That’s true, but I don’t see any other way to bite the bullet than what is going to happen. We’re going to take the shot in the stomach.
Even if the $700bil had been passed, where could we put the money that is going to help anything? I don’t see how it can. Maybe if the government were willing to devote all $700bill of that money into low-paying jobs, then it may provide an actual benefit. I don’t know. The families are still out of their houses, the gases prices are still going up, and assets are drying up due to larger market pressures. I don’t see a short-term solution to this problem, but this is out of my league and interest of study. As just a guess, I say, put $700bil into govt jobs where they’ll do the best and hire the highest amount of people.
One last hint about which stocks to buy or not to buy. Do not by any pharmecuetical stocks until after the presidential elections and for about 6 months after. If you got it, I would dump it high Unless its a well known well established frigging huge corporation, like Johnson & Johnson, then you would do well to hold it. Pharmecueticals are next on the hit lists. Too many bad drugs out there with too many side efects. The law suits are filling the courts. The next administration will have to adress it. Stocks will fall temporarily, some will go under.
While big pharma is likely to be targetted, smaller drug developers are a good bet. The population of the developed world is aging like crazy, and everyone’s on pills of some kind (with little exaggeration). Small labs are likely to keep winning lucrative patents and making good money for a long time.
Rainey, none of that would have been a problem if people weren’t packaging crappy mortgages together and selling them as assets. Perhaps the problem is best described as inconsistent regulation. True, the Fed adjusts interest rates to tweak the economy, but that can ward off bubbles. The housing bubble would have been mild if financial institutions hadn’t added to the problem by making it artificially lucrative to take on crappy mortgages from people who couldn’t afford them.
Ultimately, though, what the fed did seems reasonable; what the financial companies did seems unethical. Why do you pick on the Fed?
I will always take my chances with the free market. The impetus for “crappy” mortgages in the first place was the artificially low interest rates, held there by the misguided judgment of the Fed. They have a history of this, you know. Inept monetary expansion policies of the 20s led to the stock boom, and we know the ultimate result of that. The history is really pretty clear. The government simply cannot out-think the market. We have a perfectly efficient means of regulating the economy called supply and demand. Yes, this leads to cycles, booms and busts. That’s the nature of the economy. But there’s a difference between a market correction and a government-sponsored crash. This is a government-sponsored crash. And if we want the government to step in and fix what it broke, then fine. But if it ever gets fixed, can we then at least begin to have the discussion about getting the government (of a supposed free country) the hell out of where it doesn’t belong and is clearly incompetent? Make laws to punish unethical actions. I have no problem with that. But let’s let the efficiencies of the market work and stop jamming monkey wrenches into a system under the guise of “helping” things operate more smoothly.
The reason that there is government interference in the market is greedy people complaining to their congressional reps. Hey, we produce shitty cars and the Japanese are kicking our ass. So do we let the car companies pay for their sins? Hell no. They’re the first ones who run to the government whining and looking for taxpayer help. And its the same at anything you would like to look at. Everyone wants a guaranteed profit without taking any risks. The guy (or gal) on the production line isn’t any different. They don’t give a rat what the job is, they just want that guaranteed paycheck every week.
For all the theory, there is no such thing as a free market. There never has been, and there never will be. Why? It isn’t the governments fault. It is OURS. This isn’t just the U.S. It is in any place you’d care to mention. People want certainty - no matter what it costs.
I think there are degrees of market freedom, but I would argue that markets are freer with government intervention. Monopolies develop under laissez-faire capitalism, and they are a huge market failure. Government intervention, regulation, and redistribution might not be laissez-faire, but in terms of enabling competitors to compete on a level-playing field, it increases the freeness of the market.
Democracies are ‘monopolies’ in which everyone gains an equal share when they turn 18. For free. As such, they don’t function like monopolies that dominate an industry but keep their earnings for a limited set of shareholders. They have different effects on the market, and different effects in peoples lives. It’s at best confusing to call them by the same name, since ‘monopoly’, when referring to a private company, captures all that we dislike about the institution; if we alter the meaning so that it contains governments as well, we have to strip the word of a lot of its meaning just to make a rhetorical point. Then, we have to come up with another term to refer to the type of thing we used to mean by ‘monopoly’ (for instance, bastardfactories), and the whole game starts all over (“Governments are the most powerfull bastardfactories of all!”).
It’s not the greed, JT. There will always be greed. There will always be people serving their own interests. It’s the government capitulating to it. What if the government said, “No”? Of course they wouldn’t. But what if things were such that they couldn’t say “Yes”? Things were that way once. But you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, I’m afraid.
