labour, and they are competing with each other in that labour market.
Labour market gains from high level of savings that can be used as investment capital, instead the gov't destroys the savings with inflation and growth of gov't offices and regulations, and thus size and debt and thus taxes.
Will USA regain manufacturing? Of-course it will. Eventually it won't have a choice, but it's not going to be with 3D printers and robots, those are niche applications. There are plenty of jobs that could be done with peoples' minds and hands, but the people are prevented because of gov't inflation and regulations.
But eventually this will end, as the gov't won't be able to borrow, it will print into oblivion and there will be a serious crash, which will force the gov't to shrink, regulations will go away, eventually the labour will become competitive in USA again, even against robots and 3D printers.
The wages will drop as the productivity will increase with some of these robots, the wages will drop, which will make the human labour competitive again.
Of-course the problem is that the gov't stands in the way with its labour laws, minimum wage, SS, welfare, EI, food stamps, all that jazz, they prevent people who can't do anything else from working in factories.
Steve Jobs spent less than 4% of his money on himself, the rest was always reinvested, it was always in business, giving you the products you wanted. He could have retired back in 1985 and never work another day in his life, and that means that he would have still not spent more money than he did on himself.
Everything he did since then he gave to the rest of the people, every single thing he did since 1985 was not for his benefit, in fact he might have lived if he just kicked back and never did another day of work.
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Why are you giving credit for discovery, invention, patience, ingenuity, and the division of labour to someone who merely owns and commands capital?
- all of those things, IF they are done while being paid as an employee, are wonderful, but they are not what drives the economy forward.
The saver who invests his savings, so the capitalist is the person who takes the actual risk.
An employee only wants a paycheck, so he will find one job and then another, but he will be getting his paycheck.
A person who invests his savings is the person who takes the risk - he can lose it or he can make it bigger.
In the free market the investor's acumen is being evaluated by all the people, who can either be his customers or they can ignore him. If they ignore him, he just lost his savings.
If they ignore him and he loses his savings, the people who work for him will lose their employment, but they do not lose their savings, they didn't lose their paychecks that they received, now they need to find another place of employment.
The investor loses his savings and this mean he never received a paycheck.
He gave to the market, he gave to the employees, he gave to the government.
If the market refuses him, he lost and now he has less, maybe he has nothing, maybe he is in debt. Maybe he goes bankrupt but this does not mean that everything is lost to the society, his assets, whatever they are, will be liquidated and somebody will get them at lower price than otherwise, and maybe this will allow somebody to use those factors of production (assets) to restart the business and make it more efficient and become profitable.
Maybe the original investor overpaid for these tools, for these factors of production, maybe his loss will only fuel the next success.
If the investment does work out, then the society gains a profitable business, which means a business that is APPROVED BY THE MARKET.
That means that the business model is valid, the product is priced well and it is of a good enough quality for the market at that price.
So now there is a product, there are all these employees, there are all these taxes (*unfortunately*) that gov't gets.
Now there can be more business built around this product, maybe it's a new niche, maybe it's a new industry, maybe it's a new widget or maybe it's the same old thing but it's better and cheaper.
Better and cheaper - the purchasing power of the world goes up now as this product is better and cheaper.
The employees are productive, they can actually trade their productivity for the productivity of other people.
The investor makes big money this time, and it's good, this is the approval of the market, this means he now has more investment capital to do more.
That's why income taxes are not only morally wrong, they are economically detrimental to the society - taking from successful businesses and giving to governments, that's the worst thing somebody can do to savings, that's why inflation is so terrible and causes outflow of savings somewhere else and causes loss of productivity.
USA federal gov't shouldn't have any debt. The Fed was established almost 100 years ago now and it wasn't allowed to monetise the Treasury debt! In fact when the Fed was first set up, it provided STRONGER currency than what was in use at the time and everything was backed by gold.
Eventually the gov't wanted to spend money that it didn't have, so it wanted to spend gold it didn't have, and that's not possible to do, so they changed the rules and the so called 'debt ceiling' was also introduced.
Congress NEVER FAILED TO RAISE THE DEBT CEILING, NOT ONCE.
That's because it is not a ceiling, the ceiling will be set by the market, not by any government. The ceiling will be the market refusing to deal in US dollars and that will be that, no more borrowing, not because the Congress doesn't want to, because nobody wants to lend it money.
That's the moment that the interest rates for borrowing in USA will go up. HOWEVER the Fed will be monetising the debt, the USA is not likely to declare an honest bankruptcy and to restructure its debts. Instead it WILL cause a hyper inflation.
I know that people laugh at this, saying that it won't happen and it's been predicted for years.
Of-course it's been predicted for years, that's the trajectory. That's the doctor, telling a smoker - stop smoking, you'll get cancer.
And the smoker is laughing at the doctor, saying: why should I, I don't have cancer yet, and you've been telling me this for years now.
Well smoking doesn't cause cancer immediately, but the chances of cancer grow with time that smoker keeps the habit.
It's the same exact principle, people were laughing at people telling them that the stock market will crash in the late nineties. People have been laughing at people telling them that the house prices will start falling.
People are laughing now, saying that the current mania of US debt purchasing is not going to stop and that the Fed can push up interest rates instead of causing hyper inflation.
They are as wrong now as they were wrong then.
The Fed cannot allow interest rates to go up, USA cannot service its debt, it's over, USA is bankrupt today. And it's not only 16 Trillion, it's another 100 or so Trillion of all the unfunded liabilities, it's all the mortgage debt, it's all the health care debt, it's all the education debt, it's all private debt, it's all corporate debt, it's all municipal and all State debt.
It's because all debt is now federal gov't debt at these interest rates. The banks are all gone once the interest rates rise 3 points. The Fed can't allow that to happen, so it will cause hyper inflation.
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2. Infrastructure
It is only meaningful when it's privately built for the purpose of making more profit, because that's the infrastructure that the market is willing to pay for. All gov't infrastructure is a waste and misallocation of resources.
Keystone pipeline is real infrastructure, the gov't wants to prevent it.
The highways and bridges, all that nonsense is not productive infrastructure, it costs more than it generates. It has to be paid for by real productive activity, not by taxes, which are subsidies that will end.
3. Police.
Police is not a federal matter. It shouldn't even be a State matter, it's up to localities to have their police either private or municipal. There shouldn't be police on federal level, but today you have all sorts of armed federal agents that are like police or even more like the military.
4. Investment.
Investment is what makes a worker productive, without investment the productivity drops, and that's exactly what you are looking at. Investment is a factory, factories went East, now you are unproductive and can't support yourself, you can't trade for real things, you can only print or tax or borrow and use that to buy products from the productive world.
USA is surrounded by 2 oceans, it has rivers and lakes and yet 90% of all US sea food comes from Asia. USA is unproductive, it
The US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world bar none, Japan used to have that dubious 'honour', now it's USA since Japan lowered its corporate taxes.
USA used to have 0 income tax rate, 0 corporate tax, 0 payroll tax, you may want to remember that, that's when USA was productive, that's when it became largest manufacturer, exporter and thus creditor. That's when people came to USA for freedoms from their past governments.
The GDP in USA has been dropping for over 20 years, because the real inflation has been in the range of 11 to 15 percent for that amount of time, while the reported nonsense inflation is reverse engineered to look low, so the deflater is nonsense, USA hasn't been growing economically, it's been shrinking for 2 to 3 decades now, and it shouldn't be a surprise, that's what happens once you destroy your currency and make it easier to print the money (it's 'reserve', and to import foreign made goods).
