There was talk about renaming the Krugman thread for this purpose, but that seems to be going nowhere. Besides which, I feel the Krugman thread should be left to discuss Krugman while this thread can be used for more general economic discussion.
Discuss:
- The merits of competing theories.
- The role of the government in managing the economy.
- The causes of and solutions to our current economic woes.
- Comparisons between the economic systems of different countries.
- Theoretical and existing alternatives to our current market system.
edited 17th Dec '12 10:58:52 AM by Topazan
A civil war is not the only possible way to get widespread expropriation, just the likely result. You can get the same from a general strike, followed by factory occupation, and the government refusing to bust the strikes with guns (as FDR decided during the Depression when factories are occupied).
I'm curious as to the failure mode you're expecting, though. Do you expect anarchism to be dissolved by the first group who decide that they'd rather take from someone else than tend to the stuff they're using, or did you have something else in mind?
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
And there was a time when Social Security and Medicare would've seemed "politically impossible" and a time when a progressive income tax would've seemed "politically impossible" and a time when basically everything we take for granted, from liberal democracy to men and women having an equal right to vote, would have seemed "politically impossible," but they all happened, and not because people "accepted things the way they are" and tried to work with what was "practical," or anything like that, but because people talked about them and fought for it and didn't give up, even in the face of adversity. So expropriation being "politically impossible" isn't really that big of a problem. It means we have a long and hard fight ahead of us, not that it will never happen.
Lost in Space
Some degree of expropriation occurs whenever the government takes taxes. I'm talking about the extreme form which is seizing all methods of production and giving them to "the people", which is really just changing one set of masters for another.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
How is the change from the dominant form of organization of production from some group owning the capital by which production happens that is distinct from, though may be a subset of, the people who work with that capital to make things and that group giving those who work orders, usually through intermediaries in the form of managers to the sole owners of capital being the people who work with that capital to produce things and come to decisions democratically replacing one set of masters with another? Because I fail to see where these masters are in the second, while the masters in the first are very clearly present.
Lost in Space
If you really think that shared ownership wouldn't result in a new set of masters, only less accountable than the ones we have now, you haven't studied history at all.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
In this case, the new masters will be the people who show up to meetings, if nobody else.
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
V
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Who may just be the same people who run the company anywaynote , especially if it's a small firm.
@ airlines: Shareholdings In European Airlines By Etihad, Delta Face EC Scrutiny
@ Japan: Japan raises sales tax for first time in 17 years
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he would continue to take "necessary action" to address livelihood issues and keep Japan's economy on track.
The stepped tax increases are aimed at covering rising social welfare costs linked to Japan's ageing population.
In other Japanese Economic News, Japan introduced the Japan ISAnote in January.
edited 1st Apr '14 6:57:29 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling On
Lost in Space
The thing about removing official management from control of an enterprise is that you also remove the controls on management behavior. The people who end up running things (and there will always be someone) have less accountability than the previous ones, and as such are more likely to be corrupt.
With regards to Japan, they keep going back and forth between progressive and regressive. Sales taxes are regressive. They suppress demand, which is exactly what you do not want to do right now. /sigh
Some day, people will get it.
edited 1st Apr '14 7:34:46 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
a collection of small trees
But... but... but... free market lololol
/libertarian
I'm up for joining Discord servers! PM me if you know any good ones!
Lost in Space
Sarcasm noted, but I should just point out that Libertarianism represents the flip side of that coin, where ownership of all enterprises is private rather than public, but accountability is still removed.
The role of government is to provide that accountability — to create consequences for misbehavior that cannot be [easily] avoided. Otherwise the most corrupt will rise to the top. This is true whether you're in Libertarianism, Communism, or anarcho-syndicalism.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Fuck you, Fascist sympathizers
Nominally the free market is the accountability mechanism in right-libertarianism, while direct democracy of the workers is the mechanism in both left-anarchism and, nominally, Bolshevism.
Lost in Space
And we have ample empirical evidence that neither of them works.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
V
Best to use both methods in moderation, then, and adjust the proportions to suit the current situation.
More from The BBC article:
Separate data on Tuesday indicated that those concerns are shared by the business community. The results of the Tankan survey, which polls more than 10,500 Japanese companies about their business outlook, indicated that Japanese firms were not optimistic about the rest of the year. However, analysts say Japan's economy will have a better chance of surviving the tax rise this time round.
"Everybody was extremely worried because of the bad impact of the last hike, but this time it seems to be widely accepted," Martin Schulz, an analyst at Fujitsu Research Institute, told the BBC. "Demand is strong and it will not drop that much as many have been fearing."
Who Am I?
Now, tax breaks for employee-owned cooperatives might lead to something interesting...
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Lost in Space
I'm not sure we could achieve that desired dynamic with tax policy alone, and I'm leery of giving preferential tax treatment to certain business categories because that can bite you in the ass later.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
@Fighteer: It helps to keep in mind that, even more than America, Japan is run by nobody. The political system is tailor-made to keep "accountability" out of the picture.
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
Not much. The real loss to Wal-Mart, I think, would be that they would be paying their employees enough that said employees would be able to shop somewhere other than Wal-Mart.
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
Fuck you, Fascist sympathizers
People are always going to want bargains. I mean, Wal-Mart rose to prominence through the 90s and 00s, and you can't really say that thrift was in vogue (now the actual economic health of the average consumer in those times, especially the 00s is debatable, but people were definitely spending like it was going out of style) The problem is that right now the people who work at Wal-Mart are almost too poor to shop there due to public benefits cuts.