And there’s nowhere to sail away to, my friend. We’re stuck. I’m a dinosaur, with archaic ideas. I will continue to try to run my business as best I can, allow my profits to be confiscated and arbitrarily flung as alms to whomever the majority tells me they should be flung to, and, when things get bad enough, who knows? Maybe I’ll give up my principles and go stand in the bailout line with the rest of the knuckleheads. Gimme, I will demand.
Churro, you leave out that we elect the people that make up the ‘monopoly’. In that sense, we are the monopoly’s owners, we function exactly as shareholders in any private company. We can make decisions about who’s in charge. We can vote out the CEO. It’s equal because there’s only one vote per share, and everyone gets a share for free at 18.
In the case of a ‘free-market’ (buy which I take it you mean a laissez-faire capitalist system), how would we prevent a vast private monopoly from forcing out the competition illegally, and continuing to do its bad business? Who prevents a company from developing a private army and taking control? Competition? Who provides the cohesion that even gives currency value? Or do you advocate a giant anarcho-capitalist bartering arrangement? I think you’re taking for granted a substantial part of what the government does, picking on everything you don’t like about it, and concluding that it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
-How do you figure that people don’t have power? I can vote for who I want. I can write my senator. I can run for local office. I can contribute to political campaigns. I can make propaganda pieces that support my ideals. I can start my own political party if I get enough people together. It’s an overstatement to say that the people don’t actually have any power in a democracy.
-The governement is a monopoly of governance, I guess, but again it is a rhetorical abuse of language to use the label. A government is non-profit. It doesn’t need to make a profit, so it can build public infrastructure. There are plenty of things that governments do that private companies just can accomplish. How about a justice system? The justice system we have is bad enough and it is founded on the idea that the laws apply equally to everyone. Imagine if you could not only pay for fancy lawyers, but actually buy the laws you want after you’ve done something wrong. If it were done privately, there would be no way to have a consistent legal system.
-Private companies build private armies all the time. Besides that, do you really know who owns what company anymore? Everyone’s a subsidiary of some megacorp, or the megacorp is a primary shareholder, or whatever. People aren’t involved enough in their lives to actually seek out Little Jane Start-Up’s brand new alternative. Where will a mega corp get the capital, you ask? Where will anyone get the capital to offer a reasonable resistance?
Laissez-Faire relies on the fallacy of Homo Economicus: that people are perfectly rational, perfectly informed, and perfectly self-interested. And if that were true, anarcho-capitalism would be great. But in actual fact, people are irrational and poorly informed (I’ll leave the interests out, since I don’t need them to prove my point and they’ll just spark more debate ).
-I don’t think the government we have is perfect, in fact it’s very imperfect. However, it’s better than no government at all, and government in general is very useful. While you will want to say that the social democracies in Europe are less free because they have larger government, I would argue that they are freer because they have greater equality of opportunity (as shown by international social mobility comparissons). A persons success in the US is more dictated by their parents success than in any country in Europe but the UK (which is one of the more laissez-faire social democracies around).
If you’ve got answers, lets have them. My political philosophy might be shallow, but I’m willing to work to fathom the depths of yours
ie: In a perfect world, each election, everybody would stand for president, and everyone would perfectly comfortable voting for themselves.
It is my view that our current system of election, and governence is chiefly an unconsciously cynical exercise in damage control. Look at the number of complete fools who have at times led the most powerful countries of the world, and yet, the world, and those countries, somehow survived them.
Don’t believe me…? Imagine George Bush #2 as an old fashioned king, before they all had their balls cut off, weilding absolute and unmitigated power over everything within their realm. Would America have survived…? Would the world…?
Now, get down on your knees and praise Locke, and Oliver Cromwell.
How do DROs function for people who are self employed? What if I’m accosted by someone with a different DRO? Who arbitrates between DROs? Guns?
Public courts make shitty decisions, I’m sure, but the vast majority of them are not shitty. The colossal majority of cases are run of the mill arbitration between conflicted parties, and people are on average given fair treatment and get decent representation. The system, in almost all cases, works adequately, and offers much more consistency than DROs can offer.
I’m opposed the government having a standing army too, don’t get me wrong. But the government isn’t a company. A government does things that a company can’t do, and does them for reasons that a company can’t do them.
I have two questions:
-Supposing we were to eliminate governments, what would stop companies from becoming governments? If there were no anti-trust laws, what would stop huge companies from joining together and simply taking over? Companies have considered overthrowing the government before, what would stop them from stepping into the void that is left when government leaves?
-What, besides faith, is the evidence that ararchism would be a stable system? In the past, warlords and kings have risen out of ararchic societies. In the absence of government intervention (read: intervention “of, by , and for the people”), monopolies have stifled trade and competition, they are a recognized market failure. They control the means of dissemination of information, the populace would have essentially no access to information, and no recourse even if the could manage access. As the US has deregulated, it has become more unequal. Competition has decreased, as has social mobility. People are now more determined by their birth rank than they were in the 60s and 70s.