Nobody else in the world has the debts that USA has, thus USA has the highest taxes in the world because THE REAL TAX IS THE DEBT, it's not your current rate, it's what you really have to pay back and with interest.
And you'll pay it back, you'll pay it back by destroying the currency completely and by having life style comparable that of subsistence farmers, only you won't know how to farm.
The destruction of US freedom started with Theodore Roosevelt, the total destruction of US dollar happened with Nixon, as he defaulted on the dollar and started the real exodus of the investment capital elsewhere, where the savings could be still used productively, rather than to grow more government.
Bunch of bullshit. A factory, a mine, a farm, it's all production, a factory, a mine, a farm is what makes humans wealthy.
Those who produce, those who own and work in these factories, farms and mines are the people that build the entire economy, everything else that happens, all the other types of business, from services and medicine, to entertainment and tourism, all of it depends on factories, farms and mines.
The creation of wealth in absence of gov't meddling depends on savings and investment of the savings, thus private capital investments. The investments is what makes people productive, a factory is a combination of tools and knowledge and experience that provides necessary efficiencies for few people to have huge productive output, and this means the few people can produce so much with these tools, that it makes it possible to sell the products at lower and lower prices, and it's good for business, because you make much more money by selling to everybody, not just to the rich.
In fact all work that people do who are ALREADY rich, is work of GIVING TO THE REST.
There is no need at all for a rich person to make a business even more efficient to sell more cell phones, but he does it anyway, he reaches more efficiencies and he sells cheaper and cheaper, and today people have cellphones who never even had land lines 30 years ago.
Productivity is a function of SAVINGS and INVESTMENT as it is applied to labour.
Labour in itself is not enough to grow the economy, if everybody is just working for themselves to feed themselves, you have your subsistence farmers, hunters and gatherers.
Capitalism is the ultimate form of production, it's private ownership of capital - productive tools.
However gov't sees the wealthy economy and grows, it is built by politicians who come out of the people who cannot themselves create wealth, but they are very good at using politics of fear, envy, laziness and they promise the majority of people who do not themselves build business to take from those who have more and 'redistribute the wealth', make it 'more fair'.
There is of-course nothing fair about it, it's legalised theft, its mobocracy.
And thus the people who have the productive capital investments look for ways out, one way is to attack the political system itself and corrupt it by buying the power that the political system steals from the individuals, when it uses the mob to start stealing.
Eventually the gov't is so large, the inflation (money printing) and debt (real taxes) destroy the savings and thus the investments leave.
Investments go where there is less gov't theft, ironically today it's in China, but of-course it's in Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, some other places.
USA has the highest corporate taxes in the world, it has the highest taxes as percentage of GDP as well, because GDP is fake, because half of it is consumption of foreign made goods.
USA is unproductive because it drove away the investment capital, because it gave up on the idea of freedom, right to not have private property confiscated by the ever growing government.
The real 'trickle down' economics is in China, but the Chinese gov't prevents their population from benefiting right now, because it keeps buying US debt. Eventually this will stop.
Also, my mis-educated non-friend, Somalia was a war torn country, fighting against the British occupation first, and then, after about 2 decades of 'communism' fight against that nightmare.
Somalia is a country that fought to get some freedom, it had no freedoms at all. Somalia is a poor country, but today it has more freedom than it had under Communism and clearly it's not less productive today than it was under Communism.
Somalia in fact is a tribal country, part of it has some form of 'central' gov't, and a large part of it is divided between different clans, similar to Swiss cantons. 20 years ago it was in a civil war, today it is the country with high growth, in fact Somalia has strong currency, because nobody is printing it.
Somalia probably was one of the first countries in the world to implement bank transactions over SMS.
As to Finland - I would never want to live in Finland, but again, that's where we differ, I run my business, I don't need anybody to tell me how I should do it, my clients can tell me what they want, governments can go fuck themselves.
-- And again: USA has no productivity, USA population cannot buy Chinese goods without 54 Billion USD per month LOANS because it has no productivity.
Having productivity implies that you can have an EQUITABLE EXCHANGE OF GOODS IN THE MARKET.
USA has no productivity, where is this productivity? USA cannot buy Chinese goods without printing and borrowing! Productivity is IN CHINA.
Productivity is NOT in USA.
USA LIVES ON CHINESE CHARITY. Once that charity is over, it's going to be a huge crash in US, because where are you going to get the stuff? You can print the dollars, but what good are dollars if you can't buy anything with them?
USA is going to be a net energy and raw material exporter, USA is going to be a huge garage sale operation, selling your used items to China to buy food.
No, the market is an emergant phenomenon resulting from the actions of some people. (for example, NOT the 99 who ended up out of work, they can't buy anything).
- false.
Market is all people, so the 99 who lost their jobs are people who voted for something, they have given power to gov't to fight the market.
Thus you still cannot understand simple words that you probably read, you just don't get it.
Here are those words:
Market will always win at the end, the way to have a good economy is not to fight the market, but to let it work. The way to screw up your economy is to pretend you are smarter and more powerful than the collective desire of all people.
You see, those 99 people voted for the system that promises to use violence of gov't to fight the market.
And thus these 99 people have been beaten over the head. Too bad for them, they made the wrong choice of going for the hope of the short term benefit of supporting the politicians who offering to them to use the violence to take from some and to give to others.
You don't understand the concept of this at all, you think the 99 people had nothing to do with the fact that they lost jobs. The 99 people have the power to tell the government to use force, that's all that the market sees: force is being used to steal, and the market always fights those types of forces.
Stealing comes in many forms, it is taxes, it is regulations, it is borrowing to tax in the future, it is printing money - inflation.
Market (all people, not just those 99, but the rest of the entire world) says: you can't prevent productivity and efficiency, you can't steal people's productivity to give something for free to anybody.
Market (all people) says: we want an exchange of produced good, you are using force to prevent that.
You are using force to steal, and market says: I am going to relocate the actual savings and investment capital, which means I am going to relocate productivity, jobs, real production somewhere, where there is less pressure to steal this way.
That's all that happens.
Those 99 who lost their jobs - they were UNPRODUCTIVE.
You were arguing that in USA people are productive, then you are throwing this number: 99 people are fired.
Productive people do not get fired, not in a way that prevents them from becoming employed very quickly again. What you have is a DEPRESSION, what you have is complete imbalance in the market, it's an artificial imbalance, it's created by the overweight, huge, all powerful, very violent government, and the 99 people are the reason for that government's existence.
Every time the 99 vote for a politician who says: more regulation, higher artificial wages, more inflation, more laws, higher taxes on some, so that others can be subsidised, welfare, wars..... every time those people are complicit.
They are responsible. They are NOT the victims, they are the perpetrators. They have gotten what they wanted.
Their parents and grandparents did the same thing, when they voted for the people like Theodore Roosevelt, Hoover, FDR (well, FDR lied, he campaigned on the promise of getting gov't out of business, he promised austerity, then he got voted in and continued the inflating and spending policies of Hoover, but he couldn't have done it without people's support anyway).
Every time a person voted for SS, Medicare, Medicaid and higher taxes 'on the rich', that means the person voted for BIGGER GOVERNMENT.
