Russian politics right now are a hostage to the paradox of plenty or 'resource curse' - it's a problem that raw resource rich nations are facing, which is that the entire economy of a nation that can export near unlimited natural resources (especially energy), rotates around those exports and the government grows based on this export. The problem then becomes that the government is very rich, the individuals who are directly involved with the mining/export business become very rich, but the rest of the population is not allowed to voice their opinions, and they are lulled into complacency by a heavy system of taxes and rules (none of the rules apply to the ruling class, so it's a corrupt system), all of this destroys competition to government.
The point is to prevent any competition to the ruling class and the mechanism is to ensure that nobody becomes influential and powerful enough, that there is no solid middle class - business class, that becomes a competitor to those in power.
The reason why those in power don't want any competition is obvious - they get enormous amounts of money from the mineral/energy exporting businesses (I don't know the precise numbers, but I heard Putin has over 40 Billion US dollar fortune himself at this point. Certainly his personal wealth is huge, here is a little house he built in a very nice place on the Black sea.)
So to prevent this money waterfall from stopping, they do everything possible, including murder of journalists and theft of the elections, corruption of the courts, destruction of personal liberties.
The people who the top mafia bosses (like Putin) surround themselves with also want a nice piece of that pie, but they don't necessarily get to suck the oil from a pipe, so they end up stealing businesses, racketeering, profiting from organized crime, indeed organizing the criminal structures themselves, stealing property directly and indirectly, etc.etc. Starting your own private business in a country like that is almost always doomed to failure from the very start.
But the money exists within the country, after all, the oil/gas/metals/wood/whatever it's all exported, so there is some money, so obviously there is trade with other countries. But because of the liberty crisis and because of all the criminality, the injustice that people see in courts there is almost no private domestic manufacturing taking place.
Because of that huge population lives off scraps and on a dole and the government in power provides that 'dole'. The problem is that the people are forced into poverty by government, where many of them would otherwise do something useful, start businesses, manufacturing, farming, mining of their own. But the government prevents them from this, the government is set up to prevent a business sector from growing and business middle class from appearing. A strong business class is a strong middle class that does not want to be ruled by a bunch of murdering thugs - dictators.
So there you go, the Russian politicians have the motive, the resources an
Of-course it is all fraud, there are plenty of videos shot during the elections of so called 'carousel' (merry go-round) voters, who were paid to go and vote multiple times in dozens of locations for United Russia. There are cases of just stealing the final results and replacing them with fake pro-United Russia results. There are cases of pre-made voting ballots being thrown into the voting urns, all this is true.
But after the anti-Putin protest that happened last week, with over 40 thousand people attending just in Moscow (video) Here is a video of the anti-anti-Putin protesters (so pro-United Russia protest), that just happened, and this so called 'protest' was shown on the First Channel (main pro-government TV channel), saying that there were 25 thousand people in the crowd, which is nonsense, but more interestingly what kind of people were there. In that video the attendees are asked why did they come to this 'protest' and they either don't respond, or they are drunk and respond with pure nonsense, or they barely speak Russian (don't forget, United Russia) and they don't even understand the question well, but they answer that they are here at work or from their work.
So it's a sham, everything, start to finish (related videos to that one show people being invited to these pro-Putin protests with promises of money). Then there is this video, where people are being paid just after the pro-Putin protest. A girl in the video says: this is how we sell out Russia.
Excellent, so the fight can continue. BTW., I used to get mod points, but haven't gotten any for near 2 years now for sure. I find it strange though, I have 'excellent' to 'terrible' karma back and forth, but I can't moderate it seems even when at 'excellent'. Not excellent enough I bet.
suing is part of market. Of-course finding out that some manufacturers are pushing ads onto the drivers and buying cars that don't do that in the first place is also market.
Probably. I don't believe I bought anything specifically because of any ad, though it's possible that some of the products I bought over the years were somehow influenced by some ad somewhere, it's hard to say. But I use every tool available to block as much ad content as possible because it's all in your face nonsense.
There is nothing wrong with having some ads, obviously we have ads on everything. Look at your computer - it has a logo on it. Look at any food package - it has an ad on it. Check out your jeans, there is an ad somewhere there. Your shoes probably too. But it doesn't really bother us because it's just part of life but more importantly because it doesn't jump out at us while we are trying to do something.
If I was walking on a street and all of a sudden my shoes stopped me and started yelling: buy (whatever the brand is) and I couldn't keep walking, I would throw those shoes right out.
More likely scenario: if I put a key into the car's ignition and before it started it gave me a 30 second ad by the car manufacturer, I would fucking sue their asses to hell for wasting my time (imagine if you have to get out of some situation rather quickly, you start your car, and instead of taking you out of there, it started an ad for 30 second, giving enough time for the angry mob to catch up - you are dead.)
So it's the same with your computer - if instead of allowing you to do your work, it stopped you for 30 seconds to show/read/display an ad to you. That's insane. That's why we block all ads, and I am so jaded now, I want the maximum ad blockage even though in reality most of those ads don't really stop me from anything, but they still occupy my desktop space and it's annoying.
So I say - we can't have good things because people ALWAYS taking one step further and spoil the good thing. So we fight back the way we know how - technologically.
