The explosion of capitalism in China has many Westerners asking when political democracy—as the “natural” accompaniment of capitalism—will emerge. But a closer look quickly dispels any such hope. Modern-day China is not an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, but rather the repetition of capitalism’s development in Europe itself. In the early modern era, most European states were far from democratic. And if… return to article
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Reader Comments (30)Page 1 of 1 pagesPoor Zizek. His slavish devotion to his impossible Marxist dream has addled his brain, not to mention that it has muddled his thinking. But I suppose Zizek’s muddled thoughts are no greater or less than Marx’s own muddled thoughts. But that is no excuse, of course.
Consider: There has been an irregular but inexorable progression from the primitive to the current advanced state of personal freedom and economic development. If the current situation is not perfect, neither has it terminated. Democracy, the rule of law, and free-market capitalism have contributed to this advance, and there is no end in sight.
And what has totalitarianism, particularly Marxism, contributed to this advance? One hundred million innocent dead, profound corruption, and mind-boggling inefficiency. That’s it. Marxism’s contribution to human advancement has been entirely, and monumentally, negative.
Listen to some of the nonsense Zizek signs his name to:
The features we identify today with liberal democracy and freedom (trade unions, universal vote, freedom of the press, etc.) are far from natural fruits of capitalism. ... Recall the list of demands that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made in the conclusion of The Communist Manifesto.
These freedoms are the fruits of the Enlightenment, a philosophical development predating Marx and Engels by a hundred years, and finding its ultimate expression in the Constitution of the United States, also predating Marx and Engels. Both trade unions and businesses are expressions of the freedom of association recognized by the Constitution. The rule of law, businesses, and workers conspire to create the wealth we enjoy. Has a Socialist country ever created significant wealth? Naaa. The best the Socialists can do is to copy what the free markets are doing, meaning they are forever playing catch-up. That is not the way to get ahead. Once in a while, a Socialist entity tries to expropriate the wealth created by us capitalists, but that has never worked (Chile, and now Venezuela).
The German-British philosopher Ralf Dahrendorf has linked the increasing distrust in democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a “valley of tears.”
Read that statement (and the paragraph) slowly and carefully. Dahrendorff (and Zizek) are saying that the progression is from “state socialism” to revolution to a “valley of tears” to prosperity and democracy. And then they blame the “valley of tears” on democracy! That is insane. Do you think that a corrupt, inefficient Socialist system might be to blame for this “valley of tears”? Not to mention that Russia spent seventy years in a “valley of tears” and death, and seems headed back the way it came.
In post-Communist nations, the economic results of this new democratic order have disappointed a large strata of the population, who, in the glorious days of 1989, equated democracy with the abundance of the Western consumerist societies. And now, 20 years later, when the abundance is still missing, they blame democracy itself.
Are you sure that is right? Who is “they”? I do not see anyone in Eastern Europe clamoring to get back within the Soviet Union. East Germany was the most productive of the Soviet colonies, and it was hopelessly behind West Germany. Now all of the East European states are prosperous and growing, led by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Estonia’s GDP is now over $20,000 per person, two-thirds that of France, and up from near zero under the Socialists.
Posted by scorp on Dec 4, 2007 at 3:03 AM In Russia, after the collapse of Communism, the government adopted “shock therapy” and threw itself directly into democracy and the fast track to capitalism—with economic bankruptcy as the result. (There are good reasons to be modestly paranoid here: Were the Western economic advisers to President Boris Yeltsin who proposed this approach really as innocent as they appeared? Or were they serving U.S. strategic interests by weakening Russia economically?)
Zizek is not “modestly paranoid”, he is big time bonkers. Russia was already bankrupt; that is why it collapsed. “U.S. strategic interests” required Russia to survive and prosper. We definitely did not want a nuclear-armed chaotic collapse in Russia. To stabilize Russia, the United States sent many cargo aircraft loaded with $100 bills to inject liquidity into Russia, tens of billions of dollars in total. Since the ruble was worthless, there had to be a stable currency or else there would have been economic and social collapse, like Weimar in the 1930s. While we succeeded in avoiding physical collapse, the endemic corruption of the Soviet system carried right on over to post-Soviet Russia. There was no Russian leadership with the courage, insight, and imagination to take advantage of the gift of freedom. So sad.
Zizek’s muddled Mickey Mouse/Marxist thought process and lack of factual understanding leave him with a confused concept of the world. Consequently, he understands nothing about China, the subject of the article.
There has never been a situation on the scale of China today, and there has never been a situation where an authoritarian political system has successfully teamed with a free-market economy. Even Socialist Europe is failing to grow, both economically and demographically. To the extent that a totalitarian system controls the economy, that economy cannot reach its full potential.
Most people are impressed with China’s recent growth, a product of limited free-market trade with Europe and the USA, and are largely unaware of the unpaid costs China is incurring to participate in that trade. Huge chunks of state-owned Chinese enterprises, perhaps a trillion dollars worth, are not producing and are being propped up by an increasingly weak banking system. Pollution is out of control and threatening health and lives. Water resources are being exhausted. Corruption is rampant. The Chinese stock markets are in a huge bubble, larger than the Japanese Bubble of 1991 that essentially ended Japan’s rapid growth following WWII.
But Zizek’s limited view sees nothing of this.
Posted by scorp on Dec 4, 2007 at 3:05 AM What Mr Zizek’s “authoritarian capitalism” has in common with its 19th century predecessor is an intriguing subject. But, would Gladstone or Disraeli or Bismark or Buffet have declared for a “New Socialist Countryside” or have promoted a “socialism with [british, german, french, etc] characteristics?” Would they have sanctioned the organizing of their industrial workers into national trade unions? Or countenanced the official study of Marxism? Lenin’s NEP is probably a whole lot closer to the author’s “authoritarian” or “state” capitalism, and Lenin himself would have been deeply flattered by the phrase, as it would have meant that Russia, largely a nation of peasants of serfs, was further along the road of economic development than most observers (himself included) popularly supposed. I think what you have developing in China (and in Russia with some qualifications and amendments) is “neo-communism”; an outsized and ultimately decisive role by the state in the functioning of economic and civil life, coupled with a vigorous but subordinate private sector. Unlike Mr Zizek, I believe the role of the Chinese state will loom large for some time to come and will ultimately determine the outcome of this period of Chinese history. It is still early to predict that the modern neo-communist state will become humanity’s New Model of Governance but, given the collapse of the social market economies of Europe and the bedevilment of American aspirations worldwide, it is a distinct possiblity.
Posted by LouisGodena on Dec 4, 2007 at 11:02 PM Good take, Louis.
You might point out that Lenin strained mightily to fit medieval Russia into Marx’s philosophical industrial economy model.
The industrial world had developed over a period of several centuries when Marx made his observations, positing that industrial workers would take control of their own futures. Marx’s scientific socialism “proved” that history was inexorably moving toward a socialist Utopia, and that the state would wither away. The advanced state of capitalism was necessary to make workers aware of their exploitation, and that in turn was a necessary step toward Socialism.
So, how did Russia get from a medieval past to a Socialist future without going through the industrial and capitalist phases? Simple. Lenin declared that a hundred years of capitalist development was compressed into the ten months of the Kerensky government in 1917-1918. Oh, well, logic was never the Socialists’ strong point.
... bedevilment of American aspirations worldwide ...
I would be interested in hearing you expand on this point. In the last one hundred years, the number of democracies has expanded from about twenty to about one-hundred twenty, and global wealth has expanded geometrically. It has not always been easy, but it does seem to be inexorable, unlike Marx’s silly prattle.
Posted by scorp on Dec 5, 2007 at 2:58 AM Scorp…“Most people are impressed with China’s recent growth, a product of limited free-market trade with Europe and the USA, and are largely unaware of the unpaid costs China is incurring to participate in that trade. Huge chunks of state-owned Chinese enterprises, perhaps a trillion dollars worth, are not producing and are being propped up by an increasingly weak banking system. Pollution is out of control and threatening health and lives. Water resources are being exhausted. Corruption is rampant. The Chinese stock markets are in a huge bubble, larger than the Japanese Bubble of 1991 that essentially ended Japan’s rapid growth following WWII.”
Sounds a bit like the United States. Let’s see….water resources in the US are being exhausted (particularly the West and South), we are in the midst of a popped housing bubble (who knows how low the house values will go?) which may in fact expose that the stock market is also a bubble, corruption is rampant (name a part of the US society that doesn’t have thieves and liars running the show whether it’s politicians, religions, corporations), pollution goes on (recently an Indiana power company was allowed to dump MORE mercury into Lake Michigan…thanks Indiana I’m from Michigan).