Bigger gov't includes every department created in the last 100 years. From IRS and the Fed (supposedly private entity, which it is not), to FDA, EPA, FDIC, FHA, HUD, dep't of education, interior, commerce, to SS, to Medicare, to minimum wage and other labour laws, to these supposed 'civil rights', which are not rights, but entitlements for some and obligations for the others. That's big gov't. That's spending of the savings and investment that the market says IT DOES NOT WANT.
The market doesn't want any of these things to exist, the market is not just those 99, the market is 7 billion.
I don't really care what the market wants. It is not a living being worthy of compassion.
- and that's where you are completely wrong, just totally, fully, utterly, irredeemably wrong.
Market is people. What market wants is what people want, not some people, not some politicians, not some group of people, the entire collection of people. Market economy will always end up beating you over the head, no matter what type of command economy you are trying to set up.
USSR has been beaten over the head, China was in the same boat, all countries that tried printing money out of their trouble and that ended in inflation that drove their productivity to 0 and did the same with their purchasing power.
Market wants everybody to exchange something of value, command type economy wants to take from people who produce, raise prices and at the same time give to people who don't produce, whoever they are, be it a military industrial complex and/or the voting block of the poorer population, etc.
Market will always win at the end, the way to have a good economy is not to fight the market, but to let it work. The way to screw up your economy is to pretend you are smarter and more powerful than the collective desire of all people.
Good luck with that notion.
(and by the way, you are still under the completely nonsensical impression that increased productivity must lead to increased wages, this is nonsense. Increased productivity leads to increased purchasing power, which can be either presented as higher wages OR as lower consumer prices or a combination of the two. Instead the gov't creates inflation - printing fake currency, which creates fake demand for consumer goods, so drives prices up eventually, and at the same time it destroys productivity by driving away and destroying savings and thus the investment capital)
But that is creating the same distortion of the "free" market, you're just calling it something other than "government." The effect is the same.
- not at all, it is a service, like all other services, it's not a government and there are competing courts as well as competing private security services, private insurance, etc.
Do you understand what an externality is? It has nothing to do with public vs. private property.
- I do, you don't.
The problem of externalities is created by gov't, when gov't limits liability to people artificially in any way, be it a 75Million USD liability cap on deep sea drilling or be it allowing a company to mine on this so called 'public property' (which a nonsense oxymoron, it's not property if there is no real owner).
Gov'ts have forever provided companies with ability to dump their garbage anywhere on the 'public property' and gov'ts even limited liabilities of companies and individuals to dump their garbage on private property.
Only strict private property laws remove the problem of externalities. Externalities only exist as a limitation of liability to an individual or a business, which means it shields the individual or a business from having to bear the costs (current or potential, so either gov't limits their liability for paying for their violation of private property now or in the future via fake gov't insurance, which is always a moral hazard).
If you own a hog farm, and your pig shit stinks to high-heaven, you impose a cost on me.
- yeah, and do you understand that if you are in business of hog farming, then you have various gov't imposed limitations as to how much damages you owe to private property owners around you?
If I own that farm and the shit stinks, you have a liability claim against me and the real reason why you can't exercise it is government. Via licenses, regulations, taxation, use of 'public' land, etc., the gov't tells you: FUCK OFF with your liability claims.
In a free market you DO have liability claims against my business of hog farming, in a slave market that is set up via gov't regulations, public property, laws, taxes, inflation, limitation of liability, you do not have anything, you have no property rights.
The property rights ended very abruptly with the IRS starting to collect income taxes illegally (you can see my SIG and follow that link, I explain the issue). Of-course all other laws, including, as an example the so called 'Civil Rights Act of 64', the part of that act that imposes an obligation on the business owners to provide entitlements to people who some of those business owners didn't want to provide them to, and all of that being enforced by the gov't law, that's another example.
The minimum wage law is another example. Any time the gov't tells one individual: you have to do business in a certain way on your property and under the threat of violence these are the conditions that you must do business under here, at that moment there are no private property rights anymore.
There are no private property rights once the gov't limits liability to any company's misdeeds. There are no property rights once gov't establishes monopoly on even basic things like utility businesses, etc.
The gov't has destroyed the concept of property rights, and there is no more important concept than that.
Your property starts with your body. A gov't that is big enough to tell you that you have no property rights in your business is the gov't that can tell you that you have no property rights to your body and thus to your organs.
Your property starts with your liver, kidneys, eyes, skin, etc. Those things belong to you because fundamentally they couldn't exist without you being present and providing for them.
But the property must extend beyond your body towards things that wouldn't have existed if you weren't present, so products and services that you provide that depend on your w
Oh, boy, the person on an excavator either owns it, so it's his business, and there are plenty of people whose business involves owning complex tools, or the person on the excavator is hired in the market that sets the price for his skill. The price depend on the ratio between supply and demand, that's all.
If it takes a few months or maybe a year to learn how to operate an excavator properly, then there will be enough people learning this skill. This is a skill and they can apply it either by buying, renting an excavator or finding an employer who owns an excavator.
The worker becomes more productive, but the POINT of being more productive is NOT to give the worker the salary of ALL the workers who no longer have to do that job! That's NOT what the market wants.
The point is to ensure that the rest of the people can be freed to do other jobs, to satisfy other human demands, and maybe some of them have to figure out what the human demands are on their own.
But your argument that the excavator doesn't make the worker more productive than 1000 people with shovels, because he is not getting the same salary as 1000 people, that he gets paid only what the market sets.... well then, what's there to argue about? You don't know what's what.
yeah, and by your gov't statistics there is no inflation either and by your gov't statistics GDP means something and by your gov't statistics taxes are lowest as percentage of GDP (which is funny in itself, before 1913 there were no income taxes).
GDP is fake, half of it is spending on consumer goods made abroad (54Billion USD/month trade deficit), the rest is split between gov't, its contractors, war, the inflated finance sector. Less than 5% of US economy is manufacturing, it's ridiculous.
Productivity? You don't know what the word means, neither do people who give you your fake numbers. Tell me, is Detroit more productive than ever today, that it has no factories left?
Over 46 million people in USA are on food stamps, or SNAP, as they advertise, tell me, with 15% of your population being unemployed while jobs are constantly leaving, are these people that productive, that they can be given free food and whatever else they get from taxing others (either via tax rates or via borrowing, so future taxes + interest or via inflation)?
Tell me, all those people with all those university degrees that work as Walmart greeters or waiters or toilet cleaners, are they so productive?
You'd think that with all that education, so an investments supposedly spent on them, they'd be doing better, no?
Productivity is a measure of productive OUTPUT. Productivity is ability to have 1 person do work of 10 people or of 1000 people or more.
A person with an excavator is much more productive than a person with a shovel or a stick.
A person with a factory is much more productive than a person on food stamps.
In China productivity has increased steadily for over 30 years, yes, in USA productivity has fallen steadily for the last 40 years.
Productivity is the function of capital being applied to the labour force, and in USA the capital has been dwindling on the edge of extinction, capital has been moving to China.
Capital is not your fake dollars, capital is the tools and machinery, all the instruments and automation in the factories, capital is what makes a worker productive. Your gov't numbers on productivity are simply ridiculous, productivity decreases as savings and capital investments fall, not the other way around.
It's not about who is considered what, it's about productivity, which is directly tied to the USD reserve currency status, while USD was defaulted upon in 1971. Since 1971, the inflation hit hard, the savings started leaving and moving elsewhere (thus it's Chinese and not US CEOs), and the productivity of workers is falling, because productivity is a function of savings being used as investments to acquire/build more and better tools. Tools make a worker more productive, the more tools there are and the better they are, the less a worker needs to do to achieve the same result (with higher quality and less waste too).