Why do people think that contractor = second rate citizen? I don't know any contractors (including myself,) that want to go full time. I don't understand the mentality that choosing to be paid a rate per hour and have no other connection to the employer is somehow a bad thing.
Yes, patents are supposed to do the same exact thing all over the world - prevent people from competing and providing better products at cheaper prices.
wrong. that is not a good thing. it means people lose their jobs through no fault of their own
- wrong. This is a good thing. The people who are losing the money in case of a specific bank failure are people who lending to that bank.
This is good, as that bank goes out of business and people become more cautious as to where to put their money. That's the ultimate regulator - market regulator.
it also means that John Q Public no longer has faith in his bank to hold on to his money in what should be a stable savings account. if nothing is secured at all, as you propose, then the very basis of savings and loan as we know it loses its strength because banks won't have money available to loan out.
- nonsense.
People used banks without any government guarantee and the banking sector wasn't falling over. In fact without FDIC the banks compete with each other for their customers as the customers are looking at the private insurance that banks hold and customers care who they lend their money to. People who want to use the banks as deposit boxes pay a storage fee and some others may want to RISK their money for a few percentage points, so the money that will be loaned out is loaned out with the knowledge of the people who lend it to the banks. The money then is lent out by the bank and it cannot be immediately retrieved by the account holder, but there is no storage fee obviously and the customer gets paid.
If the banks break the trust and uses people's deposits to loan out what it's not supposed to, eventually the bank goes too far and there may be a bank run. That's a good thing - it makes sure people don't just blindly give their money to just about anybody. Worked very well before the Fed started counterfeiting money and before FDIC became the moral hazard. 19 century US economy was built with private banks, so this:
they will have to loan out at prohibitively expensive rates which will prevent people from wanting to take any risk with money at all.
- is clearly false.
but of course, you previously said you support high unemployment, so this fits just fine with that goal. it doesn't fit any thinking man's ideals, but it fits yours just fine.
- I support what the market decides and I oppose what the government wants.
Clearly the current situation with the unemployment is caused by the government destroying the market, pushing labor prices too high and pushing investment capital offshore.
I also support all sorts of efficiencies found in automation if the market is going that way, because people's goal is not to have jobs but to have productive output from those jobs and if we can put everybody out of work doing what they are doing with maximum amount of automation - that's a good thing. That would mean we have reached a stage, just like the one that transitioned the subsistence farmer economy to industrial economy, so people stopped working on the farms and came up with other ways to be productive.
People became very productive while not working on the farms and farming became very efficient as a result of industrial capitalism, as 5% of people became capable of feeding 100% of the population. That's a clear advantage to subsistence farming, where nearly all people work as farmers and nothing else gets done.
So obviously in that sense I completely support automating everything we can, so that people lose their current jobs and come up with new ideas. But again, this only makes sense as long as it's done by the free market, not governments. Gov'ts are causing this massive unemployment right now not because we can produce everything we need with a tiny number of people, but because we outsource everything we produce to somebody else and we produce nothing in return, which is not an equitable trade and will crash the economy and the dollar.
bullshit. the banks that were the most stable after the
Gov't is the main snake oil dealer today and I don't trust a word of anything it says ever to anybody, so shutting down FDA is excellent idea from my perspective. You are saying you don't trust a private company to rate foods or drugs for a premium. Well I wonder why you think you can trust an unelected official, who not only doesn't care about your vote but also doesn't care about your ability to pay premium for the food you buy, because it's all taxes/debt/printing?
All of these financial pyramid schemes are created with free money. If people had to save to invest their own money (overproduction minus under-consumption) and governments didn't manipulate money prices and didn't counterfeit currency, the interest rates would have been much higher and there would have not been all of this nonsense and unhealthy business practices.
As to being 'protected' by the government... let's just say you are not protected from inflation and look carefully at who stole the money - the gov't hands are all over this.
Wow - an entire post of contradictions. Apparently money is not fungible, and neither are customers with money.
- counterfeit is not money.
Customers are not customers if they don't produce. We don't trade with people for pieces of paper, we trade with people because they produce. If they don't produce, then we are not trading, we are subsidizing their consumption and we have to pay more to produce all of the goods that these subsidized consumers want to consume. But there is no reason to do that, because they are 'buying' our goods from us, we have to work more, but they don't produce anything, so we can't use the money to buy anything from them. They are not worth our effort.
Hmmm... so by your logic, if government reduces interest rates, and this leads to investment in production, that's bad
- bidding up prices for worthless investments with free money is not investment, it's destruction of currency. The only real investments come out of savings: overproduction - underconsumption.
But if people get capital from their facebook stock and invest it in production, that's good.
- actually I think this is also a bubble and the money that will be poured into FB is also coming from major investing institutions, mostly counterfeit, that's the only way FB can have the valuations it has.
The presence of customers is apparently immaterial.
- the only real customers are people who also produce. Trade is exchange of goods, not exchange of products for counterfeit currency.
We trade with each other because of comparative advantage. Those who are overproducing and under-consuming are able to build up savings capital and increase their output becoming wealthier than others.
Trading with people who get money from government from taxes, from debt, from printing is a worthless waste of time and life.