Let’s add a few more items. We have set historic records for deficit spending, our national debt just topped $9 trillion which thankfully countries such as China and Saudi Arabia help prop up that debt because they have to do something with those weakening pieces of paper called dollars. We don’t even pay for our wars any more, it’s all put on the government credit card (and what a great card, you don’t have to make payments just run up the bill). War, corruption…oh yeah, forgot about Iraq.
Democracy? What a bunch of clowns the duopoly is offering us for president this time. But no surprise, after all someone has to follow Bozo. Polling shows disapproval of Bush at 70% and Congress at like 85%...we vote for people we don’t even like and we will do it again in 2008. Our democracy is based on money and image, not on ideas. It’s who can raise the most money to run the worst commercials.
China? They will have their problems whatever their system. But we have our own problems and they aren’t getting any better.
Posted by Jon B on Dec 5, 2007 at 11:31 PM Jon B -
I recall distinctly reading about a job seeker in year 2000. This young man was a college graduate, age 24, and was desperate to find work. The only entry on his resume was as CEO of a multi-million dollar dot.com start-up which had never made any money and which had crashed when the NASDAQ fell by 50% in Clinton’s last year as President. Try to keep the young man’s story in mind as you read this.
Sorry to take so long to respond. It took a while to quit laughing at your ridiculous assertions and then to decide if it was worthwhile to attack such an easy target. I keep forgetting that you useless idiots actually believe the propaganda your Sinister masters pour into your receptive and willing craniums. Where did you copy your talking points, Kos? DNC? Hillary?
Because you are so easily misled, I decided to correct your erroneous information, not in the hope that you would benefit, but that some of our readers have sufficiently open minds that they might consider an alternate and defensible viewpoint.
Consider our economic history for the last fifteen years or so:
When President Clinton assumed office, the economy was recovering nicely from Greenspan’s overzealous increase in interest rates (he was afraid of reviving Carter’s double-digit inflation). Clinton promptly passed a major tax increase, which always serves to reduce investment capital, jobs, and tax receipts. As it was, the Soviet Union was collapsing from President Reagan’s applied pressure points (Russia’s corruption and inefficiency) and Clinton reduced our military and intelligence budgets, partially off-setting the loss of useful capital to useless/destructive taxes. Then Clinton foolishly allowed the dot.com Bubba Bubble to develop. That was a real, live potential disaster.
The Bubble produced a temporary surplus, which would have been better spent on correcting SS and MediCare, (re)building infrastructure, and investing in energy and technology. At any rate, in the last year of the Clinton Administration, the Bubba Bubble burst, the markets went flat before going down (Dow) or down down down (-50%, NASDAQ), and the surplus was falling like a rock (-$108 billion in year 2000, look it up).
Bursting economic bubbles are universally followed by recessions at best and economic collapse at worst. Fortunately, President Bush and Alan Greenspan took the proper corrective actions, the damage was minimized, Bubba’s tax increases were reversed, jobs quickly recovered, and growth, markets, and tax receipts flourished, giving us the strongest major economy in the world today.
With that background in mind, consider some of the silly things you just signed your name to:
... the stock market is also a bubble ...
That statement will come as a distinct shock to millions of intelligent investors who survived and thrived during the crash of the Bubba Bubble. The NASDAQ P/E Ratio rose above 61 in Clinton’s last year; anything over 30 is generally considered overpriced and bearish. It should be noted that any stock that has no income is not included in the calculations, so the young job-seeker’s multi-million dollar company is both unreported and distorting, since if there was any way to report non-earnings in a P/E Ratio, it would drive the value much higher/worse. The NASDAQ P/E Ration is now hovering around a benign 24. The S&P is a much broader index and even its P/E Ratio peaked a few months after the NASDAQ at over 44, and is now at 17. That is simply not bubble territory.
... corruption is rampant ...
Well, no, it is not.
There were a number of cases of gross business/financial misconduct (Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Rite Aid, Sunbeam, Waste Management, Cendant) during the Clinton Administration, but these were successfully prosecuted (by AGAG, in fact) during the Bush Administration, and there has been remarkably little business corruption reported recently.
Religious corruption gets a lot of attention (hypocricy attracts vultures) but is minor in scale and effect. Hollywood is much worse, but if Hollywood is found in similar activity, it is an occasion for admiration, not condemnation.
Political corruption is well documented in the USA and is almost exclusively a Democratic Party phenomenon, from LBJ’s theft of his first Senate election to Mayor Daley’s theft of the Illinois election for JFK in the 1960 presidential contest. Speaking of mayors, Democratic corruption in nearly all the big cities is pervasive: Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans. Almost the only exception is NYC, which was much improved under Mayor Guiliani but I don’t think he is a Democrat.
In fact, the USA compares quite well with other modern nations, as documented by Transparency International. Look it up.
... a popped housing bubble ...
Oh, probably not. Since we mercifully have Republican adults in the Executive branch, we can solve this discomfiture like we solved the Credit Union fiasco twenty years ago. Now LBJ pissed away $6 trillion on the War on Poverty, with the sole results being the near total destruction of Black family life in the United States and a REALLY BIG addition to the national debt that you worry about. And then there was Jimmy Carter and his double-digit inflation and double-digit interest rates. Since you are inclined to worry anyway, you might worry about how to avoid letting Democrats ruin your economy again.
We have set historic records for deficit spending ...
Ummm, no, as a matter of fact. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, during the first six months of 1941, the United States wrote purchase orders for war material and expenses that totaled greater than the GNP. We finished the war with a national debt that was over 125% of GNP, compared to about 70% now.
I fail utterly to see why anyone would object to selling our debt to China. The backing of American dollars, technology, and markets is exactly what brought China out of utter poverty and starvation just thirty years ago. China puts our dollars to good use and we put the deficit to good use. We pay about 3% a year for our debt, and we can turn it over endlessly if the Democrats do not reintroduce catastrophic inflation. We can invest the proceeds from the sale of debt with a ten percent rate of return if we apply it to our infrastructure and technology needs. Borrowing money at 3% to get a 10% rate of return on investment is good business; we ought to be borrowing as much as possible. Just don’t let the politicians piss the money away on monuments to themselves as Senator Byrd and Representative Murtha are wont to do.
But we have our own problems and they aren’t getting any better.
Bullshit. You come up with the most amazing nonsense. We have the least problems of any country. If you think otherwise, document it.
Posted by scorp on Dec 9, 2007 at 2:13 AM We must remember that China is a living civilisation for about 10,000 years, and all other civilisations are just newly born fetus in front of China.There fore I suggest we must learn from China instead of fault finding, if we want to survive in this world !!!.
It seems to me that, by showing hatful feelings about China and by using our all mental capacity to disprove China,we are only showing our subconcious fears and feelings of a dying civilisation and nothing else.
I think the emergence of China is a natural process of survival of life, which is appearing at times in this world for millions of years by which the nature toples and turns over to bring the pure and real human civilisations to survive (who let survive the others as well) and same time the nature removes the greedy and mean civilisations who have only intrest of their own survival !!!!!!
Posted by zimcan on Dec 13, 2007 at 7:20 AM Zimcan -
Your idea is interesting, but why apply it to China, for gosh sakes? Egypt had a great civilization long before China. I am sure we can learn much from Egypt.
And just what is it that you wish to learn from China? Confucius taught a moral and ethical system that worked quite well until it was corrupted by the warlords and Sinisteres, who brought war and death and destruction to China. Confucius’ teachings are now regarded as an impediment to modernization, that is to say, Confucius would frown on the modern Communists, who killed and starved upwards of 30 million Chinese. Not very moral or ethical of the Communists, but they are modern!
So, when the Chinese were impoverished and dying, President Nixon took a big gamble, and opened up to China with Western economic and cultural realities. So, who is learning from whom?
And who, exactly, is “showing hatful (sic) feelings” toward China? No one on this thread, so what the hell are you talking about? The only person I know who shows hateful feelings toward the Chinese government is my SO, and she is Chinese. So, explain yourself.
All of the Sinister Socialist states are dying, Russia and Western Europe and China of pollution, most obviously. You equate death and destruction with survival? You are a queer duck.
Posted by scorp on Dec 13, 2007 at 11:59 PM Much of the growth of China as a world power had to do with events in the 1990s quite aside from the growth of China’s export markets and the influx of over half a trillion dollars worth of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows since the early days of the “capitalist road” reforms. The decline of US military pre-eminance in the region and its support for military dictatorships in the 1980s, the decline of Japan as THE regional power due to the collapse of the Nikkei and the Yen in the early 1990s and the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 all brought about a reconfiguration of global economic positioning in East Asia.