So the difference between the pay is not about 'high ivory tower', it's about the fact that there is no competition in USA, no competition in manufacturing, no competition in production, no competition in business, because of all the gov't destruction of capital, rules, regulations, taxations, inflation.
In this situation the US companies don't have to compete with gov't bonds for interest rates, so nobody is trading stocks to get dividends, which means that the payment isn't going to the stockholder, who simply gamble with the stocks (and they are in the stock market because of theft of inflation too), but the earnings aren't paid through dividends, thus they CAN be paid to high management, and because there is no competition due to gov't regulations, destruction of capital and taxes, there is no free market to put a lid on this type of spending.
A company that pays too much money to its CEOs and such, is a company that isn't using that money to reinvest in productivity, and it's only possible because there is no free market.
these news are good news, it shows that eventually it is possible to reduce the prices of notebooks further, should somebody be willing to take a lower pay as a CEO (this one ha 14million per year salary, this was 3million bonus), then they can reduce the prices and go to war against Lenovo. They could even hire some people away form Lenovo by offering slightly higher salaries (310USD anybody?)
If a free market is one with NO government involvement, then by definition you will not have any legal recourse against another party imposing externalities on you.
- this is false, people set up their own criminal courts and their own system to handle crime and to handle contract law, you are simply looking at the only option that you know and believe that other options do not exist, that's false. EVEN in USA during the 'wild wild west' or really the 'gold rush' era, there were court systems set up without any gov't.
But what you're not understanding is that under a "free" market, there would be no liability damages AT ALL. Without the government dictating that a company is liable for damages if they spill oil into the Gulf of Mexico, you can't sue for those damages.
- this is a misunderstanding of private property.
Since people DO set up governments, what must be avoided is the gov't owning property, so all property must be private, in that case there are no externalities, every single situation has to price in liability costs.
If gov't does have 'public property' (nonsense of-course, there is no such thing), then gov't must not be authorised to allow companies to do business on public property.
No company should be able to do business on property that has no true owner. If a company wants to drill for oil, it must bid to buy that land or even that portion of the sea, whatever.
BTW., while the deep water permits were handed out, more regulations was enacted to prevent shallow water drilling, isn't that something?
This brings up your next point: yes, it is the most desirable system to have - free market without any gov't regulations upon individuals and businesses and without gov't setting rules for money or interest rates, etc. And of-course gov't shouldn't be in business of stealing money from some to hand out welfare checks to others (welfare, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, EI, etc.etc.etc.).
Private property rights are against gov't confiscating private property. Protecting property from other individuals is not something linked to the concept of 'rights', it's only about your ability to protect yourself and it may have to do with the criminal code.
Criminal code establishes the rules of behaviour and punishment in case an individual hurts another, but that's not a concept of a 'right'.
A right is a limit placed upon the collective and this right is of the individual against the collective, it's protection against the system. System can't be punished if it violates your life or property, so the criminal code and rules don't work there. Where there is the collective (gov't) there must be a concept of an individual right, or knowledge that the collective is unauthorised and it is illegal for the collective to abuse your individual rights.
People completely misunderstand this, they don't get it, and thus they buy into the fake concept that gov't can hand out rights by creating laws that force some group of individuals to be obligated to provide entitlements to other group of individuals.
Minimum wage is an entitlement and an obligation situation, it's not a right.
You are a great example of a huge failure of the system you are so vehemently protecting, conflating the 'public education' with populace being educated just proves the point that the government ran system is beyond redemption.
Slashdot Mirror
co-opting the government to get what they want from the public at large.
- since the gov't steals the power from the people, the best way to make money in such a system is to be the first in line to buy that stolen power from the gov't, why is that a surprise?
The problem is that the gov't shouldn't be allowed to steal the power from the people, but people vote based on short term gain, the politicians offer free bread and circuses and people give up freedoms that then can be sold to those, who are first in line to buy those freedoms.
That's what corruption is, it's nothing else but gov't stealing freedoms from people, because then the power over the people who lost those freedoms can be sold to the highest bidder.
Can't stop the businesses from trying to succeed by buying the power from the gov't, this has to be stopped at the source. But if the source relies on the people's votes, then the problem is of the process, by which the freedoms can be taken away.
The problem is that democracy begats tyranny, all voluntarily, all with voting.
That's why it was given to you as a Republic and you couldn't keep it.
But not necessarily alternatives which will allow the same kind of consumption growth the past couple hundred years has allowed
- right, and everything that could be invented has been invented already, and we can't build nuclear power plants if there was profit in them and we can't desalinate water if there was profit in it and we can't grow food, etc.etc.
This is all nonsense. Here is the problem: gov't is standing in the way of people, that's the problem, and the unfortunate situation is that so many people support the system, that's why it is in power.
When you say: worker productivity is still growing. Qualify where. Where is it growing? I KNOW where it is growing, and its' not in USA, not in manufacturing in any case. Worker productivity is growing alright, but it's growing in Asia and other places.
What do you think productivity is (many people here are very very very confused, so excuse me for asking what you believe it is).
Productivity of a worker doesn't depend on worker's ability to flail hands around faster, it's the investment that is applied to increase worker's output, so it's new tools, new hardware, new software, new types of automation that allow 1 person to do the job of 10, 100, 1000, 1000000 people. That's what productivity is, it's the application of investment capital, which comes from savings, to the labour force by building, buying tools that make a person more productive.
A more productive person enjoys higher standard of living, he can work shorter hours and he can do more in those hours, that's why Henry Ford cut the working week to 8 hours a day and 5 days a week and still paid his workers 2x what others were paying in factories, and he ended up increasing the output by a factor of 2 in a year as well, while dropping the prices for his cars. He hated unions, by the way, did it because it was economically the right thing to do in order to achieve higher profit.
The RICH make things CHEAPER by using INVESTMENT and sell to the POORER people to make MORE profit - and this point is so lost on people, it's crazy.
Sam Walton didn't sell to the rich, he became a multi-billionaire by selling to the poorer people.
The gov't doesn't make people more productive, the savings and the investment capital makes people more productive, and gov't destroys the savings and drives out the investment capital with inflation, regulations and taxes, and how is that supposed to make people more productive and affluent?
Well obviously, the gov't isn't concerned with outcomes, it's concerned with the process. Gov't is a process by which wealth is transferred from people who make it to people who can take it by force.
The market is concerned with getting things that people want by using whatever methods that are available, and private ownership of production (capitalism) is a method that the humanity has discovered that is best suited for delivering that goal - getting people the things that they want at the lowest possible prices and at the highest quality that is reasonable to achieve given the state of technology and manufacturing at those prices.
Gov't isn't about making a product that is useful, it's about extracting money and perpetuating itself.
So for example is the gov't interested in actually eradicating problems? Of-course not! The pharma developers are often faulted for not looking for cures but instead looking for ways to manage the disease, supposedly it makes them more money.
How about gov't? It's not interested in getting rid of poverty, who would vote for these politicians that are campaigning on the message of redistribution of wealth from some to the rest?
What if there were no poor people, what would the liberals do? Shoot themselves in despair? Gov't isn't looking for solutions to problems, it's not the goal, that's what free market capitalism does.