Yep, simplistic is the right word to describe your model
in Belgium the Flemish (regional) government currently has to pay a lot of money every year to companies and people whose cars were damaged due to badly maintained roads
- just another stupid thing that government does. Clearly this is stupid and wasteful, for gov't to pay for private transport, to fix private cars/trucks. That's really dumb. You should really get rid of that stupid government (like all other nations of-course).
Also I wonder how many more 'damaged' trucks and cars appeared all of a sudden when the program started. I bet there are many times more 'damaged' cars now, I am sure there is all sorts of corruption going on too.
Just imagine what kind of a stupid subsidy to mechanics and dealerships and parts manufacturers this is - everybody now will just bring in their truck and car to replace any wear and tear with government subsidized parts.
I wonder how many mechanics just take the money and split it with the truck/car owners, where in fact there is no damage.
Do you see how stupid and wrong it is for government to put money into this? Same thing with everything it puts money into. It creates false demand where none existed and where private sector wasn't providing this extra demand, clearly there was no need for it.
However you should ask yourself the follow up question - why is private business not building the roads in your country? I bet your roads are all public, none are private, so of-course using public roads and not paying for them directly creates the moral hazard, and the cost/benefit must not be there for private money to enter.
That's another stupid thing governments do - start in road building business in the first place.
What you seem to miss is that the evil big bad government is simply one of the ways to do that
- it's the worst way of doing it, because it has nothing to do with real demand.
There is no shortage of companies who can build up your roads, and if a community wants one that doesn't exist, all it has to do is raise bonds and hire a company itself. If there is a business case for it, it can be built no problem, it's done all the time. But in reality people want other people to pay for their expenses, that's the crux of the issue. I pity the fools who pay all these taxes.
Democracy and governments did not appear out of thin air.
- democracy is a terrible system, that's why US has a republic, but it's been cracked. Governments are evil by design and they should be allowed to do the minimum possible damage to the society. They appear when there is a power vacuum and somebody wants to occupy that space.
but simply saying that per definition pooling money via the government for public investments is basically "money that instead should have been invested in businesses or by businesses, and now hurts businesses because they don't have it" is ignoring reality.
- well, there is no 'pooling' of anything. There are no taxes allocated to any of it and none of it is backed by any production.
It's all debt, it's all counterfeiting and it's all theft. The real business takes care of its infrastructure, but when you are left without any real business due to your government policies, then you have no need for that infrastructure and any type of a project like that is just a make shift jobs project - give everybody a job, whether they want it or not, make everybody equally poor in the process. Hey, but at least they become 'equally' poor, right? Well, not the politicians.
Yes, bubbles form and they burst, but they don't have anything to do with the economy at large. They only cause problems for the economy and not just for the private investors involved if there is a government with an easy money policy backing the deals.
That's what you see in those experiments - private people losing money. That's fine, they should lose money. The market works, it awards those who take meaningful risks but mostly not those who just gamble.
As a side note, imaginary money is easy to waste - easy come easy go. People don't treat imaginary and virtual money the same is real cash.
I know of experiments where they observed people doing stupid things (like gambling) and those with credit cards lost much more than those with cash in hands, it's because people aren't that great with abstract numbers, but they understand something they hold in their hands.
Free market made USA the most prosperous country on earth in 19 century, the biggest creditor nation, manufacturer of high quality cheap goods, so I don't see a problem - some people lose money, some make money, but the real overall economy grows as production grows.
Oh, I wouldn't worry too much if I were an FB employee, I would use that stock to take up all sorts of unsustainable debt (and then I'd use that for all sorts of insane spending and hopefully some smart real investment), and then if the thing fails, I wouldn't pay anything back.
US economy today gives all the wrong incentives, so you know it at some point the Fed and Congress will be bailing out States and towns and more private companies, so why not go overboard, you won't have to repay anything anyway.
If you live in the society that allows people like Corzine to steal billions while taxing those who actually work for living, at least take advantage of it.
No, the way the economy works is you can't afford a house, so a bank put you in debt and gave the money to a developer. So when you want to remodel, you take out an additional loan or renegotiate your current loan and pay cash to a contractor who is maxxed out on his credit cards.
- well, that's the unfortunate consequence of Keynesian policies pursued by government that is trying hard to live way beyond its means and make you poor in the process pretending to save you from you.
Real economy works by people paying for items they buy with savings, and in a real working economy credit is mostly used for production, because it's supposed to earn interest.
Money sinks (houses, cars, TVs, etc.), don't earn interest, that's why this 'consumer' economy is failing.
Labor doesn't build houses. Houses are built as a result of capital investment and organization of tools, labor, land, etc. Labor is just part of equation and it's a diminishing part, as the capital is able to replace plenty of labor, so one guy with an excavator replaces hundreds of people with shovels.
But if twice as many houses are built, won't they be worth half as much?
- not if your money supply grows. You would be correct if the money supply staid the same, that's what USA had in 19 century - prices were falling as dollar was strengthening.
But if the dollar is nothing but a piece of cloth/paper or even just a few bytes in a computer, and it is growing at a whim of a politician or a banker, then the prices are going to go up in that fiat currency, as the supply of it is basically infinite and it's growing without any restraint.
Again, with the houses, just like with.com bubble, agriculture equity bubble in 1929 and the bond bubble today, it's all about the dollar supply that keeps going up, and the reason for it is because it has no sound foundation, nothing prevents it from growing.
