Topic: comrades, is bitcoin a great leap forward for international socialism? - page 2. (Read 7819 times)

As a whole, the nation WAS competitive - why? because we had a balanced and stable finances.

the 1970's period is unfortunate.

Opec strangled the world economy by restricting oil supply, it hurt us a great deal, and led, in error to people voting in thatcher.

Energy is key to economic growth, the rest are just symptoms.

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fundamentally, an hours work, is worth an hour - if a worker here is not competitive vs a labourer in a foreign land, then perhaps its just a fault of the currency markets and other features which act to make the playing field hilly - one of the many market failures we constantly deal with - So that justifies subsidy and tarrif barriers to correct for market failure.

Seems to me there has been much more regulation and regardless of what there was before, any regulation is deadly.

If by "define terms of the debate arbitrarily" you mean that I asked you to define your terms the way you liked so everybody could understand what you were saying... Yet you keep using rethoric to avoid defining in a clear and concise way what you say.

Your refusal to define the terms you are using is a clear indication for anyone with a sane and rational mind.

If you are up for a rational debate and start by leaving the rethoric aside and define your terms (the way your prefer) in a strict way, I gladly will continue. If you keep with rethoric and nothing else, Im done.

you attempt to define the terms of the debate arbitrarily - which is a tactic. No mr moderator, I won't play your game.

To summarise,

past 30 years, neoliberal economic policy has been in vogue.
privatisation, flatter taxes, deregulated trade have been the prevailing policy direction for the past 30 years. And the graph and others I've posted show context. you can see how fiscal stance has stopped improving since thatcher. A similar, arguably worse thing happened in the USA.

The western economies will remain in doldrums until the left takes over in the USA and the EU - and eve then, its touch and go. There is some serious structural problems with regards to energy policy that might constrain growth.

^^ stevendobbs I asked you for a comprehensive list of what you consider "left wing policies before the 70's" and "right wing policies after the 70's" not a polical speech like the one you posted. I specifically asked for no rethoric. You might want to try again.

PS: And please dont use the term neo-liberal. Its just a propaganda term with no real economic definition (if it had a concise and exact definition it would not work well as propaganda tool).

I have some more time to loose, so come on, state what do you think is this left wing economic policy that happen before the 70's and how is this right wing policy that happened after the 70's. Please be concise and avoid rethoric.

Again, I am telling you the reason there is high unemployment is not due to the chinese taking the jobs, its due to the policies that the western countries have followed. The chinese "taking the jobs" is just a consequence. If we would have followed different policies there would not be this unemployment.

...Communism is at the helm for the simple reason that it goes against human nature and no statist project that goes against human nature will last for long.

Germany and Japan are not hard money countries.

hugolp that doesn't make sense.  The lack of competitiveness of low skilled workers affects hard money countries like Japan and Germany, "mostly hard money" countries like the UK and whatever you call the US which has a low inflation but is a reserve currency.  They say "correlation doesn't mean causation" but what you posted doesn't enen have correlation.

OK give me a clue.  What policies would have prevented Chinese manufacturing from replacing unskilled "Western" manufacturing?

Why did the USA industrialized under a hard money monetary system? The big USA industrialization happened when prices were going down. But then, when the USA government adopted inflationary policies the USA started to deindustrialize.

The history of the British empire shows a similar picture. During the XVIII century the British empire had a (more or less) hard money system and his industries were the envy of the world. During the XIX century it followed inflationary policies and it started the deindustrialization.

The reason is that not all investments are good investments, therefore more investment is not necessarily better if its not done right. Following inflationary policies deindustrializes a country, as history show. Its also easy to explain why:

Inflation does not only brings higher prices, but also lower interest rates. The interest rates are a basic factor (among others) when investing, because its the price of financing the project. A project might not be profitable with 6% rates but it might be at 3%. This is specially true for long term investments. Therefore artificially lowering interest rates makes entrepeneurs start more long term investments than they really should. All this investments bid resources away from other projects. This is in fact, a bubble. The bubbled industry is temporarely profitable and therefore can outpay other industries for the labor and resources. Therefore part of the production has to be outsourced. At the moment this seems a good deal because the bubbled industry seems to be a more valuable activity.