Gov't is looking for one thing: power. And power is not in solving problems, it's in taking over the process by which these problems are continued forever in a way that prevents them from ever being solved.
natural resource exhaustion is not the question right now, of-course there is less oil every day, but this can be solved by the market if the gov't steps away, the market can come up with alternatives, but it's not going to be gov't that creates true market solutions, gov't can only create subsidies by destroying large parts of economy.
Wages must drop, by the way, USA is unproductive that it lost all of this investment capital, so once the US dollar is destroyed by the gov't, the wages will be very low, but again, it's not about wages. The real cost of production in a non-free market is due to the gov't involvement - inflation, regulations and thus taxes (regulations cost money, and debt is also a tax, just a tax plus interest that must be paid eventually).
I wonder what type of goods can be produced by 3D printers and robots if there is a situation that we can't have any more natural resources though?
If there are no natural resources left, we better come up with something, because if for some reason we were left without any natural resources, we'd quickly die off as a species (and as most of the life on this planet would die) if all of a sudden there were no natural resources.
Basically your question can be compared to this: if the humans all of a sudden were thrown into the deep space, everybody had a space suit on and 30 minutes of air and energy in every suit, and we were all just hanging there, orbiting Jupiter, what would we do? We'd all die, that's what we'd do.
the U.S. has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China because of the vastly cheaper labor pool. But now, se
- this is false.
There are always people who can sell their labour cheaper, but this does not at all mean that factories will just appear there, it's not only about wages.
It's about taxes, and taxes are not only the rate, taxes are the size of gov't spending and debt, which by definition is the future tax + interest that will have to be paid on it.
The real reason that people move their productivity out to other locations is the destruction of their savings via inflation and growing gov't, which is the real tax. It's the inflation, the gov't regulations, taxation of income.
The lower wages are only the icing on the cake and they don't last, the wages will go up as the labour force becomes more productive as it becomes more experienced and more specialised.
It is a huge lie that the motivator behind outsourcing is wages. Labour costs are much broader than wages. Labour costs include all of the regulations that deal with labour, it's all the potential liabillity lawsuits. Every time gov't says: you must hire this way and you cannot hire this way, you cannot fire this way, you must have this ratio of whites to blacks or you must do provide this minimum wage to all people, regardless of the job, you must, you must, you must, you must.
Every 'must' costs money. In the free market wages purchasing power of the worker rises either with higher wages OR with lower consumer prices. In 19th century USA (and in the early 20th century, before the Fed was introduced), the prices for consumer goods in USA were constantly falling.
Prices for energy (oil, coal, etc.) were falling. Prices for all things were falling, dollar was gaining strength. Nobody needed higher wages to become gradually more affluent and have gradually increasing standard of living, and it did increase gradually.
Nobody needed to tell Henry Ford to start paying 2 times as much to his assembly line workers as any other factory did at the time, he did it because the market made him do it. He cut the working week to 5 days and working hours to 8 and he still doubled productivity that year and pushed prices for his cars DOWN.
Gov't can't do that, gov't doesn't do that, that's not what it does by definition. Every regulation pushes prices up, sure sure, they can pretend to help you to hold wages above some silly minimum, but it's done to cover the gov't inflation (money printing) and the fact that the growing gov't causes shrinking private sector, it takes away the savings that are the investment pool.
Savings are used as the investment capital that is used to create new businesses. Savings is what creates new businesses, people take risks to try and make much more money than by being an employee.
But all employees WANT high level of investment, it makes them more productive, like the Ford assembly line made his workers productive (and he started hiring some disabled people on his own, he could use them, while nobody else could).
Employees want a lot of choice of businesses when they are looking for jobs, because that's competition for their product - labour, and they are competing with each other in that labour market.
Labour market gains from high level of savings that can be used as investment capital, instead the gov't destroys the savings with inflation and growth of gov't offices and regulations, and thus size and debt and thus taxes.
Will USA regain manufacturing? Of-course it will. Eventually it won't have a choice, but it's not going to be with 3D printers and robots, those are niche applications. There are plenty of jobs that could be done with peoples' minds and hands, but the people are prevented because of gov't inflation and regulations.
But eventually this will end, as the gov't won't be able to borrow, it will print into oblivion and there will be a serious crash, which will force the gov't to shrink, regulations will go away, eventually the labour will become competitive in USA again, even against robots and 3D printers.
The wages will drop as the productivity will increase with some of these robots, the wages will drop, which will make the human labour competitive again.
Of-course the problem is that the gov't stands in the way with its labour laws, minimum wage, SS, welfare, EI, food stamps, all that jazz, they prevent people who can't do anything else from working in factories.
How generous
- that's right.
Steve Jobs spent less than 4% of his money on himself, the rest was always reinvested, it was always in business, giving you the products you wanted. He could have retired back in 1985 and never work another day in his life, and that means that he would have still not spent more money than he did on himself.
Everything he did since then he gave to the rest of the people, every single thing he did since 1985 was not for his benefit, in fact he might have lived if he just kicked back and never did another day of work.
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Why are you giving credit for discovery, invention, patience, ingenuity, and the division of labour to someone who merely owns and commands capital?
- all of those things, IF they are done while being paid as an employee, are wonderful, but they are not what drives the economy forward.
The saver who invests his savings, so the capitalist is the person who takes the actual risk.
An employee only wants a paycheck, so he will find one job and then another, but he will be getting his paycheck.
A person who invests his savings is the person who takes the risk - he can lose it or he can make it bigger.
In the free market the investor's acumen is being evaluated by all the people, who can either be his customers or they can ignore him. If they ignore him, he just lost his savings.
If they ignore him and he loses his savings, the people who work for him will lose their employment, but they do not lose their savings, they didn't lose their paychecks that they received, now they need to find another place of employment.
The investor loses his savings and this mean he never received a paycheck.
He gave to the market, he gave to the employees, he gave to the government.
If the market refuses him, he lost and now he has less, maybe he has nothing, maybe he is in debt. Maybe he goes bankrupt but this does not mean that everything is lost to the society, his assets, whatever they are, will be liquidated and somebody will get them at lower price than otherwise, and maybe this will allow somebody to use those factors of production (assets) to restart the business and make it more efficient and become profitable.
Maybe the original investor overpaid for these tools, for these factors of production, maybe his loss will only fuel the next success.
If the investment does work out, then the society gains a profitable business, which means a business that is APPROVED BY THE MARKET.
That means that the business model is valid, the product is priced well and it is of a good enough quality for the market at that price.
So now there is a product, there are all these employees, there are all these taxes (*unfortunately*) that gov't gets.
Now there can be more business built around this product, maybe it's a new niche, maybe it's a new industry, maybe it's a new widget or maybe it's the same old thing but it's better and cheaper.
Better and cheaper - the purchasing power of the world goes up now as this product is better and cheaper.
The employees are productive, they can actually trade their productivity for the productivity of other people.
The investor makes big money this time, and it's good, this is the approval of the market, this means he now has more investment capital to do more.
That's why income taxes are not only morally wrong, they are economically detrimental to the society - taking from successful businesses and giving to governments, that's the worst thing somebody can do to savings, that's why inflation is so terrible and causes outflow of savings somewhere else and causes loss of productivity.
1. Debt.
USA federal gov't shouldn't have any debt. The Fed was established almost 100 years ago now and it wasn't allowed to monetise the Treasury debt! In fact when the Fed was first set up, it provided STRONGER currency than what was in use at the time and everything was backed by gold.
Eventually the gov't wanted to spend money that it didn't have, so it wanted to spend gold it didn't have, and that's not possible to do, so they changed the rules and the so called 'debt ceiling' was also introduced.