Or did the US Fed cause the Tulip Bulb bubble in 1637, too
- not the US Fed obviously, but the same idea exactly - people threw everything into tulip growing and flooded the market, and the tulips went down in value relative to everything else. That's what the Fed is doing with the currency, why is that a surprise?
As to the.com - you can go back and check the gov't set interest rates and the money expansion, the return rate was negative, today it's even worse. Again, how is that a surprise?
Banks competed and some went bust. That's a good thing - prevents a bad bank from continuing bad practices. You don't like banks going bust? Well, your government doesn't like it either, that's why it has destroyed your productivity and will destroy your currency - to keep appearance of a working bank system.
What is funny is that it seems you are arguing for regulated banking, saying that without regulations the banks fail, yet you admit that banks used to fail individually, but not institutionally. But today, with all the regulations (and there are tens of thousands of regulations) and with all the regulatory bodies (hundreds of them), the banks are failing institutionally and globally because of all of the governments sticking their noses where they don't belong - business and money.
Infrastructure is only meaningful in any way if it can make the people more productive. Clearly productivity has nothing to do with the jobs programs that government is involved in. Any infrastructure projects that gov't does (all those roads, etc.), those are just money sinks if they are not demanded by the actual business requirement, and there is no business requirement at this point in US or Europe. There is no business requirement and you should go up in this thread, I wrote about the real interest rates and lack of real investment and the reasons behind it.
Since there is no investment capital at acceptable interest rates for business in these countries, there is no business requirement, there will be no new business and anything you believe is necessary and should be done as an investment by the government will not make US businesses more productive, because those businesses will not exist anyway.
Gov't jobs programs are make shift jobs and money sinks - work for the sake of work.
You can build all the houses and bridges and roads you like, you can spend your entire life building them, but if the business cannot operate in your environment you won't have ANY return on that so called 'investment'. When there is a real demand and real capital investment infrastructure gets build, because it is necessary to increase efficiencies and productivity. Gov't does not need to build it, if the environment is conducive to production, those things are built. US is broke and so are many other European nations, there is no money and there is no reason to do these projects except to continue providing the government with reasons for further spending and existence and to pretend the economy is doing something while destroying the currency.
Yeah - that's while all the.com companies are doing so well, they produced something.
- no, the.com bubble was spawned by the federal reserve, the culprit of the time was Greenspan and as he was flooding the market with cheap money and lowering interest rates, the same principles applied at the time, the investment funds didn't know where to find any meaningful return that would not be negative (and the real interest rate has been negative for a very long time now, certainly more than 2 decades).
The cheap money gave people the wrong incentives, the.com bubble was created the same way that the agriculture equities bubble before the great depression, the housing bubble of two-thousand's and the final currency/bond bubble that's being inflated now. It's all in the hands of the federal reserve and their ability to counterfeit currency..com companies weren't producing anything much of value, buying pencils at $1 and selling for 50 cents on line and having a business model that basically said: we'll make it up in volume was disastrous then, as it is today, but the people were buying the.com bubble just as readily and weren't able to admit it was a bubble in the same way that the house mortgages were bought and nobody wanted to admit that was a bubble.
Same thing is happening with US bonds right now, and it's funny how people are thinking that sovereign debt of a nation that prints currency as defense against is non-existent economy, all because of faith in government's ability to do something...
Let's put it this way: if the currency is weakening now, you don't want to be in that currency. But you don't buy Treasuries in that currency, because those Treasuries are the exact same thing as that currency, as they pay in that currency.
The shortage of the investment capital is due to the money printing and negative return rates that are artificially created by the governments. The real interest rates today are insanely high, but that's what markets figure - if the amount of money that can be printed is infinite, then there is no reason why return rate on real investment shouldn't be set infinitely high as well.
That's why no business can get a loan and only governments are swimming in worthless cash, since they print it.
As to Henry Ford - the guy was working in a sound monetary system, no federal reserve and no income taxes.
You are a shill but you can't change the reality. The reality is that before all of the regulations and the Fed existence and before FDIC the banks never failed institutionally, as in - they never had a government giving them free money and preventing any potential competition. Banks are now your government but that only happens when government meddles with business, but it's inevitable. Once government starts 'regulating business', it means it's there to steal power and sell it and the business that is closest to the trough (the Fed) becomes the government. Since it becomes a part of government that is not beholden to the voters, it can steal without any impunity. The correct solution is to get rid of all regulations and protections and stop destroying the money.
But you know that, the reason why you sniff out every one of my comments is because you are an AC shill.
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Russian politics right now are a hostage to the paradox of plenty or 'resource curse' - it's a problem that raw resource rich nations are facing, which is that the entire economy of a nation that can export near unlimited natural resources (especially energy), rotates around those exports and the government grows based on this export. The problem then becomes that the government is very rich, the individuals who are directly involved with the mining/export business become very rich, but the rest of the population is not allowed to voice their opinions, and they are lulled into complacency by a heavy system of taxes and rules (none of the rules apply to the ruling class, so it's a corrupt system), all of this destroys competition to government.
The point is to prevent any competition to the ruling class and the mechanism is to ensure that nobody becomes influential and powerful enough, that there is no solid middle class - business class, that becomes a competitor to those in power.