That’s why it seems to me that anarchism has failed as a political experiment. It used to exist, and now it doesn’t, and the closer we get to it the worse it seems to make things we value. So, what evidence is there that it would work this time?
I’ve actually become very pro-market recently due to talks with more classically liberal people. That’s why I’m being careful to distinguish between free-market and laissez-faire: I am very much in favor of maximizing the benefits that a free-market provides, I just think that government intervention ensures a freer market. But, I’ve come a long way already, so I’m open to ideas and evidence that say I’m wrong. Thanks for providing.
What you describe here is exactly what happened to end feudalism. The merchant class, the bourgoisie, became powerful through trade, and eventually rivaled the nobility in power. Both these powerful elites were competing for power, and in order to weaken one another, they empowered the middle and lower classes. Do you know what the result of that was? Democracy. A system like that will tend to collapse into a democratic government. As powerful companies compete with each other, they will recruit from the working class for support. In order to gain that support, they will begin offering incentives, such as education, infrastructure, better quality of life. The will and desires of the great majority of people will be important because that will dictate who the mass of workers and, I still think, soldiers support. The line between this system and a modern democracy becomes functionally non-existent, differing only in the fact that it’s the US of Coke vs. the Union of Pepsi’s Socialist Republics.
I think you are still continuing to assume currently government responsibilities and assurances in your defence. Insurance companies are “going to have to pay for medical bills and funerals”? Under whose orders? Competition won’t affect them, as it doesn’t affect them now. The problems with relying on competition to police the insurance agencies is that the way insurance functions is too delayed and uncertain. I pay for health and life insurance now, but 1) I may never use my health insurance, 2) I don’t know how good my health insurance will be if I do use it until I use it, but I pay for it now, and 3) I will be dead by the time life insurance comes into play, but I am paying for it now. The fact that relatively few people ever need serious treatment from health insurance companies, and that everyone pays for it without knowing how well it actually works, makes it extremely difficult to show that they suck in a fair number of cases.
But of course, we will have DROs. What if I don’t get a DRO? When I walk into your store, are you doing to ask to see my DRO card? I think that’s unrealistic to expect, but you’d have to do that to pretty much everyone you see to make sure they’re legit. And anyone who wanted to do wrong could simply refuse to pay for a DRO. This would all be supplemented by the frontier justice of arming every man, woman, and child to the teeth so that they could shoot anyone who shot them. But then frontier justice has been tried before, and ultimately didn’t work out. The Wild-West was pacified, and it improved commerce because people were assured relative safety with a designated sherif.
(I’m not opposed to the second ammendment. I used to be, but I’m not any more. There isn’t the statistical data to back up claims that guns cause violence. I still think guns are bad, and I still think ideally we would have fewer of them in society, but I think that banning them is like spanking a kid for sneezing to stop him from getting a cold.)
I think that’s a difficult claim to support. Boom bust cycles have existed throughout human societies. Even throughout evolutionary history, if you look at population growth as a boom and extinctions as a bust, you see booms and busts occuring for millions of years.
Is there a comparisson study you’re referring to when you say that the free market is stabler than interventionalist economies? From a quick bit of research into Rothbard, it doesn’t seem that he based his theories in empirical studies, but in quasi-a priori theory, which makes taking his word for it somewhat like taking Marx’ word for it that communism is ideal. It also seems that there are many old and stable economies in northern europe, and many of them are quite interventionalist. Those countries also experience better quality of life, more social mobility, and a better ranking in the Democracy Index (created and ranked by The Economist, which is hardly liberal).
The free-market is an impossible ideal, even if we were to agree that it is an ideal. There are time delays, lack of transparency, irrationality, and other aspects of human interactions that make a free-market impossible in principle (of course, it’s a principle backed up by empirical evidence). What isn’t a false ideal is creating a maximally efficient market within the confines set by human fallibility, and that requires a not-for-profit arbitrating body such as government to make regulations reasonably, not self-interestedly, and to apply them to a broad set of circumstance. The evidence seems to show that intervention creates a better standard of living, and that laissez-faire creates vast inequality (and in the worst sort of way, which is to say unearned inequality).
Question for further exploration: Is social mobility something that should be considered more or less efficient? It seems that given what you like about the free-market, you should like an efficient market that encourages a meritocratic system. Deregulation makes employment less meritocratic, and social programs make it more so (specifically, temporary welfare, transitional assistance, and socialized medicine). This seems to be a case where socialism helps the private sector approach the ideal better than does laissez-faire policy. What are your thoughts on this?
Except, as I point out, insurance doesn’t work well in market circumstances. It may be years before the mettle of my insurance company is tested. If they don’t pay out, it will be too late for my dissatisfaction to affect their profits: I’ve already paid them.
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