Congress NEVER FAILED TO RAISE THE DEBT CEILING, NOT ONCE.
That's because it is not a ceiling, the ceiling will be set by the market, not by any government. The ceiling will be the market refusing to deal in US dollars and that will be that, no more borrowing, not because the Congress doesn't want to, because nobody wants to lend it money.
That's the moment that the interest rates for borrowing in USA will go up. HOWEVER the Fed will be monetising the debt, the USA is not likely to declare an honest bankruptcy and to restructure its debts. Instead it WILL cause a hyper inflation.
I know that people laugh at this, saying that it won't happen and it's been predicted for years.
Of-course it's been predicted for years, that's the trajectory. That's the doctor, telling a smoker - stop smoking, you'll get cancer.
And the smoker is laughing at the doctor, saying: why should I, I don't have cancer yet, and you've been telling me this for years now.
Well smoking doesn't cause cancer immediately, but the chances of cancer grow with time that smoker keeps the habit.
It's the same exact principle, people were laughing at people telling them that the stock market will crash in the late nineties. People have been laughing at people telling them that the house prices will start falling.
People are laughing now, saying that the current mania of US debt purchasing is not going to stop and that the Fed can push up interest rates instead of causing hyper inflation.
They are as wrong now as they were wrong then.
The Fed cannot allow interest rates to go up, USA cannot service its debt, it's over, USA is bankrupt today. And it's not only 16 Trillion, it's another 100 or so Trillion of all the unfunded liabilities, it's all the mortgage debt, it's all the health care debt, it's all the education debt, it's all private debt, it's all corporate debt, it's all municipal and all State debt.
It's because all debt is now federal gov't debt at these interest rates. The banks are all gone once the interest rates rise 3 points. The Fed can't allow that to happen, so it will cause hyper inflation.
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2. Infrastructure
It is only meaningful when it's privately built for the purpose of making more profit, because that's the infrastructure that the market is willing to pay for. All gov't infrastructure is a waste and misallocation of resources.
Keystone pipeline is real infrastructure, the gov't wants to prevent it.
The highways and bridges, all that nonsense is not productive infrastructure, it costs more than it generates. It has to be paid for by real productive activity, not by taxes, which are subsidies that will end.
3. Police.
Police is not a federal matter. It shouldn't even be a State matter, it's up to localities to have their police either private or municipal. There shouldn't be police on federal level, but today you have all sorts of armed federal agents that are like police or even more like the military.
4. Investment.
Investment is what makes a worker productive, without investment the productivity drops, and that's exactly what you are looking at. Investment is a factory, factories went East, now you are unproductive and can't support yourself, you can't trade for real things, you can only print or tax or borrow and use that to buy products from the productive world.
USA is surrounded by 2 oceans, it has rivers and lakes and yet 90% of all US sea food comes from Asia. USA is unproductive, it
The US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world bar none, Japan used to have that dubious 'honour', now it's USA since Japan lowered its corporate taxes.
USA used to have 0 income tax rate, 0 corporate tax, 0 payroll tax, you may want to remember that, that's when USA was productive, that's when it became largest manufacturer, exporter and thus creditor. That's when people came to USA for freedoms from their past governments.
The GDP in USA has been dropping for over 20 years, because the real inflation has been in the range of 11 to 15 percent for that amount of time, while the reported nonsense inflation is reverse engineered to look low, so the deflater is nonsense, USA hasn't been growing economically, it's been shrinking for 2 to 3 decades now, and it shouldn't be a surprise, that's what happens once you destroy your currency and make it easier to print the money (it's 'reserve', and to import foreign made goods).
Nobody else in the world has the debts that USA has, thus USA has the highest taxes in the world because THE REAL TAX IS THE DEBT, it's not your current rate, it's what you really have to pay back and with interest.
And you'll pay it back, you'll pay it back by destroying the currency completely and by having life style comparable that of subsistence farmers, only you won't know how to farm.
The destruction of US freedom started with Theodore Roosevelt, the total destruction of US dollar happened with Nixon, as he defaulted on the dollar and started the real exodus of the investment capital elsewhere, where the savings could be still used productively, rather than to grow more government.
Bunch of bullshit. A factory, a mine, a farm, it's all production, a factory, a mine, a farm is what makes humans wealthy.
Those who produce, those who own and work in these factories, farms and mines are the people that build the entire economy, everything else that happens, all the other types of business, from services and medicine, to entertainment and tourism, all of it depends on factories, farms and mines.
The creation of wealth in absence of gov't meddling depends on savings and investment of the savings, thus private capital investments. The investments is what makes people productive, a factory is a combination of tools and knowledge and experience that provides necessary efficiencies for few people to have huge productive output, and this means the few people can produce so much with these tools, that it makes it possible to sell the products at lower and lower prices, and it's good for business, because you make much more money by selling to everybody, not just to the rich.
In fact all work that people do who are ALREADY rich, is work of GIVING TO THE REST.
There is no need at all for a rich person to make a business even more efficient to sell more cell phones, but he does it anyway, he reaches more efficiencies and he sells cheaper and cheaper, and today people have cellphones who never even had land lines 30 years ago.
Productivity is a function of SAVINGS and INVESTMENT as it is applied to labour.
Labour in itself is not enough to grow the economy, if everybody is just working for themselves to feed themselves, you have your subsistence farmers, hunters and gatherers.
Capitalism is the ultimate form of production, it's private ownership of capital - productive tools.
However gov't sees the wealthy economy and grows, it is built by politicians who come out of the people who cannot themselves create wealth, but they are very good at using politics of fear, envy, laziness and they promise the majority of people who do not themselves build business to take from those who have more and 'redistribute the wealth', make it 'more fair'.
There is of-course nothing fair about it, it's legalised theft, its mobocracy.
And thus the people who have the productive capital investments look for ways out, one way is to attack the political system itself and corrupt it by buying the power that the political system steals from the individuals, when it uses the mob to start stealing.
Eventually the gov't is so large, the inflation (money printing) and debt (real taxes) destroy the savings and thus the investments leave.
Investments go where there is less gov't theft, ironically today it's in China, but of-course it's in Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, some other places.
USA has the highest corporate taxes in the world, it has the highest taxes as percentage of GDP as well, because GDP is fake, because half of it is consumption of foreign made goods.
USA is unproductive because it drove away the investment capital, because it gave up on the idea of freedom, right to not have private property confiscated by the ever growing government.
The real 'trickle down' economics is in China, but the Chinese gov't prevents their population from benefiting right now, because it keeps buying US debt. Eventually this will stop.
Also, my mis-educated non-friend, Somalia was a war torn country, fighting against the British occupation first, and then, after about 2 decades of 'communism' fight against that nightmare.
Somalia is a country that fought to get some freedom, it had no freedoms at all. Somalia is a poor country, but today it has more freedom than it had under Communism and clearly it's not less productive today than it was under Communism.
Somalia in fact is a tribal country, part of it has some form of 'central' gov't, and a large part of it is divided between different clans, similar to Swiss cantons. 20 years ago it was in a civil war, today it is the country with high growth, in fact Somalia has strong currency, because nobody is printing it.
Somalia probably was one of the first countries in the world to implement bank transactions over SMS.
As to Finland - I would never want to live in Finland, but again, that's where we differ, I run my business, I don't need anybody to tell me how I should do it, my clients can tell me what they want, governments can go fuck themselves.
