That's where to begin.
I wonder at the outcome of these so -called revolutions. Remember
Marie Antoinette! :-) And Louis XVI! Those poor creatures funded the
American Revolution- went broke- and that was that!
Maybe the bar is so low, we feel blessed just to avoid the ruptures
and rabble.
On Jun 28, 6:42 pm, Ash <ashkas...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You've riled my ire Archy, now what can we do about it I wonder. My
> knowledge of things isn't up to the complexities of economics but the
> principles of simple exchange keep making me think we should have a dual
> economy: let corporations exist (remove personhood), and establish a
> social system (independent of government) to allow people the option to
> serve the commonwealth of society. With all the things that need to be
> done there is such a high unemployment, people cannot afford property
> taxes and various costs, why not let people live and prosper? Perhaps
> there isn't enough to go around (sarcasm), or maybe we just need some
> balance.
>
> On 6/28/2011 4:13 PM, archytas wrote:
>
>
>
> > What the isn't is any public dialogue on whether the stuff about law,
> > freedom, entrepreneurialism, innovation and the motivation of wealth
> > is the problem.
>
> > On Jun 28, 8:32 pm, archytas<nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> When you look at GDP figures (not that many do) in the US you see real
> >> wage decline over 30 years yet an increase in consumption (and hence
> >> GDP). Questions obviously arise here on how - the answer is debt
> >> spending - but how did the borrowing arise - wouldn't we expect
> >> lending to fall with less money coming in to pay of debt contracted?
> >> Part of the answer lies in greed and a property bubble created by
> >> this. Loans appeared to be secured against property, but the banks
> >> were fueling speculation to inflate property prices to 'earn'
> >> bonuses. I see little difference in what they did and Deng ordering
> >> 'homes' that no one will live in. In a sense we all went into a
> >> command economy. As with the famous Sino-Soviet experiments this was
> >> and still is based on 'elite madness' and false accounting.
>
> >> I mention habros because a poisoning feature of luxury seems
> >> involved. It's surely all over - just switch on TV. The way we
> >> normally think about running a household just don't apply, though
> >> politicians mug us with this kind of false analogy. The promise in
> >> the last election in the UK was that frontline services would not be
> >> affected by cuts in waste and all the other lies of this kind - the
> >> usual 5 cents in the dollar stuff pace Bob Dole. This never works and
> >> we know it doesn't.
>
> >> I would guess most people have a notion that GDP is a reflection of
> >> effort and this is the problem. GDP goes up when we buy plastic
> >> Chinese crap or TVs we didn't make on money borrowed against what was
> >> supposed to be the ever rising value of our assets like housing. So
> >> GDP goes up when we simply bubble property prices - usually good for
> >> people owning property. What the banks did in this needs long
> >> investigation and description - but in short they began to make money
> >> make money - something that clearly can't be 'real'. The accounting
> >> here involves governments creating electronic money (now QE) and
> >> lending this at low rates to favoured banks (a surplus of capital
> >> never built on effort) who appeared to be making money hand over
> >> fist. This was really the Ponzi scheme and no more than anything
> >> Madoff was doing. Ponzi schemes pay out not on earnings but with the
> >> new money their lies on performance bring in. The lies are supported
> >> by elaborate maths. I teach the maths and they don't work as claimed,
> >> only reducing risk in margins. The key metaphor is to imagine playing
> >> Monopoly against a banker with a couple of spare sets of money in her
> >> back pocket.
>
> >> The idea in this is to use capital ore and more effectively (fine) but
> >> it all goes mad when the capital becomes earnings ten years off
> >> treated as though you've made it now. The maths is complicated but
> >> the schemes are not - it's almost like placing bets on all horses and
> >> living it up on the winnings whilst ignoring the losses or inflating
> >> the currency you use to 'account' for them.
>
> >> What people can't grab is that economics and accounting is like this
> >> anyway - though supposedly under strict rules. Businesses need to
> >> stay alive until the good times when most profit is made. This is
> >> fine until the madness or crooks get in and the idea ceases to be
> >> about the viable business and becomes just profit.
>
> >> I can build the case in figures but the issue is corruption - a
> >> corruption as endemic as that in Soviet performance management. What
> >> they are telling us is stark. We can't have the public services (who
> >> cares who runs them if they do it properly) to educate kids, look
> >> after old and disabled people and the rest even though we have plenty
> >> of labour to do this - labour in some senses earned through massive
> >> productivity rises in agriculture and manufacturing. Looming over us
> >> is a massive and generally parasitic financial services sector that
> >> matches these productivity gains in size - all of which could be
> >> routinised to a fraction.