But when the bubble bursts and all this investments are revealed as malinvestments, there is a problem. The country where the productive industry has moved is now specialized to some degree and has achieved a better productivity in that activity, while the country with the bubble has reduced it because less people were developing it. Therefore its not profitable to do that activity in the country with the bubble anymore (a industrialized country is always more productive than a low wage country, regardless of the mambo jambo to justify China growth).

The sensible solution would be to allow the after bubble correction to happen, purge all the malinvestments, save and invest again under a sound monetary system, to start new productive industry. The problem is that the government reaction is usually to lower more the interest rates to re-inflate the bubble, with the effect of destroying even more productive industry, that is sent to other countries.

And it gets to a point that the capital structure is so distorted that not even 0% interest rates and crazy money printing re-inflates the bubble.

And here we are.

Your first responsibility is to take care of yourself, so you won't be a burden to other people. If you don't do at least that, how can you be so arrogant as to think you can help others? You make progress by adapting to your own nature. In Rabelais' Gargantua the Abbey of Theleme had the motto: Fay ce que vouldras, or "Do as you will." Rabelais (unlike the Book of Judges) treats this in a very positive light. The implication is: Don't go seeking after some ideal far removed from your own needs. Don't get involved in some crusade to save the human race--because you falsely think that is the noble thing to do--when what you may really want to do, if you are honest with yourself, is to stay home, grow vegetables, and sell them in a roadside market. (Growing vegetables is, after all, real growth--more so than some New Age conceptions.) You have no obligation under the sun other than to discover your real needs, to fulfill them, and to rejoice in doing so.

In this approach you give other people the right to make their own choices, but you also hold them responsible for the consequences. Most social "problems", after all, are a function of the choices people make, and are therefore insolvable in principle, except by coercion. One is not under any obligation to make up for the effects of other people's decisions. If, for example, people (poor or rich, educated or not) have children they can't care for or feed, one has no responsibility to make up for their negligence or to take on one's own shoulders responsibility for the consequent suffering. You can, if you wish, if you want to become a martyr. If you are looking to become a martyr, the world will gladly oblige, and then calmly carry on as before, the "problems" unaltered.

One may, of course, choose to help the rest of the world to the extent that one is able, assuming one knows how. But it is a choice, not an obligation. Modern political correctness and prostituted religion have tried to turn all of what used to be considered virtues into social obligations. Not that anyone is expected to really practice what they preach; rather it is intended they feel guilty for not doing so, and once the guilt trip is underway, their behavior can be manipulated for political purposes.

Again, I am telling you the reason there is high unemployment is not due to the chinese taking the jobs, its due to the policies that the western countries have followed. The chinese "taking the jobs" is just a consequence. If we would have followed different policies there would not be this unemployment.

I agree.  They move up the value chain.  In the UK, manufacturing output has risen constantly.  What has fallen is manufacturing employment.  And within that fall, you see its the low skilled workers are at the greatest disadvantage.  Their work can be done elsewhere and thus they are no longer needed.

The reason this matters is that these unemployed low skilled people create a huge inequality.  Its not just that they earn less themselves.  The move from an economy where there was a labour shortage to an economy where there is a constant desperate supply of surplus labour puts those who buy labour in a very strong negotiating position.  While there may be other factors, this long term trend of having a permanently insecure labour force with constant unemployment and low wages has the be a big factor in the growing inequality in all our countries.

No. There is a link between the loosing competivity of the western countries and that they loose industry. And this industry obviously goes somewhere else. But we have seen in history many nations with higher, much higher, wages outcompete nations with lower wages. Wage is only one factor of the cost of production.