The crisis left China as the strongest player in the region. The powerful developmentalist strategies of South Korea with its 8% or greater average annual growth rates came to a grinding halt with US/ IMF intervention which broke down Korean tariff barriers and the state assisted investment strategies of the Korean Cheobol, the Korean equivalent ot the Japanese Zaibatsu. The collapse of the Random Access Memory Chip markets left Thailand and Indonesia in a bad recession. Japanese manufacturing was deeply connected to the smaller East Asian economies but shifted markedly to the US with its larger internal market and highly profitable opportunities for FDI in auto manufacturing in the last five years or so. The financial crisis of the “Asian Tiger” economies left China in a dominant position as a regional economic power with the former Tiger economies as its satellites. Not only are they important sources of industrial raw materials such as oil and various metal ores but their economies serve as markets for the export of Chinese finished consumer goods. Trade between China and the ASEAN bloc has grown about three times faster than trade between China and the west. Much of this resulted from the late 1990s collapse of the US domestic IT market. The recent proposal by the Asian Development Bank for the creation of an East Asian Free Trade area that would encompass over three million people with a total GDP of over $10 trillion would alter trade relations within global capitalism. Such an enormous trade bloc would doubtless be met with increased FDI from the US. The US trend is less toward global trade than investment. China has absorbed more than half of the FDI inflows into East Asia since the 1997 financial crisis. As China eclipses Japan as the main source of East Asia imports China will also grow as a regional economic power while attracting more FDI in manufacturing as its export markets for consumer durables becomes increasingly profitable. China could well become the anchor of a new East Asian economic bloc.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Dec 16, 2007 at 6:52 PM scorp: Who is “they”? I do not see anyone in Eastern Europe clamoring to get back within the Soviet Union.
You quite obviously haven’t been around to former Soviet Union lately. I happen to live in a country that belonged to USSR and I can assure you that there’s no lack of people who long for old times. It’s not majority of people, but it certainly isn’t insignificant either.
Posted by nuwanda on Dec 20, 2007 at 12:56 AM From partisan scorp…“You come up with the most amazing nonsense. We have the least problems of any country. If you think otherwise, document it.”
OK…This is just for starters.
# The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).
# The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
# Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the earth. Seventeen percent believe the earth revolves around the sun once a day (The Week, Jan. 7, 2005).
# “The International Adult Literacy Survey…found that Americans with less than nine years of education ‘score worse than virtually all of the other countries’” (Jeremy Rifkin’s superbly documented book The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, p.78).
# Our workers are so ignorant and lack so many basic skills that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
# “The European Union leads the U.S. in…the number of science and engineering graduates; public research and development (R&D) expenditures; and new capital raised” (The European Dream, p.70).
# “Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature” (The European Dream, p.70).
# Nevertheless, Congress cut funds to the National Science Foundation. The agency will issue 1,000 fewer research grants this year (NYT, Dec. 21, 2004).
# The World Health Organization “ranked the countries of the world in terms of overall health performance, and the U.S. [was]...37th.” In the fairness of health care, we’re 54th. “The irony is that the United States spends more per capita for health care than any other nation in the world” (The European Dream, pp.79-80).
# “The U.S. and South Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not provide health care for all their citizens” (The European Dream, p.80).
# Lack of health insurance coverage causes 18,000 unnecessary American deaths a year. (That’s six times the number of people killed on 9/11.) (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005.)
# “U.S. childhood poverty now ranks 22nd, or second to last, among the developed nations. Only Mexico scores lower” (The European Dream, p.81).
# Twelve million American families—more than 10 percent of all U.S. households—“continue to struggle, and not always successfully, to feed themselves.” Families that “had members who actually went hungry at some point last year” numbered 3.9 million (NYT, Nov. 22, 2004).Do you want me to get into crime, incarceration rates, murder? I like the first point, we should be chanting…“we’re number 49, we’re number 49!”
The rest of your drivel? I might return to address it when I have time.
Posted by Jon B on Dec 20, 2007 at 6:34 PM Actually scorp,, a few more “least problems.”
# The United States is 41st in the world in infant mortality. Cuba scores higher (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005).
# Women are 70 percent more likely to die in childbirth in America than in Europe (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005).
# The leading cause of death of pregnant women in this country is murder (CNN, Dec. 14, 2004).
# “Of the 20 most developed countries in the world, the U.S. was dead last in the growth rate of total compensation to its workforce in the 1980s…. In the 1990s, the U.S. average compensation growth rate grew only slightly, at an annual rate of about 0.1 percent” (The European Dream, p.39). Yet Americans work longer hours per year than any other industrialized country, and get less vacation time.
# “Sixty-one of the 140 biggest companies on the Global Fortune 500 rankings are European, while only 50 are U.S. companies” (The European Dream, p.66). “In a recent survey of the world’s 50 best companies, conducted by Global Finance, all but one were European” (The European Dream, p.69).
# “Fourteen of the 20 largest commercial banks in the world today are European…. In the chemical industry, the European company BASF is the world’s leader, and three of the top six players are European. In engineering and construction, three of the top five companies are European…. The two others are Japanese. Not a single American engineering and construction company is included among the world’s top nine competitors. In food and consumer products, Nestlé and Unilever, two European giants, rank first and second, respectively, in the world. In the food and drugstore retail trade, two European companies…are first and second, and European companies make up five of the top ten. Only four U.S. companies are on the list” (The European Dream, p.68).
# Sometime in the next 10 years Brazil will probably pass the U.S. as the world’s largest agricultural producer. Brazil is now the world’s largest exporter of chickens, orange juice, sugar, coffee, and tobacco. Last year, Brazil passed the U.S. as the world’s largest beef producer. (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
# As of last June, the U.S. imported more food than it exported (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
# Bush: 62,027,582 votes. Kerry: 59,026,003 votes. Number of eligible voters who didn’t show up: 79,279,000 (NYT, Dec. 26, 2004). That’s more than a third. Way more. If more than a third of Iraqis don’t show for their election, no country in the world will think that election legitimate.
# One-third of all U.S. children are born out of wedlock. One-half of all U.S. children will live in a one-parent house (CNN, Dec. 10, 2004).
# “Americans are now spending more money on gambling than on movies, videos, DVDs, music, and books combined” (The European Dream, p.28).
# “Nearly one out of four Americans [believe] that using violence to get what they want is acceptable” (The European Dream, p.32).
# Forty-three percent of Americans think torture is sometimes justified, according to a PEW Poll (Associated Press, Aug. 19, 2004).
# “Nearly 900,000 children were abused or neglected in 2002, the last year for which such data are available” (USA Today, Dec. 21, 2004).
# “The International Association of Chiefs of Police said that cuts by the [Bush] administration in federal aid to local police agencies have left the nation more vulnerable than ever” (USA Today, Nov. 17, 2004).
Posted by Jon B on Dec 20, 2007 at 6:43 PM Jon B -
You shitting me, boy?
Most of your quotes are from Jeremy Rifkin and NYT, blatant Sinisteres and dubitable sources at best and grossly corrupt and inaccurate at worst. How could it be otherwise? Has there ever been a Socialist bureaucracy, such as Rifkin proposes, that did not end up inefficient and corrupt? No, of course not. “The European Dream” is not reality now (Rifkin is projecting and clearly admits this), and will end up the same way as the Soviet dream did after 1918, in more death, more destruction, more inefficiency, and more corruption. .
Lending her support to Jeremy Rifkin’s endorsement of the ‘European Dream,’ Alessandra Bosco argues that the solution to Europe’s current economic malaise ...
What??? What economic malaise? Is that part of Rifkin’s “European Dream”?
Well, yes. The Lisbon Accords 2000 was an agreement and policy statement within the EU to match USA productivity growth in ten years time. In year 2000, Western Europe had suffered years of no growth/slow growth, and they were desperate to increase their productivity. Seven years on, the EU has made no progress in increasing their economic growth. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
We have exactly what we produce: no more, no less.
Socialist bureaucracies are not noted for rising productivity and economic strength, much less innovation and entrepreneurship, the driving forces of American growth, productivity, and prosperity. On the contrary, Socialist bureaucracies are notably susceptible to failure and collapse, like the Soviet Union throughout its history and Venezuela now, with Europe stumbling around without progress, in spite of Rifkin’s projected but unrealized dream. To the degree the EU continues to embrace bureaucratic Socialism, they will continue to stagnate or fail, as the case may be.
On a per cap basis, European GDP is about two-thirds that of the USA. Rifkin has cherry-picked the industrial and medical statistics that support his thesis. That is not surprising, that is what Sinister ideologues do, but why are you so gullible? Are you incapable of independent thought?
If you walk through a European residential area, it is somewhere between the poor section of town and a slum. The houses are small and overcrowded. What we define as poverty in the USA is the norm in Europe. European prices are higher while their incomes are lower, about one-third lower in France and Germany.
