Topic: Economic Devastation - page 116. (Read 504813 times)

You are describing yourself here, I think.

You are deliberately mis-using well-defined terms in a way that lines up with a key propaganda meme propagated by the very forces you seek to unmask.  Do you not see the absurdity in this?

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The United States has no collective control over production and distribution.  The government is completely captured and under the control of a very narrow group of private interests.  Anyone can see that.

Socialism: a system of collective control especially over production and distribution in an economy.

In a socialist economy the government controls the means of production

underclass who do not understand the mechanism of their impoverishment

There is not a single element of the power structure in the United States that is not completely hostile to socialism.

But perhaps you are using a different definition for this term?  
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Debt and taxes are not rising as a result of "socialists" pulling the levers of power.
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The United States is not run by socialists.  That is utterly obvious.  If it is not obvious to you, you are using a tainted definition of the word socialism.

There has been more and more socialism and collectivisation in the last decades as the government grew, the debt and taxes went up and the people were not improving their life styles anymore. Rich were getting richer, poor were getting poorer.

You cannot deny the governement is intervening much more now than in the 50's. There are more social programs that ever, yet the middle class and poor are suffering more.

B.A.S. afaics you do not grasp the thesis of this thread. My hypothesis is that after this global crisis, the productive economy will be primarily knowledge innovation, i.e. the manufacturing economies will be insignificant relative to the knowledge components (e.g. marketing analysis, product design, etc).

There is nobody to sell it to because all the US does is innovate; we don't produce it. Take Apple for instance... Designed in California; made in China. The US needs to start caring about itself instead of others. IMO, innovation in the US is made to export, not the reverse.

Correct I prefer to ignore collectivists pigs that use semantic shell games to obscure the fact that growth of government as a share of GDP is the concomitant factor in all flavors of totalitarian governance, e.g. socialism, fascism, communism, and democracy.

The Jew is the enemy of the human race. This race must be sent back to Asia, or exterminated. H. Heine, A. Weil, and others are simply secret spies. Rothschild, Crémieux, Marx, Fould, evil choleric, envious, bitter men etc., etc., who hate us." (Carnets, vol. 2, p. 337: No VI, 178)

Tough to take anyone seriously who applies the term "socialism" to the current political setup in the United States.

Europeans apparently don't have a clue since they will repeat their megadeath from the 1940s again in the next decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

Socialism in its generative essence is any system where the government is a very large percentage of the GDP, because implicitly it is in control of the economy and directing the redistribution of resources not for free market profit but for the "benefit of the society".

Europe precisely falls into this most generalized essence of socialism. As well you can factor in the Universal Health Care (not for profit but for social benefit), the strong political power of the debilitating unions, the government bailouts for example for Peugot, banks, etc..

Please stop wasting my time. I am busy programming for profit and don't have time for your ignorant bliss.

Tough to take anyone seriously who applies the term "socialism" to the current political setup in the United States.

There is not a single element of the power structure in the United States that is not completely hostile to socialism.

But perhaps you are using a different definition for this term?  Such as the one usually used by the right wing hordes in the United States who are suckered into believing a cartoon version of politics:

Huh?

Why do you equate our innovation with what is broken?

Now I think I am reading you are one of those guys who thinks technology and "complexity" are the problem and life would be great if we all returned to the Amish Paradise.

That's the ticket:

Do we (the US) scale back our innovative/entrepreneurial spirit in favor of restructuring the broken (or soon to be) architecture of America and returning to the fundamentals?

OR-

Ramp it up even more, riding the tidal wave all the way to the shore where we enviably crash into the beach suffering an economic depression as great as the 1930s or worse?

The brave new world of weak demand and frenzied speculation

Last week I had drinks with one of my former Peking University students and we discussed some of the ways the global economy might react to a world adjusting from a global crisis with weak demand and excess liquidity. In no particular order and very informally these are some of the consequences we thought were likely or worth considering:

With their highly diversified financial systems and incentive structures that reward innovation and entrepreneurialism, the US, the UK and perhaps a handful of “Anglo-Saxon” and Scandinavian economies, in their different ways, are especially good at this. Much of Europe and Japan are not. The latter should take steps to increase the amount by which they will benefit from many more years of high risk appetite among investors.