The reason why those in power don't want any competition is obvious - they get enormous amounts of money from the mineral/energy exporting businesses (I don't know the precise numbers, but I heard Putin has over 40 Billion US dollar fortune himself at this point. Certainly his personal wealth is huge, here is a little house he built in a very nice place on the Black sea.)
So to prevent this money waterfall from stopping, they do everything possible, including murder of journalists and theft of the elections, corruption of the courts, destruction of personal liberties.
The people who the top mafia bosses (like Putin) surround themselves with also want a nice piece of that pie, but they don't necessarily get to suck the oil from a pipe, so they end up stealing businesses, racketeering, profiting from organized crime, indeed organizing the criminal structures themselves, stealing property directly and indirectly, etc.etc. Starting your own private business in a country like that is almost always doomed to failure from the very start.
But the money exists within the country, after all, the oil/gas/metals/wood/whatever it's all exported, so there is some money, so obviously there is trade with other countries. But because of the liberty crisis and because of all the criminality, the injustice that people see in courts there is almost no private domestic manufacturing taking place.
There is almost no manufacturing and many of the farmers who try hard end up attacked, sometimes murdered and their farms (case of government forcing a chicken farmer out of business with false back-taxes), lands and equipment stolen and in many cases then just sold for scrap and destroyed.
Because of that huge population lives off scraps and on a dole and the government in power provides that 'dole'. The problem is that the people are forced into poverty by government, where many of them would otherwise do something useful, start businesses, manufacturing, farming, mining of their own. But the government prevents them from this, the government is set up to prevent a business sector from growing and business middle class from appearing. A strong business class is a strong middle class that does not want to be ruled by a bunch of murdering thugs - dictators.
So there you go, the Russian politicians have the motive, the resources an
Forgot to include the link from the 10th of December anti-Putin, anti-United Russia protests.
Of-course it is all fraud, there are plenty of videos shot during the elections of so called 'carousel' (merry go-round) voters, who were paid to go and vote multiple times in dozens of locations for United Russia. There are cases of just stealing the final results and replacing them with fake pro-United Russia results. There are cases of pre-made voting ballots being thrown into the voting urns, all this is true.
But after the anti-Putin protest that happened last week, with over 40 thousand people attending just in Moscow (video) Here is a video of the anti-anti-Putin protesters (so pro-United Russia protest), that just happened, and this so called 'protest' was shown on the First Channel (main pro-government TV channel), saying that there were 25 thousand people in the crowd, which is nonsense, but more interestingly what kind of people were there. In that video the attendees are asked why did they come to this 'protest' and they either don't respond, or they are drunk and respond with pure nonsense, or they barely speak Russian (don't forget, United Russia) and they don't even understand the question well, but they answer that they are here at work or from their work.
So it's a sham, everything, start to finish (related videos to that one show people being invited to these pro-Putin protests with promises of money). Then there is this video, where people are being paid just after the pro-Putin protest. A girl in the video says: this is how we sell out Russia.
Yes, it's a sham.
Excellent, so the fight can continue. BTW., I used to get mod points, but haven't gotten any for near 2 years now for sure. I find it strange though, I have 'excellent' to 'terrible' karma back and forth, but I can't moderate it seems even when at 'excellent'. Not excellent enough I bet.
suing is part of market. Of-course finding out that some manufacturers are pushing ads onto the drivers and buying cars that don't do that in the first place is also market.
Probably. I don't believe I bought anything specifically because of any ad, though it's possible that some of the products I bought over the years were somehow influenced by some ad somewhere, it's hard to say. But I use every tool available to block as much ad content as possible because it's all in your face nonsense.
There is nothing wrong with having some ads, obviously we have ads on everything. Look at your computer - it has a logo on it. Look at any food package - it has an ad on it. Check out your jeans, there is an ad somewhere there. Your shoes probably too. But it doesn't really bother us because it's just part of life but more importantly because it doesn't jump out at us while we are trying to do something.
If I was walking on a street and all of a sudden my shoes stopped me and started yelling: buy (whatever the brand is) and I couldn't keep walking, I would throw those shoes right out.
More likely scenario: if I put a key into the car's ignition and before it started it gave me a 30 second ad by the car manufacturer, I would fucking sue their asses to hell for wasting my time (imagine if you have to get out of some situation rather quickly, you start your car, and instead of taking you out of there, it started an ad for 30 second, giving enough time for the angry mob to catch up - you are dead.)
So it's the same with your computer - if instead of allowing you to do your work, it stopped you for 30 seconds to show/read/display an ad to you. That's insane. That's why we block all ads, and I am so jaded now, I want the maximum ad blockage even though in reality most of those ads don't really stop me from anything, but they still occupy my desktop space and it's annoying.
So I say - we can't have good things because people ALWAYS taking one step further and spoil the good thing. So we fight back the way we know how - technologically.
Why do people think that contractor = second rate citizen? I don't know any contractors (including myself,) that want to go full time. I don't understand the mentality that choosing to be paid a rate per hour and have no other connection to the employer is somehow a bad thing.
Yeah, there are all sorts of copyright pirates out there.
GEMA is an example of an organization that lays millions of fraudulent claims.