Your expressed appreciation of socialist healthcare is grossly inappropriate. European healthcare is a cross between China’s barefoot doctors and imported (from America) technology and drugs. When European, Canadian, or Oriental patients have a serious healthcare concern, they go to the USA for care. We are now starting to see a reverse flow of patients, as Oriental doctors provide inexpensive treatments originated in the USA. This is not unlike the adoption and adaptation of Western industrial technology in the East, resulting in increased performance and lower costs all around.
Henry McKinnell gave very detailed evidence of how socialised [or government run] healthcare was destroying medicine in Europe. The effect on R&D has been devastating. Europe has a much weakened healthcare ecosystem because the markets are not driving the agenda; decreased innovation is the case. - DAVOS 2005 by Julie Meyer
Virtually all medical innovation and new medical drugs are the product of American capitalism. Inventing new stuff is expensive. The American consumer pays for this growth. If the American consumer did not pay for this growth, it would not exist. The other countries do not pay for this; that is why American drugs are sold more cheaply in Canada and elsewhere, and can be reimported at less cost. Would we be better off stopping American innovation and allowing medicine to stagnate? We will find out to the extent we adopt Socialist medical bureaucracy.
Jon B, if you have an argument to make, don’t make it on the basis of Sinister ideology, which does not work.
Posted by scorp on Dec 31, 2007 at 9:39 PM Scorp,
All you do is spew mindless rage and opprobrium over cliched images with no attention to actual facts as if reality doesn’t exist. China has gone capitalist and its economy has grown at a rate of 9.5% annually since the early 1990s. You act as if Mao was still in power. He’s been gone over three decades. Get over it. A new game is in town and China is modern history’s fourth great industrial revolution!! That’s not the opinion of some leftist ragsheet. It was announced with great fanfare by the UK’s Financial Times!!
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Jan 2, 2008 at 6:06 AM From Scorp,
“You shitting me, boy?”
If you’re calling yourself a turd, well, sorry I don’t crap offensive right wingers, they don’t flush well.
You’re opposition argument comes from Henry McKinnell, the ex-Pfizer CEO? A staunch supporter of Bush and various right wingers? That guy? He got the boot from Pfizer as should you for using a biased source.
I’ve been to Europe. There is a difference in how they got to this point as to housing. They actually built homes and business structures to last centuries unlike our quick build soon to fall apart suburbia. You can see how fast our houses disintegrate as they sit empty after foreclosures. They also had this strange idea in the old days that living closer together was a plus unlike our fragmented wide open spaced suburbia so dependent on cheap oil to even traverse from one subdivision to the next. European houses and structures are so much more interesting inside and out in comparison to our production line McMansions.
I see it my work. Five year old buildings with tiling falling off the wall, the cheap ceilings coming down, the air conditioning units failing repeatedly. It’s that creative destruction in action. Build cheaply, so that it will have to be repaired often and then replaced.
I’m not even sure what part of Europe you are even talking about. Many of those countries have been in a building boom for years. Nice gleaming office buildings, suburbia, but not in our wasteful ways.
Finally, plenty of those statistics had nothing to do with your source problem. No comment on those, eh?
I will grant you that we are number one in a few things, like violence. Do you want those statistics? Or are you willing to concede that for industrialized nations, we kill ourselves far beyond any of them.
Posted by Jon B on Jan 3, 2008 at 2:04 PM Here’s the lowdown of our “booming” employment for 2007.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ non-farm payroll data, the US “super economy” created a miserable 1,054,000 net new jobs during 2007. This is not enough to keep up with population growth.
Last year 1,428,000 private sector service jobs were created.
Waitresses and bartenders accounted for 304,200, or 21% of the new service jobs last year and 29% of the net new jobs.
Health care and social assistance accounted for 478,400, or 33% of the new service jobs and 45% of the net new jobs. Ambulatory health care and hospitals accounted for the lion’s share of these jobs.
Professional and business services accounted for 314,000, or 22% of the new service jobs and 30% of the net new jobs. Are these professional and business service jobs the high-end jobs of which “free traders” speak? Decide for yourself. Services to buildings and dwellings account for 53,600 of the jobs. Accounting and bookkeeping services account for 60,500 of the jobs. Architectural and engineering services account for 54,700 of the jobs. Computer systems design and related services account for 70,400 of the jobs. Management consultants account for 88,400 of the jobs.
There were more jobs for hospital orderlies than for architects and engineers. Waitresses and bartenders accounted for as many of last year’s new jobs as the entirety of professional and business services.
Wholesale and retail trade, transportation, and utilities accounted for 181,000 of 2007’s new jobs.
Where are the rest of the new jobs? There are a few scattered among arts, entertainment, and recreation, repair and maintenance, personal and laundry services, and membership associations and organizations.
Many of these jobs aren’t even filled by Americans and plenty of them require no college.
Posted by Jon B on Jan 9, 2008 at 3:22 PM Zizek’s tying of capitalism to authoritarianism is no more valid than linking democracy and capitalism by Bush. While neither is mutually exclusive, they are not sets of Siamese twins.
The problems in any form of economics or governing are due to the human condition called greed. Money and Power are joined at the hip — the nourish each other if not balanced by such virtues as love, ethics, humility are likely to lead to excess.
It has been interesting to follow this exchange with each contributor listing various examples of the results in countries with both elected and imposed systems. Most of the samples are undeniable, but their causes are open to debate.While I am a firm believer of “free markets” I don’t consider what we now have to be truly free. Legislation and regulation have been weighted in favor of big business and first and foremost the financial businesses.
The other big gainers have been top management of industry. Rather than try to reverse those regulations which our companies must satisfy, they simply set the jobs where the regulations aren’t — Asia, Mexico and Africa. The immediate boost to the bottom line brought them huge benefits in the form of bonuses, stock options and pro-sports stars’ sized salaries.
The big losers are the ordinary employee and the U.S. taxpayer. (Throw in the small stockholder whose money is used to pay those CEOs. Job quality is sickening and over the past thirty years purchasing power has fallen dramatically. (U.S. Census Bureau — Changes in Median Household Income: 1969-1996) We are now witnessing the crumbling dollar, contaminated imports and after a brief time of Fed rate cuts, we’ll get inflation which may surpass that in the 1970s as they begin to raise.
In a sense we already have authoritarian capitalism. It need not be at the point of a gun. When someone has the authority to pass legislation to favor themselves and their patrons, can set the standards of what is and is not to be enforced, and feeds only choice data to the public — what else should we call it?
Posted by whattheheck on Jan 9, 2008 at 7:41 PM Whattheheck…
“In a sense we already have authoritarian capitalism. It need not be at the point of a gun. When someone has the authority to pass legislation to favor themselves and their patrons, can set the standards of what is and is not to be enforced, and feeds only choice data to the public — what else should we call it?”
Bravo!!! This is exactly what I’ve been trying to put into words for too long. Authoritarian Capitalism, a great term to describe where we are today.
Add in a complacent media that mostly just reads the script of whatever the government gives them if the media even bothers to break from entertainment, sports and political gossip/horse race news.
Authoritarian Capitalism in our democracy can also explain the complacency of voting. Here we are in primary season and behind all the voting is actually the lack of voting. The numbers show that not even half of registered ( and even lower for eligible voters) voters are participating. People just don’t feel that the political system works because of that explanation you’ve given. It’s in the subconscious after decades of increasing Authoritarian Capitalism.
Iowa eligible voters, 2.2 million as of 2004…considered active registered voters, 1.9 million. The total actual voters from both parties for the 2008 caucus…about 356,000. What’s that, about 20%? And this state begins our presidential race?
New Hampshire did well votes to registered voters, but that state prides itself on voter participation and this year had two competitive races. But watch these kind of ratios as we go along. By the way, I had a tough time finding these numbers (registered and eligible voters) for Iowa and New Hampshire from media reports (ABC, CNN, etc.) on the web. The media doesn’t really cover those numbers. They give vote counts but not in contrast to how many could have voted. They don’t consider the lack of participation in Iowa a story.
Posted by Jon B on Jan 10, 2008 at 4:53 PM You know I never got around to correcting Scorps erroneous view of economic history. But for now lets point out a few things.
Scorps relates…on my conjecture about a possible stock market bubble…“That statement will come as a distinct shock to millions of intelligent investors who survived and thrived during the crash of the Bubba Bubble. The NASDAQ P/E Ratio rose above 61 in Clinton’s last year; anything over 30 is generally considered overpriced and bearish. It should be noted that any stock that has no income is not included in the calculations,...it would drive the value much higher/worse. The NASDAQ P/E Ration is now hovering around a benign 24. The S&P is a much broader index and even its P/E Ratio peaked a few months after the NASDAQ at over 44, and is now at 17. That is simply not bubble territory.”