Normally, developing countries only benefit indirectly from periods of abundant capital and excess risk taking because abundant capital tends to lead increased investment in developing countries and higher commodity prices. This, however, is perhaps the first time that excess liquidity has overlapped with a period of crisis and contraction, so it is hard to know what to expect except that the days of historically high hard commodity prices are well behind us (food may be a different matter). I suspect that developing countries are going to lag economically over the next few years largely because of high debt levels.
Why? Because one of the ways the market will probably distinguish between different types of risk is by steering away from highly indebted entities. Excess debt is clearly worrying, and while there will always be investors who are willing to lend, in the aggregate they will probably discriminate in favor of equity-type risks unless policymakers create incentives in the opposite direction.

Developing countries almost never benefit from the high tech boom that typically accompanies periods of excess liquidity because they tend to have limited technology capabilities. Policymakers should consider nonetheless how to take advantage of what capabilities they do posses.
India for example has a vibrant innovation-based sector, but it suffers from low credibility and from regulatory and red-tape constraints that will make it hard for Indian innovation to benefit from global investors’ high risk appetites. New Delhi — and perhaps local state capitals — should focus on addressing these problems. If Indian technology companies are given the regulatory flexibility and if investors find it easy to put money into (and take it out of) Indian technology ventures, we might see India capture some of the benefits of what may be a second or third wave of information technology.

Brazil is another large developing economy with pockets of tremendous innovation but which overall also suffers from low credibility and distorted incentive structures — and way too much debt. I am neither smart nor knowledgeable enough to propose specific policies, but policymakers in Brazil, like in India and in other very large developing economies — and they must be large in order that their relatively small technology sectors can achieve critical mass — must develop an explicit understanding of the institutional constraints and distorted incentive structures that prevent the development of their technology sectors, and take forceful steps to reverse them.

China is weak in high -tech innovation largely because of institutional constraints, including education, regulatory constraints, distorted incentive structures,and a hostile environment for innovative thinking (defying attempts to separate “good” innovative thinking from “bad”).  Overly-enthusiastic American venture capitalists, Chinese policymakers, and Chinese “entrepreneurs”, many of whom have almost become Silicon Valley caricatures will disagree, but in my experience most China, and certainly those involved in technology, are very skeptical about Chinese innovation capabilities. For example, when I taught at Tsinghua University, China’s answer to MIT, my students regularly joked that the only way to turn Tsinghua graduates into high tech innovators was to send them to California.
The main reason for its weak track record in innovation, I would argue, is that in China, like in many countries, there are institutional distortions that directly constrain innovation, as I explain in my blog entry on “social capital”. There are also indirect distortions, most obviously extraordinarily low interest rates and the importance of guangxi, that made accessing credit or developing good relationships with government officials infinitely more profitable, and requiring far less effort, for managers than encouraging innovation.

It is politically too difficult to resolve many of these institutional constraints nationally. In fact we are probably not even moving in the right direction — for example Beijing has recently sharply reduced internet access within China for domestic political reasons, and it is a pretty safe bet that this and other attempts to secure social stability will come at the expense of a culture of innovation.

But if Beijing is reluctant to relax constraints at the national level, it might nonetheless be willing to do so in specific local jurisdictions. If there were pockets within the country operating under different legal, regulatory, tax and cultural systems, and much more tolerant of the political and social characteristics of highly innovative societies, China might see the creation of zones of innovation that would benefit from the favorable global environment. I am skeptical about the impact of the Shanghai free-trade zone on trade or investment, for example, but it could become a more credible center of Chinese innovation under a very different legal and regulatory system  — much as Shanghai was, by the way, in the 1920s and 1930s. China has benefitted in the past from special economic zones, with different laws and regulations, dedicated to manufacturing. It might benefit in the future if it turns these into special “innovation” zones, also with very different laws and regulations —  and above all a far greater appetite for the “bad” things that are always part of highly innovative cultures, including a wide open internet and tolerance for any kind of discussion.

The Chinese spit and defecate along the road. Japanese are very conforming society and more like cats than the Chinese who are more like dogs. Japanese sip tea and have many formalities of social behavior. The Chinese gets things done any way they feel like it (did you read about them putting straw in the concrete to save money so the bridges collapsed, the Japanese would never do that!).

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End Game, Gold Investors Will be Destroyed
Commodities / Gold and Silver 2010
Jun 15, 2010 - 02:33 PM GMT
By: Shelby_H_Moore

Learning programming can be lucrative. I would suggest learning web programming.