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And again: USA has no productivity, USA population cannot buy Chinese goods without 54 Billion USD per month LOANS because it has no productivity.
Having productivity implies that you can have an EQUITABLE EXCHANGE OF GOODS IN THE MARKET.
USA has no productivity, where is this productivity? USA cannot buy Chinese goods without printing and borrowing! Productivity is IN CHINA.
Productivity is NOT in USA.
USA LIVES ON CHINESE CHARITY. Once that charity is over, it's going to be a huge crash in US, because where are you going to get the stuff? You can print the dollars, but what good are dollars if you can't buy anything with them?
USA is going to be a net energy and raw material exporter, USA is going to be a huge garage sale operation, selling your used items to China to buy food.
No, the market is an emergant phenomenon resulting from the actions of some people. (for example, NOT the 99 who ended up out of work, they can't buy anything).
- false.
Market is all people, so the 99 who lost their jobs are people who voted for something, they have given power to gov't to fight the market.
Thus you still cannot understand simple words that you probably read, you just don't get it.
Here are those words:
Market will always win at the end, the way to have a good economy is not to fight the market, but to let it work. The way to screw up your economy is to pretend you are smarter and more powerful than the collective desire of all people.
You see, those 99 people voted for the system that promises to use violence of gov't to fight the market.
And thus these 99 people have been beaten over the head. Too bad for them, they made the wrong choice of going for the hope of the short term benefit of supporting the politicians who offering to them to use the violence to take from some and to give to others.
You don't understand the concept of this at all, you think the 99 people had nothing to do with the fact that they lost jobs. The 99 people have the power to tell the government to use force, that's all that the market sees: force is being used to steal, and the market always fights those types of forces.
Stealing comes in many forms, it is taxes, it is regulations, it is borrowing to tax in the future, it is printing money - inflation.
Market (all people, not just those 99, but the rest of the entire world) says: you can't prevent productivity and efficiency, you can't steal people's productivity to give something for free to anybody.
Market (all people) says: we want an exchange of produced good, you are using force to prevent that.
You are using force to steal, and market says: I am going to relocate the actual savings and investment capital, which means I am going to relocate productivity, jobs, real production somewhere, where there is less pressure to steal this way.
That's all that happens.
Those 99 who lost their jobs - they were UNPRODUCTIVE.
You were arguing that in USA people are productive, then you are throwing this number: 99 people are fired.
Productive people do not get fired, not in a way that prevents them from becoming employed very quickly again. What you have is a DEPRESSION, what you have is complete imbalance in the market, it's an artificial imbalance, it's created by the overweight, huge, all powerful, very violent government, and the 99 people are the reason for that government's existence.
Every time the 99 vote for a politician who says: more regulation, higher artificial wages, more inflation, more laws, higher taxes on some, so that others can be subsidised, welfare, wars..... every time those people are complicit.
They are responsible. They are NOT the victims, they are the perpetrators. They have gotten what they wanted.
Their parents and grandparents did the same thing, when they voted for the people like Theodore Roosevelt, Hoover, FDR (well, FDR lied, he campaigned on the promise of getting gov't out of business, he promised austerity, then he got voted in and continued the inflating and spending policies of Hoover, but he couldn't have done it without people's support anyway).
Every time a person voted for SS, Medicare, Medicaid and higher taxes 'on the rich', that means the person voted for BIGGER GOVERNMENT.
Bigger gov't includes every department created in the last 100 years. From IRS and the Fed (supposedly private entity, which it is not), to FDA, EPA, FDIC, FHA, HUD, dep't of education, interior, commerce, to SS, to Medicare, to minimum wage and other labour laws, to these supposed 'civil rights', which are not rights, but entitlements for some and obligations for the others. That's big gov't. That's spending of the savings and investment that the market says IT DOES NOT WANT.
The market doesn't want any of these things to exist, the market is not just those 99, the market is 7 billion.
I don't really care what the market wants. It is not a living being worthy of compassion.
- and that's where you are completely wrong, just totally, fully, utterly, irredeemably wrong.
Market is people. What market wants is what people want, not some people, not some politicians, not some group of people, the entire collection of people. Market economy will always end up beating you over the head, no matter what type of command economy you are trying to set up.
USSR has been beaten over the head, China was in the same boat, all countries that tried printing money out of their trouble and that ended in inflation that drove their productivity to 0 and did the same with their purchasing power.
Market wants everybody to exchange something of value, command type economy wants to take from people who produce, raise prices and at the same time give to people who don't produce, whoever they are, be it a military industrial complex and/or the voting block of the poorer population, etc.
Market will always win at the end, the way to have a good economy is not to fight the market, but to let it work. The way to screw up your economy is to pretend you are smarter and more powerful than the collective desire of all people.
Good luck with that notion.
(and by the way, you are still under the completely nonsensical impression that increased productivity must lead to increased wages, this is nonsense. Increased productivity leads to increased purchasing power, which can be either presented as higher wages OR as lower consumer prices or a combination of the two. Instead the gov't creates inflation - printing fake currency, which creates fake demand for consumer goods, so drives prices up eventually, and at the same time it destroys productivity by driving away and destroying savings and thus the investment capital)
There is nothing wrong with psychopaths, it's the so called 'normal' people that we should be all wary about.
But that is creating the same distortion of the "free" market, you're just calling it something other than "government." The effect is the same.
- not at all, it is a service, like all other services, it's not a government and there are competing courts as well as competing private security services, private insurance, etc.
Do you understand what an externality is? It has nothing to do with public vs. private property.
- I do, you don't.
The problem of externalities is created by gov't, when gov't limits liability to people artificially in any way, be it a 75Million USD liability cap on deep sea drilling or be it allowing a company to mine on this so called 'public property' (which a nonsense oxymoron, it's not property if there is no real owner).
Gov'ts have forever provided companies with ability to dump their garbage anywhere on the 'public property' and gov'ts even limited liabilities of companies and individuals to dump their garbage on private property.
Only strict private property laws remove the problem of externalities. Externalities only exist as a limitation of liability to an individual or a business, which means it shields the individual or a business from having to bear the costs (current or potential, so either gov't limits their liability for paying for their violation of private property now or in the future via fake gov't insurance, which is always a moral hazard).
If you own a hog farm, and your pig shit stinks to high-heaven, you impose a cost on me.
- yeah, and do you understand that if you are in business of hog farming, then you have various gov't imposed limitations as to how much damages you owe to private property owners around you?
If I own that farm and the shit stinks, you have a liability claim against me and the real reason why you can't exercise it is government. Via licenses, regulations, taxation, use of 'public' land, etc., the gov't tells you: FUCK OFF with your liability claims.
In a free market you DO have liability claims against my business of hog farming, in a slave market that is set up via gov't regulations, public property, laws, taxes, inflation, limitation of liability, you do not have anything, you have no property rights.
The property rights ended very abruptly with the IRS starting to collect income taxes illegally (you can see my SIG and follow that link, I explain the issue). Of-course all other laws, including, as an example the so called 'Civil Rights Act of 64', the part of that act that imposes an obligation on the business owners to provide entitlements to people who some of those business owners didn't want to provide them to, and all of that being enforced by the gov't law, that's another example.
The minimum wage law is another example. Any time the gov't tells one individual: you have to do business in a certain way on your property and under the threat of violence these are the conditions that you must do business under here, at that moment there are no private property rights anymore.