Yes, patents are supposed to do the same exact thing all over the world - prevent people from competing and providing better products at cheaper prices.
wrong. that is not a good thing. it means people lose their jobs through no fault of their own
- wrong. This is a good thing. The people who are losing the money in case of a specific bank failure are people who lending to that bank.
This is good, as that bank goes out of business and people become more cautious as to where to put their money. That's the ultimate regulator - market regulator.
it also means that John Q Public no longer has faith in his bank to hold on to his money in what should be a stable savings account. if nothing is secured at all, as you propose, then the very basis of savings and loan as we know it loses its strength because banks won't have money available to loan out.
- nonsense.
People used banks without any government guarantee and the banking sector wasn't falling over. In fact without FDIC the banks compete with each other for their customers as the customers are looking at the private insurance that banks hold and customers care who they lend their money to. People who want to use the banks as deposit boxes pay a storage fee and some others may want to RISK their money for a few percentage points, so the money that will be loaned out is loaned out with the knowledge of the people who lend it to the banks. The money then is lent out by the bank and it cannot be immediately retrieved by the account holder, but there is no storage fee obviously and the customer gets paid.
If the banks break the trust and uses people's deposits to loan out what it's not supposed to, eventually the bank goes too far and there may be a bank run. That's a good thing - it makes sure people don't just blindly give their money to just about anybody. Worked very well before the Fed started counterfeiting money and before FDIC became the moral hazard. 19 century US economy was built with private banks, so this:
they will have to loan out at prohibitively expensive rates which will prevent people from wanting to take any risk with money at all.
- is clearly false.
but of course, you previously said you support high unemployment, so this fits just fine with that goal. it doesn't fit any thinking man's ideals, but it fits yours just fine.
- I support what the market decides and I oppose what the government wants.
Clearly the current situation with the unemployment is caused by the government destroying the market, pushing labor prices too high and pushing investment capital offshore.
I also support all sorts of efficiencies found in automation if the market is going that way, because people's goal is not to have jobs but to have productive output from those jobs and if we can put everybody out of work doing what they are doing with maximum amount of automation - that's a good thing. That would mean we have reached a stage, just like the one that transitioned the subsistence farmer economy to industrial economy, so people stopped working on the farms and came up with other ways to be productive.
People became very productive while not working on the farms and farming became very efficient as a result of industrial capitalism, as 5% of people became capable of feeding 100% of the population. That's a clear advantage to subsistence farming, where nearly all people work as farmers and nothing else gets done.
So obviously in that sense I completely support automating everything we can, so that people lose their current jobs and come up with new ideas. But again, this only makes sense as long as it's done by the free market, not governments. Gov'ts are causing this massive unemployment right now not because we can produce everything we need with a tiny number of people, but because we outsource everything we produce to somebody else and we produce nothing in return, which is not an equitable trade and will crash the economy and the dollar.
bullshit. the banks that were the most stable after the
Gov't is the main snake oil dealer today and I don't trust a word of anything it says ever to anybody, so shutting down FDA is excellent idea from my perspective. You are saying you don't trust a private company to rate foods or drugs for a premium. Well I wonder why you think you can trust an unelected official, who not only doesn't care about your vote but also doesn't care about your ability to pay premium for the food you buy, because it's all taxes/debt/printing?
All of these financial pyramid schemes are created with free money. If people had to save to invest their own money (overproduction minus under-consumption) and governments didn't manipulate money prices and didn't counterfeit currency, the interest rates would have been much higher and there would have not been all of this nonsense and unhealthy business practices.
Err... MF Global were never a bank, and never had any depositors, at least not in the usual sense.
- I am certain that the people holding their money at MF global in actual money accounts weren't thinking the same way as you are, because they were quite surprised that their money accounts were drained.
But don't worry, more is coming. More deposits will be stolen from other banks and more people will be surprised that their 'deposits' are gone.
Of-course saying that something is a 'deposit' to a bank is a ruse, there are no deposits, only loans, but you wouldn't know about it because of FDIC.
As to being 'protected' by the government... let's just say you are not protected from inflation and look carefully at who stole the money - the gov't hands are all over this.
Wow - an entire post of contradictions. Apparently money is not fungible, and neither are customers with money.
- counterfeit is not money.
Customers are not customers if they don't produce. We don't trade with people for pieces of paper, we trade with people because they produce. If they don't produce, then we are not trading, we are subsidizing their consumption and we have to pay more to produce all of the goods that these subsidized consumers want to consume. But there is no reason to do that, because they are 'buying' our goods from us, we have to work more, but they don't produce anything, so we can't use the money to buy anything from them. They are not worth our effort.
As to your prediction - that's pretty worthless. But who else did you see except for me predicting that bank deposits will be stolen from the banks next?
Anyway, I am sure you learned nothing from this.
Hmmm ... so by your logic, if government reduces interest rates, and this leads to investment in production, that's bad
- bidding up prices for worthless investments with free money is not investment, it's destruction of currency. The only real investments come out of savings: overproduction - underconsumption.
But if people get capital from their facebook stock and invest it in production, that's good.
- actually I think this is also a bubble and the money that will be poured into FB is also coming from major investing institutions, mostly counterfeit, that's the only way FB can have the valuations it has.