Lets’ see. From a Dow high of 14,100 in late summer 2007, we are at 12,100 a drop of two grand or roughly 15%. They called it a correction at 10% what do you call it when it becomes 20%? Double correction? Plenty of economists would use the word “bubble” the problem being that there really isn’t an exact definition for the word. Generally it means a reversal of some significance based on a steady rise beyond normal historical data.
Your P/E Ratio example during the late 1990s, is the truth. Yet, sometimes P/E is a lagging indicator. For example, the day after an earnings report, the ratio is accurate, three months later…old news. Of course it also depends whether the company is presenting honest data and we see from the billions of write-downs from CityGroup, Merrill, etc. that all through the previous several quarters they were not presenting honest or accurate data. They have claimed they didn’t understand their “exposure” to sub-prime, it’s up to the public whether to believe them now. Scorp, you can track CityGroup’s P/E for the last year if you’d like, but in the end (as of today) the P/E was caca.
Beyond that, where the Dow, S&P, etc. are going in the near future is further down, more shoes to drop. The current shoe is the bond insurers such as as Ambac that insured companies like Merrill for losses in mortgage investments such as those Ponzi Schemes called CDOs and SIVs. But..uh, oh…those were BIG losses!!!! “We aren’t too sure we have your money. Actually, we don’t, sorry.” The shoe hits the floor and more big write-downs.
So you don’t want to call the drop in the markets a bubble? I don’t care. Labels matter little to those losing money as fast as they are now. But have faith Scorp, the government will probable step in and save your free market (once again) with a bail-out of the bond insurers. At least you’d better hope they do otherwise 2,000 points off the Dow high as of today could become wistful nostalgia.
Posted by Jon B on Jan 19, 2008 at 6:36 PM Continued..
Scorp blubbers about my assessment that the housing bubble popped…“Oh, probably not. Since we mercifully have Republican adults in the Executive branch, we can solve this discomfiture like we solved the Credit Union fiasco twenty years ago. Now LBJ pissed away $6 trillion on the War on Poverty, with the sole results being the near total destruction of Black family life in the United States and a REALLY BIG addition to the national debt that you worry about. And then there was Jimmy Carter and his double-digit inflation and double-digit interest rates. Since you are inclined to worry anyway, you might worry about how to avoid letting Democrats ruin your economy again.”
First..interesting that Scorp proposes that Bush will solve it (which of course means that Scorp believes it IS a problem..not “probably not” as he puts it) but then doesn’t explain HOW. Scorp fails to attribute the “Credit Union fiasco” or as most call it “Savings and Loan Scandal” to the deregulation of the industry by Reagan ( Scorp’s God, I’ve heard he kisses his autographed photograph daily). He fails to mention the whopping numbers added to the debt under Reagan (he can’t see the picture because his lips are so close to it). How did they solve the Savings and Loan debacle? Sit tight…a massive GOVERNMENT BAILOUT, to save Scorps Free Market.
Do I worry about the national debt? Not anymore. Bush proved you could pay for wars using the government credit card, so..I don’t want to hear anyone from the right cry if this country ends up paying for future social security with that same card. In fact since every president (Dems and Reps) from Kennedy on have used the card and added more to the national debt…I say let’s really have a party and give everyone making less than say $50,000 an annual income of $50,000..put it on the card! Let’s see how high we can run that sucker up. The sky’s the limit and you can thank the six years of Republican Congress married to Bush to teach me this. They’ve changed my mind, I’m a convert. Pave our streets gold and paint the street signs with silver, put it on the card!!!
So Scorp,,,I’m still bewildered. “Probably not” housing popped bubble or is Bush going to fix it? But if you think not, then you must be in another country. Even your idols in the Bush Administration have acknowledged a housing bust, Paulson just the other day.
And once again for the umpteenth time Scorp thinks I’m a democrat and is wrong. He just can’t stop thinking linear, left and right. It’s something that you can’t stop the partisans of the parties to do, stop thinking linear. There is also up and down. I’ll leave it at that for now.
Posted by Jon B on Jan 19, 2008 at 7:06 PM Jon B -
And once again for the umpteenth time Scorp thinks I’m a democrat and is wrong.
Naaa. Calling you a Democrat is just a polite way of saying that you are a Marxist, which is the cover Marxists typically use when they are not pretending to be Progressives (!) or Liberals (!!!). Marxists need cover because they are ashamed that one of the tenets of their philosophy holds that conventional/bourgeois morality must be overturned. In practice, that means that dishonesty is a principled way to gain political power if you are a Marxist. But Marxists cannot just come out and say they are principled liars without losing credibility. So you and your ilk spout utter nonsense at the top of your lungs: faked ANG records (CBS/Rather), “the war is lost” (Reid), faked casualty reports (Lancet/Soros), global warming (Gore).
And “deregulation of the (S&L) industry by Reagan” according to Jon B. It was Carter that first deregulated those S&Ls;, Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act, 1980.
(For some reason, Marxists are not perturbed, much less ashamed, that no Marxist government has ever succeeded. Hope springs eternal.)
Your P/E Ratio example during the late 1990s, is the truth.
Thank you.
Yet, sometimes P/E is a lagging indicator.
Ummm, only if you are operating in a vacuum. Corporations are required to make public any material information, promptly and impartially. Not doing so is fraud.
But since you understand a basic item like P/E ratio, I’m sure you understand the elements of some other scandals and frauds we have experienced in the last few years:
Reference points -
1980 GDP - $3.053 trillion when Carter left office
2000 GDP - $10.021 trillion when Clinton left office
2007 GDP - $14+ trillion
Great Society
President Johnson decided that we could have guns (Vietnam) and butter (Great Society), but he gave no thought to paying for all the goodies. The resulting economic turmoil resulted in seventeen years of stagnation, during which the markets (DOW) went essentially sideways, terminating in the Carter Catastrophe with inflation and interest in double digits. Johnson’s War on Poverty was the single largest item in the Great Society and it cost $6 trillion, yielding disastrous results for poor, mostly Black, families which were obliterated in the millions. And yielding its contribution to the size of the federal debt, now $9 trillion. Johnson was President, philosophy dynamics was Marxist.
Savings and Loan
The Carter administration passed the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act, 1980, which served to deregulate the assets of S&Ls;. But the day President Reagan took office in 1981, almost the entire S&L industry was technically bankrupt, with 3100 of 3800 S&Ls; losing money that year. Because of the ongoing problems, a bipartisan effort passed the Garn-St.Germain Depository Institutions Act, 1982, which deregulated liabilities. But controls were poor; fraudulent appraisals were common and the proceeds of the frauds were split between the S&L operators and the politicians to whom the operators made donations. The Keating Five and St.Germain (all Demonicrats except John McCain) were prominently disciplined by the Congress. The GAO assigned a cost of $160 billion to correcting the S&L problem at a time when the GDP was $3.053 trillion - 5.24%. Carter was President at the start, philosophy dynamics was naivete for Carter, criminal for some of the S&Ls; and some members of Congress.
Bubba Bubble
We have already discussed this, but it is noteworthy that the NASDAQ lost $5 trillion in capitalization and 80% of its value before it stabilized. Over $3 trillion of the loss occurred before President Clinton left office. Clinton was President, philosophy dynamics was naivete by everyone, but Clinton and Greenspan were in charge; they should have recognized the danger and they were the only two people on earth that could have done anything to prevent the damage. .
Corporate Scandals
There was a culture of corruption during the Clinton administration (quite apart from Bill and Hill’s personal dysfunctionalities), and massive fraud occurred. Each of these companies had fraud of over $1 billion, none of which were detected by the Clinton administration when it occurred. All of these crimes were detected and subsequently prosecuted during the first eighteen months of the Bush administration. Most of these companies are out of business or survive in grossly altered form:
Adelphia
AOL Time Warner
Arthur Andrson.
Enron.
Global Crossing
Qwest
Tyco
WorldCom
XeroxClinton was President, philosophy dynamics was naivete by Clinton, corruption by corporate officers.
Long Term Capital Management
LTCM was organized in 1994 by some well-established financial investors and two Nobel laureates in economics. They did very well in the hedge fund markets for three years, but in 1998 turmoil in the markets, including financial unrest in Russia, threatened their highly leveraged positions and a near panic ensued. The NYFRB sponsored a bailout, and the situaltion was stabilized with a loss of $4.6 billion. Ironically, after the dust settled the LTCM positions were settled with a modest profit. But despite the relatively small size, the threat to global markets was real. Hedge fund regulation was strengthened as a result of the LTCM fiasco. Clinton was President, philosophy dynamics was naivete, particularly by LTCM.