It would mean more money for everyone involved in the long run, but of course Wal-Mart leadership and investors would never be able to look past the short-term hit to their bottom line.
V
Most of the time — oddly enough, in the British supermarket industry it's the middle ground that's doing less well at the moment (which includes Wal Mart-owned ASDA), while the discountersnote and the higher-end supermarketsnote are doing better. It's not always about the money in Britain — we went quality and value, especially after recent scandals and due to the influence of the medianote .
And now, something from the past, at the ending of the Age of Keynesianism:
James Callaghan came to office in 1976. He was immediately told the economy was facing huge problems, according to documents released in 2006 by the National Archives. The effects of the 1973 oil crisis were still being felt, with inflation rising to over 27% in 1975. Financial markets were beginning to believe the pound was overvalued, and in April that year The Wall Street Journal advised the sale of sterling investments in a story titled "Goodbye, Great Britain. It was nice knowing you". At the time the UK government was running a budget deficit, and Labour's strategy emphasised high public spending. Callaghan was told there were three possible outcomes: a disastrous free fall in sterling, an internationally unacceptable siege economynote or a deal with key allies to prop up the pound while painful economic reforms were put in place. The US government feared the crisis could endanger NATO and the European Economic Community (EEC), and in light of this the US Treasury set out to force domestic policy changes. In November 1976 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced the conditions for a loan, including deep cuts in public expenditure.
edited 4th Apr '14 7:32:35 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling On
a collection of small trees
My brother (the MRA who thinks the country is going to collapse) bought a book called Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy that he wants the family to read. No political agenda there, right? Of course, the book is written by an Austrian economist who is a libertarian, so his views of what's "basic" are probably very specific. And my parents supposedly like the book and think the guy's ideas make sense.
What are other "basic" economics books out there? There is obvious a world of difference between the Austrian and Keynesian schools of thought. Only Austrians are stupid enough to think that charity alone can fulfill all the needs of the destitute (historically, they've had a hard time reaching into rural and lesser-known areas), that natural monopolies don't exist, and that private companies can be trusted with infrastructure.
The book, btw, is this one: http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465022529/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396841323&sr=8-1&keywords=basic+economics+thomas+sowell
Mama mia.
I'm up for joining Discord servers! PM me if you know any good ones!
V
Russia 'planned Wall Street bear raid'
Here is Mr Paulson on the unfolding drama:
"When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started to become unglued, and you know there were $5.4tn of securities relating to Fannie and Freddie, $1.7tn outside of the US. The Chinese were the biggest external investor holding Fannie and Freddie securities, so the Chinese were very, very concerned."
Or to put it another way, the Chinese government owned $1.7tn of mortgage-backed bonds issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was deeply concerned it would incur huge losses on these bonds.
Mr Paulson: "I was talking to them [Chinese ministers and officials] regularly because I didn't want them to dump the securities on the market and precipitate a bigger crisis. And so when I went to Congress and asked for these emergency powers [to stabilise Fannie and Freddie], and I was getting the living daylights beaten out of me by our Congress publicly, I needed to call the Chinese regularly to explain to the Central Bank, 'listen this is our political system, this is political theatre, we will get this done'. And I didn't have quite that much certainty myself but I sure did everything I could to reassure them."
In other words, China had lent so much to the US that Mr Paulson needed to do his best to persuade its government and central bank that China's investment in all this US debt would not be impaired.
Now this is where we enter the territory of a geopolitical thriller. Mr Paulson:
"Here I'm not going to name the senior person, but I was meeting with someone… This person told me that the Chinese had received a message from the Russians which was, 'Hey let's join together and sell Fannie and Freddie securities on the market.' The Chinese weren't going to do that but again, it just, it just drove home to me how vulnerable I felt until we had put Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship [the rescue plan for them, that was eventually put in place]."
For me this is pretty jaw-dropping stuff - the Chinese told Hank Paulson that the Russians were suggesting a joint pact with China to drive down the price of the debt of Fannie and Freddie, and maximize the turmoil on Wall Street - presumably with a view to maximizing the cost of the rescue for Washington and further damaging its financial health. Paulson says this guerrilla skirmish in markets by the Russians and Chinese didn't happen.
But this kind of intelligence from China on Russian desire and willingness to embarrass the US in a financial sense may help to explain - in a small way - why President Obama shows little desire to understand Crimea as seen by Mr Putin. And maybe if the US is being a bit more robust than the EU in wanting to impose economic and financial sanctions on Russia, that may not all be about America's much lesser dependence (negligible dependence) on Russian gas and oil.
Beware the Crazy Man.
That mention made it in the HBO movie Too Big To Fail.
edited 7th Apr '14 2:37:59 AM by FFShinra
Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...
Who Am I?
Wow, that is fascinating. We should totally pay for energy diversification in Europe (that would destroy the Russian economy).
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Lost in Space
Again, the biggest victim of that would have been China, because it depends on a strong dollar and a weak renminbi to sustain its trade balance. Also, the U.S. markets imploding completely would have taken half the world with us; Russia's leaders were fools if they didn't think it would have spilled over to them.
@Bonsai: For basic economic books, I've already recommended Krugman's to you, and there's always the good old Keynes to fall back on: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
edited 7th Apr '14 6:42:58 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
"Expropriation", as you call it, is both politically impossible and would probably result in a civil war, so yeah. I also believe that human nature makes it impossible for it to function on a large scale, just as Libertarianism cannot work. So while it's interesting to talk about in theory, in practice, it won't and can't happen.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"