The presence of customers is apparently immaterial.
- the only real customers are people who also produce. Trade is exchange of goods, not exchange of products for counterfeit currency.
We trade with each other because of comparative advantage. Those who are overproducing and under-consuming are able to build up savings capital and increase their output becoming wealthier than others.
Trading with people who get money from government from taxes, from debt, from printing is a worthless waste of time and life.
Yep, simplistic is the right word to describe your model
- however simplistic, yet here is my write up that predicts theft of money from deposits in banks. Now it happened.
So however simplistic, I see the path that is in front of us. Do you see anything?
in Belgium the Flemish (regional) government currently has to pay a lot of money every year to companies and people whose cars were damaged due to badly maintained roads
- just another stupid thing that government does. Clearly this is stupid and wasteful, for gov't to pay for private transport, to fix private cars/trucks. That's really dumb. You should really get rid of that stupid government (like all other nations of-course).
Also I wonder how many more 'damaged' trucks and cars appeared all of a sudden when the program started. I bet there are many times more 'damaged' cars now, I am sure there is all sorts of corruption going on too.
Just imagine what kind of a stupid subsidy to mechanics and dealerships and parts manufacturers this is - everybody now will just bring in their truck and car to replace any wear and tear with government subsidized parts.
I wonder how many mechanics just take the money and split it with the truck/car owners, where in fact there is no damage.
Do you see how stupid and wrong it is for government to put money into this? Same thing with everything it puts money into. It creates false demand where none existed and where private sector wasn't providing this extra demand, clearly there was no need for it.
However you should ask yourself the follow up question - why is private business not building the roads in your country? I bet your roads are all public, none are private, so of-course using public roads and not paying for them directly creates the moral hazard, and the cost/benefit must not be there for private money to enter.
That's another stupid thing governments do - start in road building business in the first place.
What you seem to miss is that the evil big bad government is simply one of the ways to do that
- it's the worst way of doing it, because it has nothing to do with real demand.
There is no shortage of companies who can build up your roads, and if a community wants one that doesn't exist, all it has to do is raise bonds and hire a company itself. If there is a business case for it, it can be built no problem, it's done all the time. But in reality people want other people to pay for their expenses, that's the crux of the issue. I pity the fools who pay all these taxes.
Democracy and governments did not appear out of thin air.
- democracy is a terrible system, that's why US has a republic, but it's been cracked. Governments are evil by design and they should be allowed to do the minimum possible damage to the society. They appear when there is a power vacuum and somebody wants to occupy that space.
but simply saying that per definition pooling money via the government for public investments is basically "money that instead should have been invested in businesses or by businesses, and now hurts businesses because they don't have it" is ignoring reality.
- well, there is no 'pooling' of anything. There are no taxes allocated to any of it and none of it is backed by any production.
It's all debt, it's all counterfeiting and it's all theft. The real business takes care of its infrastructure, but when you are left without any real business due to your government policies, then you have no need for that infrastructure and any type of a project like that is just a make shift jobs project - give everybody a job, whether they want it or not, make everybody equally poor in the process. Hey, but at least they become 'equally' poor, right? Well, not the politicians.
Yes, bubbles form and they burst, but they don't have anything to do with the economy at large. They only cause problems for the economy and not just for the private investors involved if there is a government with an easy money policy backing the deals.
That's what you see in those experiments - private people losing money. That's fine, they should lose money. The market works, it awards those who take meaningful risks but mostly not those who just gamble.
As a side note, imaginary money is easy to waste - easy come easy go. People don't treat imaginary and virtual money the same is real cash.
I know of experiments where they observed people doing stupid things (like gambling) and those with credit cards lost much more than those with cash in hands, it's because people aren't that great with abstract numbers, but they understand something they hold in their hands.
Free market made USA the most prosperous country on earth in 19 century, the biggest creditor nation, manufacturer of high quality cheap goods, so I don't see a problem - some people lose money, some make money, but the real overall economy grows as production grows.
Oh, I wouldn't worry too much if I were an FB employee, I would use that stock to take up all sorts of unsustainable debt (and then I'd use that for all sorts of insane spending and hopefully some smart real investment), and then if the thing fails, I wouldn't pay anything back.
US economy today gives all the wrong incentives, so you know it at some point the Fed and Congress will be bailing out States and towns and more private companies, so why not go overboard, you won't have to repay anything anyway.
If you live in the society that allows people like Corzine to steal billions while taxing those who actually work for living, at least take advantage of it.
No, the way the economy works is you can't afford a house, so a bank put you in debt and gave the money to a developer. So when you want to remodel, you take out an additional loan or renegotiate your current loan and pay cash to a contractor who is maxxed out on his credit cards.
- well, that's the unfortunate consequence of Keynesian policies pursued by government that is trying hard to live way beyond its means and make you poor in the process pretending to save you from you.
Real economy works by people paying for items they buy with savings, and in a real working economy credit is mostly used for production, because it's supposed to earn interest.
Money sinks (houses, cars, TVs, etc.), don't earn interest, that's why this 'consumer' economy is failing.
Labor doesn't build houses. Houses are built as a result of capital investment and organization of tools, labor, land, etc. Labor is just part of equation and it's a diminishing part, as the capital is able to replace plenty of labor, so one guy with an excavator replaces hundreds of people with shovels.