>
> >> When we talk about making an industry efficient we have little problem
> >> with allowing wages to come under international competition and all
> >> the rest, Yet to match this in, say, policing by importing droves of
> >> keen Chinese and sacking our expensive finest - and the very idea of
> >> doing this at the top of banking seems impossible - though all the
> >> skills are comparable.
>
> >> I suspect the real issues cannot be addressed because most people
> >> adjust to a view of just being cogs in the wheel and feel their sanity
> >> threatened by thoughts of the criminality that has been going on
> >> around them. They look for homely answers like 'blaming profligate
> >> Greeks' (a hospital doctor in Greece gets under half what a lecturer
> >> gets in the UK) and imagining austerity measures will let us save our
> >> way out of the problems. This is not what history tells us - though,
> >> of course, most people know no real history.
>
> >> What is happening now is history. - it may as well be a re-write of
> >> much imperialist history. I hope war is less on the cards, but I'm
> >> not at all sure. Our ignorance is the real issue - and I suspect this
> >> is ignorance about just how unfair the world is and how massively
> >> irrational our systems are.. It's worse than we are thinking and our
> >> public dialogue allows us to say.
>
> >> The questions we aren't asking are about what would be left if there
> >> was no more 'international trade' and we got round to making stuff
> >> locally and allowing more global exchange of expertise through virtual
> >> exchange. We aren't broke in such a system and have capital.
>
> >> My guess is that most of what we call 'work' in the current system is
> >> no such thing - it's neurosis.
>
> >> On Jun 28, 12:58 pm, Ash<ashkas...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>> So, bullets=100pts, futures=-100TNpts. ;-)
> >>> On 6/28/2011 12:07 AM, archytas wrote:
> >>>> The truth on bullets is you get to eat if you have them and the food
> >>>> holders don't!
> >>>> On Jun 28, 3:52 am, rigsy03<rigs...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>> I wonder the number of vacant, distressed properties in the West?
> >>>>> Well, China was humiliated by the tactics of the West in our forcing
> >>>>> her to open to trade via opium and dynasty overthrow plus the theft of
> >>>>> her national arts and treasures- keeping them "safe" in western
> >>>>> museums, like the rest of our lootings.
> >>>>> Americans accumulated their own debt with abuse of credit when it was
> >>>>> easy street. The banks/financial institutions were irresponsible and
> >>>>> so were our governments. You can't eat bullets.
> >>>>> On Jun 27, 4:49 pm, archytas<nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>>> I don't believe the modern arguments (post 1950) concern communism
> >>>>>> other than as a futile ideal. We seem to have forgotten about habros
> >>>>>> - the polluting quality of luxury. The term arises in a Greek play
> >>>>>> celebrating the victory of the Athenian Democracy over the Persians.
> >>>>>> The warning to the Greeks was that they must never become sissies
> >>>>>> wallowing in emotions and luxury like the defeated Persians. Most of
> >>>>>> us are barely aware of history and have no real clue what the Soviets
> >>>>>> and Chinese were up to. Even in relation to what's going on in China
> >>>>>> now, I find few who know they have built ghost cities and are fueling
> >>>>>> GDP growth with a property bubble.
> >>>>>> The broad brush of western economics is that the ignorant rabble have
> >>>>>> no place in real decision-making and that they must both know this (in
> >>>>>> order not to forget their place) and to deny it in fantasies to
> >>>>>> encourage virtual self-aggrandizement. Thus we are to live in virtual
> >>>>>> meritocracy whilst actually just part of a pack that will not
> >>>>>> challenge the alphas. In a very real way, we do not argue with facts,
> >>>>>> but the stories of literature which bounds our expectations. Video
> >>>>>> games are a warning of what we are, even if we don't play them.
> >>>>>> The debts that are everywhere like a nightmare are not to do with
> >>>>>> money as a means of simple exchange, taken on to be worked off in some
> >>>>>> equation of labour value. They have been manipulated as surely as any
> >>>>>> in past empires. Just as Chinese GDP is floating on 64 million empty
> >>>>>> buildings no one can afford to live in (terms are often half up front,
> >>>>>> the balance over 3 years), our currencies float on deals between
> >>>>>> governments and favoured banks. We have suppressed wages and banks
> >>>>>> hardly even provide working capital for business, instead engaging in
> >>>>>> speculation in giant Ponzi schemes hedged in ever increasing prices
> >>>>>> for assets that no one would eventually be able to buy from a wage,
> >>>>>> and securitised to the tax payer. Wages were collapsed over 30 years
> >>>>>> by exporting manufacturing - but GDP kept rising as we borrowed
> >>>>>> against the asset pile to buy more and more crap and pay welfare to
> >>>>>> those deprived of jobs.
> >>>>>> The rich grew vastly richer in this period. If there are 64 million
> >>>>>> Chinese
>
> ...
>
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