Subprime Mortgage
Home ownership has long been seen as a beneficial and desirable goal by the citizenry and by the government. After President Bush corrected the Bubba Bubble, there were lower standards for residential loan approvals (to help families of limited means) and there was reported fraud by lenders, fraud by borrowers, and speculation by borrowers, all facilitated by the rising housing market. Loans were packaged and sold as investments; financial models that worked well in limited circumstances did not work well in a market overwhelmed with sheer volume after housing prices started to slip.
The current panic is due to uncertainty, much like the threat in the LTCM panic. Actual identified dollar costs of the Subprime Mortgage are $100 billion at the end of 2007 and a bailout of $65-$150 billion is being discussed. As a percentage of GDP, this is small in comparison to the S&L scandals and miniscule compared to the Bubba Bubble. Politicians and financial institutions have matured since the S&L fiasco, and they have learned to get damaging information out early. The other domestic markets remain strong and indicators (P/E ratio) are benign, sustained by our excellent productivity gains. Bush is President, philosophy dynamics was naivete, and some element of low-level corruption by the lenders and borrowers.
A big source of uncertainty lies in foreign markets. The Chinese markets are sky high and shaky. The collapse of the Chinese economy will end the Communist government, as planned by President Nixon, lo these many years ago. Central Europe is still plagued by low productivity and high interest rates and they will take a hit, but the new markets in Eastern Europe have adapted well and will come out better. Commodities are coming down, spoiling the party in the Middle East and Russia. Russia lost a tremendous opportunity to establish democracy, free markets, and the rule of law after the collapse of the Communist Empire, but now they will get another chance.
Enjoy.
Posted by scorp on Jan 22, 2008 at 4:14 AM Scorp…
The thing you don’t ever seem to notice is that I don’t defend Democratic presidents (at least those in my lifetime). Sure those corporate criminals had their beginnings in the dot.com boom which occurred during Clinton’s term and continued to be criminals during the Bush early years. (By the way your list was but a small sample of the larger total.) Of course Bush had to have the SEC and Justice throw a few in jail, that’s just plain politics…you have to show some kind of law and enforcement even if it’s the rich robbing people without guns, otherwise the public would clamor for Bush’s head.
You know, so many of those criminals were Bush supporters with Ken Lay the star supporter. Bush didn’t do anything more than Clinton UNTIL the crap hit the Wall St. and UNTIL Congress jumped on the bandwagon with Sarbannes/Oxley. Remember some of these crooks were buddies with Bush and Cheney and others in his administration, they weren’t going to do anything even if they knew the crimes were happening, only IF the crimes were revealed, which they eventually were.
Remember as well that Clinton in those dot.com days had a Republican Congress. They were together on economics, they both were at fault. Remember, Congress passed and Clinton signed the cancellation of the Glass-Steagal Act which separated banks and investment firms, and it took just a couple of years with the fall of that firewall to blaze into a fire on Wall Street.
Clinton and Bush were only a slight difference in economic beliefs. They both hired the same FED Chairman, Alan Greenspan, who can be more blamed for economic ups and downs than either president. You know the Greenspan story, but who knows what you actually believe about it.
Carter…He got squeezed. The US hit peak oil production and had to begin to rely increasingly on imported oil. At that time we were far more wasteful with oil, today after many years (and many presidents) we’re more efficient (less oil heating for example) with oil. OPEC also became a player with those nations finally agreeing on a strategy, which of course was to raise prices and ultimately to have an oil embargo. The US as a wasteful oil user and as well the never ending increased need for oil, got squeezed. Eventually we got the Carter Doctrine (the Mid-East officially became a US important “interest.”) Every president since has followed the Carter Doctrine. I’m sure you approve as Reagan and two Bushes were Carter Doctrine devotees.
How did Carter make the oil in this country peak that any previous president also didn’t cause it to peak? Scorp..sometimes the Earth controls people, not the other way around. Of course our economy had problems, we were never ready for oil prices to jump in those days, we are hardly in any better position today. The recession we are probably in right now probably has as much to do with $90-100 oil prices as the mortgage mess.
The deregulation of S&Ls; happened in Reagan’s term, get over it. And the government had to save the free market. We should also remember that people that had accounts over the FDIC level of $100,000 were paid off, obviously not the poor getting rewarded for being stupid. We should also remember that current Republican presidential hopeful John McCain was involved as part of the Keating Five, somehow only he of the five managed to hold his political job.
Part of your problem is that you are so right partisan and part is that you give presidents too much credit for both the good and bad of economics, when mostly they only react when things go bad and mostly with dumb luck (good and bad). The economy is really run by people, mostly rich people, not by presidents.
Posted by Jon B on Jan 22, 2008 at 3:35 PM “Ummm, only if you are operating in a vacuum. Corporations are required to make public any material information, promptly and impartially. Not doing so is fraud.”
Which is what I’ve been saying for decades, they are frauds and they do fraudulent things. Even your Dubya God was a fraud when he was at Harkin Energy when he failed to report his stock sales for nearly a year, but it helps not to get prosecuted when your father is president.
It’s hard to prove fraud. It isn’t easy proving that say CityGroup knew earlier about their mortgage exposure. As well, it might not be fraud, but simple ineptitude. You can be rich and have a Harvard degree and still do stupid things, be out of the loop, misunderstand the numbers, etc.
Further, economics and corporatism isn’t a science. What worked or didn’t work in one era might not react the same way in another. Just listening to the econ-pundits on CNBC in the last month shows a wide range of viewpoints and opinions of what’s happening and what to do.
Free market capitalism is laden with fraud, it’s the main part of the game to take advantage of others. Of course this could be said of nearly everything involving people. The best you can do is to try and regulate away as much of the greed that brings about the fraud, but it will never be fully stopped because there are a percentage of people that no amount of laws will stop them from finding another way to beat the law.
I see little difference in these mortgage CDO creators (working in a near lawless sphere) and The Hole-in-the-Wall Gang in near lawless 1800s west. Both were groups of people scheming ways to steal within the realm of their world of right and wrong.
Posted by Jon B on Jan 22, 2008 at 4:02 PM Marxist???
Man, you don’t even know. But I guess I should tell you.
I believe the next evolution in democracy is direct democracy. I have no faith in two party or one party representative systems. It’s that simple. A duopoly is only barely better than a one party system in a nation of our size. We’ve outgrown our democracy.
As to China, have you forgotten they are communist? Any “unrest” due to economic recession can alway be handled by force. Additionally, China has a lot of experience with a poor economy, they’ve lived it for years. It’s The US that would have a tough time with some type of world-wide recession/depression. We’ve lived at a high standard (at least a portion of the society) for so long that falling back would be a harder pill to swallow.
Russia, they sit on a ton of oil, they will be in fine shape (in relation to their shape history) as long as oil continues to be such a needed commodity.
I think long term using this premise. No nation state, empire has ever remained on top forever. They all have found a way to relinquish the hill either by force or by collapse. To think that our country has somehow found the answer to break that fact would be the height of egotism and probably the very reason not to rule forever. When I hear so much jingoism, nationalism, exceptionalism, I can’t help but to wonder if we are not in the same psychosis as any other people of fading empires not expecting the fall. So, I look for signs of the fall, which could be gradual, sudden or some sort of ebb and tide.
The entity that eventually passes our supremacy will be different, my hope, a direct democracy.
But I know Scorp..WE are superior to all others. We will rule forever, right?
Posted by Jon B on Jan 22, 2008 at 4:37 PM Jon B –
Liberalism (the philosophy, not the Sinisteres) is based on the primacy and sovereignty of the individual, to the exclusion of kings, nobles, priests, potentates – and commissars. The most concise and eloquent statement of liberal principles is the Constitution of the United States of America. The first ten Amendments to the Constitution enumerate the rights of free men, including their right to protect themselves from government and from each other. Fortunately, most people are decent, hard-working, and non-aggressive.
But if everyone is free to do what they want, conflicts invariably result. That is why the United States was structured as a republic (Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution), and not as a democracy. The republican structure created different power centers, what we term checks and balances, that divide up the energies and the powers of the people and the limited powers of the governing bodies. This republican structure allow these energies and powers to be freely expressed, insofar as possible, without unduly impinging on the rights of other people.
I’m not sure what you mean by “direct democracy”, but it sounds dreadful. The Founders of this Republic were rightfully fearful of mob democracy, which was the very reason they created a republic. In a direct democracy, 51% of the peoples can determine who within the minority they want to take out and lynch; it has happened within the last century in this nation. Never again.
The Marxists universally call themselves (direct) democracies, such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; democracy is a respected term that they have stolen for cover as they slaughter the people.
The power to regulate commerce was given to the Congress, and Congress is required to treat all states equally, but that is all the Constitution says of the matter. Commercial organizations undoubtedly predate history, and are useful for the efficiency and productivity they create. Our Republic allows commercial enterprise in a system of free association so long as it is voluntary. (That was not always true, and the Demonicrat unions want to restrict the voluntary nature of labor even now.)