But if twice as many houses are built, won't they be worth half as much?
- not if your money supply grows. You would be correct if the money supply staid the same, that's what USA had in 19 century - prices were falling as dollar was strengthening.
But if the dollar is nothing but a piece of cloth/paper or even just a few bytes in a computer, and it is growing at a whim of a politician or a banker, then the prices are going to go up in that fiat currency, as the supply of it is basically infinite and it's growing without any restraint.
Again, with the houses, just like with .com bubble, agriculture equity bubble in 1929 and the bond bubble today, it's all about the dollar supply that keeps going up, and the reason for it is because it has no sound foundation, nothing prevents it from growing.
Or did the US Fed cause the Tulip Bulb bubble in 1637, too
- not the US Fed obviously, but the same idea exactly - people threw everything into tulip growing and flooded the market, and the tulips went down in value relative to everything else. That's what the Fed is doing with the currency, why is that a surprise?
As to the .com - you can go back and check the gov't set interest rates and the money expansion, the return rate was negative, today it's even worse. Again, how is that a surprise?
Banks competed and some went bust. That's a good thing - prevents a bad bank from continuing bad practices. You don't like banks going bust? Well, your government doesn't like it either, that's why it has destroyed your productivity and will destroy your currency - to keep appearance of a working bank system.
What is funny is that it seems you are arguing for regulated banking, saying that without regulations the banks fail, yet you admit that banks used to fail individually, but not institutionally. But today, with all the regulations (and there are tens of thousands of regulations) and with all the regulatory bodies (hundreds of them), the banks are failing institutionally and globally because of all of the governments sticking their noses where they don't belong - business and money.
Infrastructure is only meaningful in any way if it can make the people more productive. Clearly productivity has nothing to do with the jobs programs that government is involved in. Any infrastructure projects that gov't does (all those roads, etc.), those are just money sinks if they are not demanded by the actual business requirement, and there is no business requirement at this point in US or Europe. There is no business requirement and you should go up in this thread, I wrote about the real interest rates and lack of real investment and the reasons behind it.
Since there is no investment capital at acceptable interest rates for business in these countries, there is no business requirement, there will be no new business and anything you believe is necessary and should be done as an investment by the government will not make US businesses more productive, because those businesses will not exist anyway.
Gov't jobs programs are make shift jobs and money sinks - work for the sake of work.
You can build all the houses and bridges and roads you like, you can spend your entire life building them, but if the business cannot operate in your environment you won't have ANY return on that so called 'investment'. When there is a real demand and real capital investment infrastructure gets build, because it is necessary to increase efficiencies and productivity. Gov't does not need to build it, if the environment is conducive to production, those things are built. US is broke and so are many other European nations, there is no money and there is no reason to do these projects except to continue providing the government with reasons for further spending and existence and to pretend the economy is doing something while destroying the currency.
Yeah - that's while all the .com companies are doing so well, they produced something.
- no, the .com bubble was spawned by the federal reserve, the culprit of the time was Greenspan and as he was flooding the market with cheap money and lowering interest rates, the same principles applied at the time, the investment funds didn't know where to find any meaningful return that would not be negative (and the real interest rate has been negative for a very long time now, certainly more than 2 decades).
The cheap money gave people the wrong incentives, the .com bubble was created the same way that the agriculture equities bubble before the great depression, the housing bubble of two-thousand's and the final currency/bond bubble that's being inflated now. It's all in the hands of the federal reserve and their ability to counterfeit currency. .com companies weren't producing anything much of value, buying pencils at $1 and selling for 50 cents on line and having a business model that basically said: we'll make it up in volume was disastrous then, as it is today, but the people were buying the .com bubble just as readily and weren't able to admit it was a bubble in the same way that the house mortgages were bought and nobody wanted to admit that was a bubble.
Same thing is happening with US bonds right now, and it's funny how people are thinking that sovereign debt of a nation that prints currency as defense against is non-existent economy, all because of faith in government's ability to do something...
Let's put it this way: if the currency is weakening now, you don't want to be in that currency. But you don't buy Treasuries in that currency, because those Treasuries are the exact same thing as that currency, as they pay in that currency.
The shortage of the investment capital is due to the money printing and negative return rates that are artificially created by the governments. The real interest rates today are insanely high, but that's what markets figure - if the amount of money that can be printed is infinite, then there is no reason why return rate on real investment shouldn't be set infinitely high as well.
That's why no business can get a loan and only governments are swimming in worthless cash, since they print it.
As to Henry Ford - the guy was working in a sound monetary system, no federal reserve and no income taxes.
I actually have a few things written about it as well.
You are a shill but you can't change the reality. The reality is that before all of the regulations and the Fed existence and before FDIC the banks never failed institutionally, as in - they never had a government giving them free money and preventing any potential competition. Banks are now your government but that only happens when government meddles with business, but it's inevitable. Once government starts 'regulating business', it means it's there to steal power and sell it and the business that is closest to the trough (the Fed) becomes the government. Since it becomes a part of government that is not beholden to the voters, it can steal without any impunity. The correct solution is to get rid of all regulations and protections and stop destroying the money.
But you know that, the reason why you sniff out every one of my comments is because you are an AC shill.