There are no private property rights once the gov't limits liability to any company's misdeeds. There are no property rights once gov't establishes monopoly on even basic things like utility businesses, etc.
The gov't has destroyed the concept of property rights, and there is no more important concept than that.
Your property starts with your body. A gov't that is big enough to tell you that you have no property rights in your business is the gov't that can tell you that you have no property rights to your body and thus to your organs.
Your property starts with your liver, kidneys, eyes, skin, etc. Those things belong to you because fundamentally they couldn't exist without you being present and providing for them.
But the property must extend beyond your body towards things that wouldn't have existed if you weren't present, so products and services that you provide that depend on your w
Oh, boy, the person on an excavator either owns it, so it's his business, and there are plenty of people whose business involves owning complex tools, or the person on the excavator is hired in the market that sets the price for his skill. The price depend on the ratio between supply and demand, that's all.
If it takes a few months or maybe a year to learn how to operate an excavator properly, then there will be enough people learning this skill. This is a skill and they can apply it either by buying, renting an excavator or finding an employer who owns an excavator.
The worker becomes more productive, but the POINT of being more productive is NOT to give the worker the salary of ALL the workers who no longer have to do that job! That's NOT what the market wants.
The point is to ensure that the rest of the people can be freed to do other jobs, to satisfy other human demands, and maybe some of them have to figure out what the human demands are on their own.
But your argument that the excavator doesn't make the worker more productive than 1000 people with shovels, because he is not getting the same salary as 1000 people, that he gets paid only what the market sets.... well then, what's there to argue about? You don't know what's what.
yeah, and by your gov't statistics there is no inflation either and by your gov't statistics GDP means something and by your gov't statistics taxes are lowest as percentage of GDP (which is funny in itself, before 1913 there were no income taxes).
GDP is fake, half of it is spending on consumer goods made abroad (54Billion USD/month trade deficit), the rest is split between gov't, its contractors, war, the inflated finance sector. Less than 5% of US economy is manufacturing, it's ridiculous.
Productivity? You don't know what the word means, neither do people who give you your fake numbers. Tell me, is Detroit more productive than ever today, that it has no factories left?
Over 46 million people in USA are on food stamps, or SNAP, as they advertise, tell me, with 15% of your population being unemployed while jobs are constantly leaving, are these people that productive, that they can be given free food and whatever else they get from taxing others (either via tax rates or via borrowing, so future taxes + interest or via inflation)?
Tell me, all those people with all those university degrees that work as Walmart greeters or waiters or toilet cleaners, are they so productive?
You'd think that with all that education, so an investments supposedly spent on them, they'd be doing better, no?
Productivity is a measure of productive OUTPUT. Productivity is ability to have 1 person do work of 10 people or of 1000 people or more.
A person with an excavator is much more productive than a person with a shovel or a stick.
A person with a factory is much more productive than a person on food stamps.
In China productivity has increased steadily for over 30 years, yes, in USA productivity has fallen steadily for the last 40 years.
Productivity is the function of capital being applied to the labour force, and in USA the capital has been dwindling on the edge of extinction, capital has been moving to China.
Capital is not your fake dollars, capital is the tools and machinery, all the instruments and automation in the factories, capital is what makes a worker productive. Your gov't numbers on productivity are simply ridiculous, productivity decreases as savings and capital investments fall, not the other way around.
It's not about who is considered what, it's about productivity, which is directly tied to the USD reserve currency status, while USD was defaulted upon in 1971. Since 1971, the inflation hit hard, the savings started leaving and moving elsewhere (thus it's Chinese and not US CEOs), and the productivity of workers is falling, because productivity is a function of savings being used as investments to acquire/build more and better tools. Tools make a worker more productive, the more tools there are and the better they are, the less a worker needs to do to achieve the same result (with higher quality and less waste too).
So the difference between the pay is not about 'high ivory tower', it's about the fact that there is no competition in USA, no competition in manufacturing, no competition in production, no competition in business, because of all the gov't destruction of capital, rules, regulations, taxations, inflation.
In this situation the US companies don't have to compete with gov't bonds for interest rates, so nobody is trading stocks to get dividends, which means that the payment isn't going to the stockholder, who simply gamble with the stocks (and they are in the stock market because of theft of inflation too), but the earnings aren't paid through dividends, thus they CAN be paid to high management, and because there is no competition due to gov't regulations, destruction of capital and taxes, there is no free market to put a lid on this type of spending.
A company that pays too much money to its CEOs and such, is a company that isn't using that money to reinvest in productivity, and it's only possible because there is no free market.
these news are good news, it shows that eventually it is possible to reduce the prices of notebooks further, should somebody be willing to take a lower pay as a CEO (this one ha 14million per year salary, this was 3million bonus), then they can reduce the prices and go to war against Lenovo. They could even hire some people away form Lenovo by offering slightly higher salaries (310USD anybody?)
If a free market is one with NO government involvement, then by definition you will not have any legal recourse against another party imposing externalities on you.
- this is false, people set up their own criminal courts and their own system to handle crime and to handle contract law, you are simply looking at the only option that you know and believe that other options do not exist, that's false. EVEN in USA during the 'wild wild west' or really the 'gold rush' era, there were court systems set up without any gov't.
But what you're not understanding is that under a "free" market, there would be no liability damages AT ALL. Without the government dictating that a company is liable for damages if they spill oil into the Gulf of Mexico, you can't sue for those damages.
- this is a misunderstanding of private property.
Since people DO set up governments, what must be avoided is the gov't owning property, so all property must be private, in that case there are no externalities, every single situation has to price in liability costs.
If gov't does have 'public property' (nonsense of-course, there is no such thing), then gov't must not be authorised to allow companies to do business on public property.
No company should be able to do business on property that has no true owner. If a company wants to drill for oil, it must bid to buy that land or even that portion of the sea, whatever.
BTW., while the deep water permits were handed out, more regulations was enacted to prevent shallow water drilling, isn't that something?
This brings up your next point: yes, it is the most desirable system to have - free market without any gov't regulations upon individuals and businesses and without gov't setting rules for money or interest rates, etc. And of-course gov't shouldn't be in business of stealing money from some to hand out welfare checks to others (welfare, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, EI, etc.etc.etc.).
Private property rights are against gov't confiscating private property. Protecting property from other individuals is not something linked to the concept of 'rights', it's only about your ability to protect yourself and it may have to do with the criminal code.
Criminal code establishes the rules of behaviour and punishment in case an individual hurts another, but that's not a concept of a 'right'.
A right is a limit placed upon the collective and this right is of the individual against the collective, it's protection against the system. System can't be punished if it violates your life or property, so the criminal code and rules don't work there. Where there is the collective (gov't) there must be a concept of an individual right, or knowledge that the collective is unauthorised and it is illegal for the collective to abuse your individual rights.
People completely misunderstand this, they don't get it, and thus they buy into the fake concept that gov't can hand out rights by creating laws that force some group of individuals to be obligated to provide entitlements to other group of individuals.
Minimum wage is an entitlement and an obligation situation, it's not a right.
'Jane Smith just purchased Herceptin Herpes Medication and KY Jelly at Podunk Walmart [53 People Are Making a Doctor Appointment]'
- FTFY.
Yeah, I've seen too many pictures of your face around, AC.
You are a great example of a huge failure of the system you are so vehemently protecting, conflating the 'public education' with populace being educated just proves the point that the government ran system is beyond redemption.
Also you don't need to put "please" before GTFO.