Our system depends on entrepreneurs, professionals, and independents, as well as corporations. The creativity and productivity are enormous. Bill Gates is among the world’s richest people; I have personally contributed perhaps $100 per year for twenty years to his enterprise, and got a hell of a bargain. The same is true of oil companies, construction companies, financial service companies. We all benefit from the structure as opposed to picking berries and chasing rabbits, or even worse, serving and dying at the whim of a Stalin, a Mao, a Pol Pot, a Kim Jong-Il, or a Ceasar Chavez.
Marxist economies do not create anything; they copy as much as they can, and end up consuming themselves.
Our democratic republic with free markets, the rule of law, and the right of free association has created unprecedented productivity, growth, and prosperity. The principles are freely transferable. Chile has gone from the poorest country in Latin America in Allende’s time to the richest country in Latin America now. Ireland has risen remarkably in the last thirty years due to free market reforms, and Eastern Europe, particularly Estonia, has done so as well since the Soviet Empire collapsed.
There were about twenty real democracies in the world a century ago, and now there are over 120. The United States was an example and an influence in most of these new democracies.
Marx spoke of the inevitablility of scientific socialism, but every example we have shows that Marxist economies collapse or, at best, persist at low levels of productivity and high levels of bureaucracy or terror, as the case may be. Russia and China did not meet the bare minimalist developmental requirements for Marxist Socialist revolution, and the Marxists made a hash of the efforts, creating death and destruction, waste and corruption. Europe at least meets the developmental prerequisites for the Socialist revolution that Marx hypothesized, but it too is mired in inefficiency and precipitate demographic decline.
So, why do you Marxists think you can do better, when you have never done better in the past? And why do you think we will allow you to mess up the best system ever created, and which is constantly improving?
I would like to address a few of your weirdest statements:You know, so many of those criminals were Bush supporters with Ken Lay the star supporter. Bush didn’t do anything more than Clinton UNTIL the crap hit the Wall St. and UNTIL Congress jumped on the bandwagon with Sarbannes/Oxley. Remember some of these crooks were buddies with Bush and Cheney and others in his administration, they weren’t going to do anything even if they knew the crimes were happening, only IF the crimes were revealed, which they eventually were.
You are guilty of the Marxist/Fascist false argument here. I presented facts and you questioned Bush’s motivation in an attempt to confuse the discussion and conflate Bush’s actions with Clinton’s lack of action. But you know nothing of Bush’s motivation; in fact, it is quite impossible to determine anyone’s motivation. The best a competent observer can do is report the facts accurately.
You are correct that Bush knew Lay, but are you claiming that he knew Kowalski and the other criminal executives? No, you are just trying to confuse the issue. Hannah Arendt identified this false argument, reply to facts by questioning motivation, in her analysis of the development of totalitarianism. This argument was utilized by both the Fascists and the Communists, and you have it down pat. If you have a legitimate point, give us the facts. Otherwise you are just blowing.
Remember as well that Clinton in those dot.com days had a Republican Congress. They were together on economics, they both were at fault.
Well, nobody covered themselves with glory, but the only two people on earth who had responsibility and authority to deal with the dot.com bubble were Clinton and Greenspan. Congress is reactive and partisan, and always will be, as that is the way the Constitution was written in recognition of political realities.
Clinton and Bush were only a slight difference in economic beliefs. They both hired the same FED Chairman, Alan Greenspan, who can be more blamed for economic ups and downs than either president. You know the Greenspan story, but who knows what you actually believe about it.
I believe that the economy is developing and evolving rapidly, that we have learned much about the way it works, but that we do not always act in accordance with our understanding. For example, in the Great Depression, we raised taxes to provide funds for the government and we restricted trade to protect our producers and consumers. Both actions made the Depression worse; after eight years of FDR, the unemployment rate was still over 10%. Economists now have a theoretical and empirical base to support lowering tax rates (up to a point) in order to increase tax receipts and to support increasing free trade in order to improve the lot of both consumers and producers. But populists, usually Demonicrats, do not understand economics, and insist on taking actions that hurt the economy, not to mention the citizens.
Such understanding of the economy that we have, and it is considerable, are the results of the efforts of a few people, Hayek and Friedman from the academy, Volcker and Greenspan from the political side, and a few others.
There is no question that Greenspan made a mistake in not following up on his 1996 comment on the “irrational exuberance” of the markets (DOW), which was at that time in the 6000 range, on the way to 12,000 four years later. But Greenspan also made significant contributions to the understanding of markets, and was a principal in attenuating the effect of the crash of the Bubba Bubble, along with President Bush.
When you are on the leading edge of a rapidly developing situation, such as Greenspan was for a number of years, some mistakes are inevitable. That does not mean that Greenspan was not the best man for the job. What I do not understand is why Demonicrats and Marxists insist on doing the same old things over and over, and enjoying the same old failures over and over.
Carter…He got squeezed. The US hit peak oil production and had to begin to rely increasingly on imported oil. At that time we were far more wasteful with oil, today after many years (and many presidents) we’re more efficient (less oil heating for example) with oil. OPEC also became a player with those nations finally agreeing on a strategy, which of course was to raise prices and ultimately to have an oil embargo. The US as a wasteful oil user and as well the never ending increased need for oil, got squeezed. Eventually we got the Carter Doctrine (the Mid-East officially became a US important “interest.”) Every president since has followed the Carter Doctrine. I’m sure you approve as Reagan and two Bushes were Carter Doctrine devotees.
Well, that is an interesting interpretation. Utterly fatuous, but interesting. Carter encouraged the overthrow of the imperfect Shah, the only real ally we had in the Middle East, and promoted the installation of a totalitarian theocracy that is now the principal sponsor of terrorism throughout the world. We now have the Mullahs surrounded, and the Demonicrats want to surrender. This sounds like an Comedy Central routine.
The deregulation of S&Ls; happened in Reagan’s term, get over it.
Lying Marxist bullshit. The first deregulation of the S&Ls; was Carter’s Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act, 1980, which only deregulated assets and caused further problems. The day Reagan took office the S&Ls; were bankrupt, with 3300 (of 3800) institutions losing money that year. Get over it yourself. And try to get over yourself.
But I know Scorp..WE are superior to all others. We will rule forever, right?
Ummm, no, as a matter of fact. We are the same as all others. It is our form of government that works better than most. As other countries adopt our form of government, they work better as well. You Marxists want to change our form of government to something that is demonstrably, often catastrophically, worse. It is well worth my time and effort to fight for the preservation and continued development of our system of government.
Posted by scorp on Jan 25, 2008 at 7:06 AM Scorp…
You don’t have to give me a history lesson I already know.
Direct democracy, if you don’t understand it…look it up. You know, use your Internets (as Bush calls it).
You can still have a bill of rights and direct democracy. There are any number of websites describing how it could be applied to the US.
And you can stop labeling me a Marxist, since you don’t know what DD is. But aren’t you a fascist telling me what I am.
Bush more than KNEW Lay. Kenny Boy paid for his inauguration. And if you are complaining about insinuation, so what. You have no problem cherry picking data that supports your inept conclusions, completely ignoring anything that flat out counters your arguments. For instance, you keep pointing to Democratic presidents as adding to the federal debt, yet completely ignoring Republican presidents that did exactly the same thing. Complete cherry-picking.
The Great Depression was made worse by Hoover when he did nothing, relying on the free market to plunge us into the worst depression ever.They didn’t call the homeless camps around the country Hoovervilles for nothing.
>>>But I know Scorp..WE are superior to all others. We will rule forever, right?
Ummm, no, as a matter of fact. We are the same as all others. It is our form of government that works better than most. As other countries adopt our form of government, they work better as well. You Marxists want to change our form of government to something that is demonstrably, often catastrophically, worse. It is well worth my time and effort to fight for the preservation and continued development of our system of government.<<<
And I have to explain sarcasm to you as well?
>>>Carter encouraged the overthrow of the imperfect Shah?????
Are you kidding? Please cite something other than your Republican cereal box to explain. When Carter allowed the Shah to enter the US for medical treatment after the overthrow, it resulted in anger in Iran because they wanted the Shah back to stand trial. They began kidnappings that became the Iranian hostage crisis.
To deregulate the Savings and Loans associations was a law passed by Congress, the Garn-St.Germain Act of 1982 (official title: A bill to revitalize the housing industry by strengthening the financial stability of home mortgage lending institutions and ensuring the availability of home mortgage loans.) It was introduced by Representative St. Germain in the 97th Congress on May 4, 1982. It was signed into law (Public Law 97 - 320) by President Reagan on October 15, 1982.
The S&L was about commercial real estate speculation. Some of the worst investment were resorts built out in the middle of nowhere. Thrifts weren’t allowed into commercial real estate until the above act which morphed from housing into commercial. But there were a number of reasons that followed St. Germaine that contributed. The Carter bill you mentioned, wasn’t helpful because it caused some problems by over-regulating and the St. Germain Act was suppose to help the thrifts. Later Reagan fought the Federal Home Loan Bank Board when they wanted to reel in what they saw as wild investing prior to the actually scandal hitting the fan. When you get down to it, the S&L scandal had some of the same slant that our current mortgage mess has….greed gone too far.
Posted by Jon B on Jan 25, 2008 at 5:06 PM Jon B. -
You don’t have to give me a history lesson I already know.
What is it that you know? The barest flash on history books should make it obvious that Marxism, in all its disguises and in all its locations, results in stagnation and rot at best and death and destruction as a more normal condition. Meanwhile, back in the real world, democracy, the rule of law, and capitalist free markets work extremely well, and have expanded geometrically for the last hundred years because of its remarkable successes, in social, economic and military spheres.
Look at China; constrained as it is by a totalitarian political class, capitalism has still worked wonders in just thirty years. The Communist rulers of China have allowed excessive growth and China is going to take a hit shortly. A $3 trillion loss during Clinton’s last year was serious but not devastating for the US economy. When China takes a much smaller hit, the ruling Marxists will be swept away. If you had any knowledge or understanding of history, you would realize that this is a repeating cycle in China.
What you term as “direct democracy” was just democracy when I went to school (I took honors in American History), as contrasted with representative democracy. For direct democracy,on the high side there is Switzerland and the town hall meetings common in some parts of the United States. On the downside there are persistent Marxist attempts to subvert and control the process, some of which I have personal knowledge here in the United States, in school boards and in academia, not to mention the Demonicrats. But the aspects of republican governance as specified in our Constitution tend to balance the contending forces and energies so that no faction can take control and the will of the people can be expressed. That is what you want to eliminate. Why do you want to do that?
But aren’t you a fascist telling me what I am.
Fascism and Marxism are the same thing. If you don’t believe it, count the dead bodies each has produced. If anything, Marxism is worse by an order of magnitude, based on simple body count. I am equally opposed to all forms of tyranny, whether it is revolutionary tyranny or subversive tyranny, Fascist or Marxist. Revolutionary tyranny occurs when democracy is weak, subversive tyranny is observed when democracy is strong. There is no doubt in my mind that if Marxists (Demonicrats) could take control of the government, I would be high on the list for elimination by Iron Felix or his successors. I have already been threatened with death on this site by one of your comrades, Michael P. Hardesty aka Blondemike.
…you keep pointing to Democratic presidents as adding to the federal debt, yet completely ignoring Republican presidents that did exactly the same thing.
Marxist bullshit distortion. My complaint with LBJ was that he added $6 trillion to the federal deficit and produced spectacularly bad results, the destruction of millions of Black families. If you go back to previous threads I have criticized Clinton for his budgetary surpluses at a time when we desperately needed to spend the money on Social Security, infrastructure, and energy independence.
When Republican presidents increase the national debt, it serves to increase jobs and productivity, and pays for itself; we have already discussed the falling ratio of debt/GDP. Johnson’s fiscal irreponsibility led to seventeen years of stagnation, and Bubba’s Bubble led to a recession.
The national debt is quite a useful thing, but, like fire, it can be quite destructive. Marxist misuse of the Soviet economy led to corruption and collapse. In their ignorance, or maybe by design, Demonicrats are quite willing to do the same.
In a consistently expanding economy, holding down expenditures necessarily and beneficially results in a lower debt service requirement. When you can borrow money at 3% and invest it with a 10% return, you should be borrowing all that you can, but you should not be pissing it away on earmarks, or whatever. I am never pleased to see my tax money wasted, but the first priority should always be to keep jobs and productivity up, and the deficit will take care of itself. Demonicrats simply do not understand this, anymore than the Politburo did.
The Great Depression was made worse by Hoover when he did nothing, relying on the free market to plunge us into the worst depression ever.They didn’t call the homeless camps around the country Hoovervilles for nothing.
For someone who already knows history, that is a profoundly ignorant statement. We had very little understanding of economic principles. Hoover did lots, and it was all wrong. FDR did lots, and most of it was wrong as well. That is why the Great Depression lasted so long. You need to go back to your economic and history books.
Carter encouraged the overthrow of the imperfect Shah?????
Carter not only encouraged the overthrow of the imperfect Shah, he also encouraged the Shah’s replacement by a terrorist theocracy that was far worse. You need to go back to your history books.
Posted by scorp on Jan 28, 2008 at 9:13 PM Wow, what fun!
Let’s begin at the end…“Carter not only encouraged the overthrow of the imperfect Shah, he also encouraged the Shah’s replacement by a terrorist theocracy that was far worse. You need to go back to your history books.”
I asked you to supply a source other than a Republican cereal box, you failed to do that. Nothing further until you do.
Working upwards…“That is why the Great Depression lasted so long. You need to go back to your economic and history books.”
You do understand that it was a world-wide depression I hope. I only spoke of the very beginning within the US. You do understand that actually the US did better than much of the world during this period. We staved off political upheaval such as communism and even the development of a right wing military coup that was thwarted. I’m sure you know the left and right extremist governments that rose up throughout the world during this time.
Federal debt again. Your viewpoint..good if Republicans, bad if Democrats is nothing but your partisanship. Earlier I posted the new jobs for 2007, look it over and explain how this is so good. Dubya entered office with a debt of $5.7 trillion, now it’s $9 trillion a 45% increase. By the day he leaves office it may be doubled. And the jobs this created in 2007 according to the Bureau of Labor was led by bartenders and waitresses, real high tech.
So, I’m still a marxist..
Let’s think this thing through. You claim to like representative democracy. You thus believe in other people running your life, making decisions for you. The only thing voting does is give you an option of who you want to control the decisions (if your candidate even wins). That makes you authoritarian, a follower of others.
You claim you believe in a two party system within a representative democracy. Yet, anyone who reads your slop knows quite well that you are an ideologue Republican follower. You probably vote straight ticket R. So, what you really want is a one party system, Republican. If the Democrats never held power again it would be heaven for you. You want one party rule, your party.
Authoritarian one party rule, sure sounds like either Nazi Germany or Stalin Russia. Now don’t be upset, lots of people are just like you. Both Democrats and Republicans include authoritarian one party believers.
Unlike you, I’m an anti-authoritarian. I don’t like others making political decisions for me. I’m also against a two-party system as anytime one power holds control then it becomes a one-party state.
Your criticism of direct democracy might be valid if it had ever really been tried, it’s just theory. But representational democracy can claim one of the worst breakdowns of any political system. Hitler didn’t win election, it took the conservatives to join with the Nazi Party to enable Hitler to rise to power.
Posted by Jon B on Jan 30, 2008 at 3:56 PM More scorp stupidly… “Fascism and Marxism are the same thing.”
And you base this on body counts? No form of government that has ever existed is innocent of body counts.
The real main difference between the two is business. Fascism is marked by government and business as separate entities but working for the same goal usually for the military. Business profits by the working agreements with fascism. Supported by the government Nazi fascism was a classic example of a military industrial complex. The worst abuses of course was the slave labor provided by the government to the businesses building for the war effort.
Your fears of Marxism in the US is pathetic as we are far closer to Fascism because of a military industrial complex. Our war economy (which exists whether we are in war or not) is supported by our government this year to the tune of $1 trillion dollars. Some of this outlay goes directly to the federal debt (for example, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars), the rest out of our tax dollars.
Our government even makes deals to other countries for the expressed interest to support weapons makers. Look at our aid money sent to countries like Israel, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia that is then followed up by an arms deal. Our government pays other countries to buy from our arms producers, or the other way of looking at it, after all the wheeling and dealing we give arms to other countries. We absolutely subsidize the arms industry but in many cases for the benefit of other countries.
I just laughed at your Bush recently over in Saudi Arabia literally dancing with the prince with a sword on his shoulder. Bush announces another arms deal (with the foreign aid flowing in the background) and then pleads with them to further open the oil spigot. The Saudi’s are the ones really laughing, “Look how we made him dance!”
Any military industrial subsidization that ends up in the federal debt is nothing more than make work. Much of the arms production is never even consumed in the sense that in a capitalist country produced goods are for consumption. We build it, store it, obsolete it…all for the government, paid for by tax dollars or added to the federal debt.
We have over 800 military bases in more than 120 countries. Most of these bases have no military value in the sense that they are protecting anything or preparing for attack. Oh, the military will claim the opposite, but then again they are in the center of the military industrial complex, they exist so they must justify their existence.
Posted by Jon B on Jan 31, 2008 at 1:56 AM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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