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Hi, BigNorseWolf. While the original thread has been locked, you raised some points in your reply to me I'd like to respond to. As we aren't spewing hate at one another, I'm assuming this is acceptable
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A: That's actually considered debatable, rather than a proven truth. However, extended deficit spending right now is probably not a great idea, as the downgrades and turmoil going on in the markets suggests.
B: It's about as proven as anything can get in the murky realms of "what if" economics and history. It PROBABLY helped the economy but there's absolutely no doubt that it helped the individuals involved by giving them enough cash to buy food for their families, job skills, some pride. It also definitely helped the nation by building up the infrastructure. So it's definitely a double win, and possibly a triple.
I think it also disproves the idea that people were out of work because they're lazy. As soon as the government put up a sign saying "work here" veritable armies of people showed up to do it.
Even if deficit spending is a good idea (and I'm not especially denying it under the circumstances we find ourselves in) there is a limit to what can be done with debt levels so high, and from where it becomes counter-productive. More below.
I didn't say all people are unemployed because they are lazy. I doubt the vast majority are. I am lazy and even I went and found myself a job. More below.
[quote=]A: You already are. They are getting restive, as comments from the official news agency indicate. There are probably limits to what they will accept.
We're too big to fail. We're not only their biggest borrower we're their biggest customer. If we're not buying more things than we need their entire system shuts down. America would have riots that would end with some minor legislative changes. China would have riots that would end in revolt. So we can play chicken with china because we're driving and SUV and they've got a smartcar. Suckers.
Hmm. So everyone is getting excited about nothing, are they? Actually, the US doesn't need to default to do itself a lot of damage. Yes, a lot of Chinese money is tied up in US Treasuries, and falls in the value of that debt would hurt them. They hold that money as foreign exchange reserves. That could come from falls in the value of the debt due to credit downgrades and from falls in the value of the dollar itself, which would probably happen in concert if some serious downgrades happened and also be self-reinforcing.
However, a fall in the value of US debt would actually not be very helpful for your spending plans. The flipside of falling values of debt is increasing interest costs. A brief example: a US Treasury, face value $1, is issued with a 5% interest rate on the face value payable to the purchaser, and will repay in full in five years. Due to credit concerns, the value in the market of that Treasury falls to $0.90. If that bond is then sold by the purchaser to someone else at $0.90, the actual interest rate is 5%x1/0.90 = 5.5%. If the government, under those market conditions, wants to sell Treasuries to new investors, the rate they would have to pay would be 5.5%, because that is the going rate in the market.
For a foreign investor (like the Chinese) the fall in value of the dollar adds an added layer of risk, which might also mean they demand a higher interest rate in the market. And there's another implication. The US is in the happy position of providing the world's reserve currency, i.e. the currency which other central banks will predominately hold their currency reserves in. Because of this, funding cost for the US government are a bit lower than they otherwise would be (this is a factor of the additional demand for dollar assets as opposed to, say, sterling). But this is a right that is earned in part by economic size but also be economic stewardship. If it looked like the US was willing to "play chicken" with the markets, it is hard to believe that reserve currency status would be maintained, also increasing funding costs.
So you can see that not paying attention to your credit rating will impact on how much it costs the government to fund itself, so in fact that would impact on how much money, after interest costs was left over for spending. Also bear in mind that corporate borrowings are also priced off US Treasuries, so companies would have less to invest. In the US (not the UK) mortgage rates are also priced off US Treasuries, so it would raise prices for the average guy in the street. Couple that with a falling dollar, and you would see rising inflation along with rising debt costs. That's not a recipe for a happy economy. And that's before you even bring the costs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security into the mix.
And then think of the political implications. A US government that doesn't stand behind its own credit rating would have a lot of trouble telling anyone else what to do, which could damage any diplomatic efforts. There would almost certainly be reduced spending of stuff like defence, which would mean that the US's role as the world's policeman would suffer. And who would you like to step into that role? China? I've nothing against the Chinese as such but at the moment they are an autocratic dictatorial oligarchy with no genuine respect for human rights. Would was want to leave the world in their grasp?
And even if China did bail out the US (assuming they could afford it, and actually their economy isn't that big even if it is growing fast) what would be the impact of that? Increased Chinese dominance on the world stage, in business (NEWSFLASH - CHINA BUYS WALMART!) and so on. China doesn't have much of a consumer culture and if the Chinese start selling to themselves, they won't even need the US as a market that much. And if the Chinese don't blink? I mean, there's lots of developed countries who would like to borrow from the Chinese at the moment. What if they decide to hold their reserves in euros or sterling?
US dominance is not a given. In fact, it is a fairly new phenomenon (from the Spanish-American War). Remember, I'm British - we had a global empire considerably less than a century ago, and are now very much a middle-ranking economy on the edge of Europe.
[Quote=]A: Also true, but I get irritated by people telling me about the horrors of unemployment when I have experienced them and they don't seem to have done.
B: It's hard to tell what the other person has or hasn't experienced. It could also be vastly different in their country or even by city.
That's also true.
[Quote=]A: Firstly, company B will offer cheaper products to the market. That benefits consumers.
B: It does.. unless one of those consumers used to make the product. You however reach a tipping point where the cheap products can't be bought because the consumers have no money. It's a matter of group vs individual benefit. In an ideal world, everyone else would make things in an expensive country in order to provide you with rich consumers for your cheap products.
A: Think about what you have in your house and where it was made. Secondly, tying up resources in an activity which can be more productively carried out elsewhere is a way of being inefficient, which actually reduces wealth for everyone. This was established by Ricardo a long time ago.
B: Equivocation: everyone is not everyone.
A group is not synonymous with an aggregate of the individuals within it. If you have a group of 10 people making 10,000 dollars each, or 5 people making 20,000 and 5 people making nothing the GROUP is the same, but the individuals are not.
If a job is exported to china the benefit and savings is dispersed among all of the consumers, saving them say 3 dollars per unit. The downside is that the cost is localized and the employees are loosing 18,000 dollars or whatever their salary was. You can't just look at things from a macro point of view: that's how we got into this mess.
You can't design policy for individuals. Plus, individuals change. Economies change. Tastes and technology change. My mother used to use a Kalamazoo counting machine, a sort of mechanical computer / calculator, in the late fifties and early sixties to do the payroll for the company she worked for. Now, that technology is clearly obsolete with the advent of computing. But what did the guys who used to make the machines think about the rise of computing think? Were they worried they would be laid off, flung on the scrap-heap with irrelevant skills? Maybe. Should they have been protected, by placing restrictions on people using computers, the purchase of computers, extra taxes for computerised payrolls to discourage the use of computers, and so on? Clearly, such a policy would have been ultimately bad for everyone, given that computing has revolutionised pretty much everything.
So maybe that's a silly, straw man example. But how do you choose which industries to protect, and which to throw to the wolves? If you are talking about government action, you are basically talking about civil servants and their political masters (yes, politicians, those corrupt bastards we were talking about before) having the say. Do you trust them to predict correctly? How would you prevent corrupt vested interests - you know, those terrible corporations (and unions) lining the pockets of the terrible corrupt politicians - manipulating such a policy to their own ends. And that's not exactly a rhetorical question - a lot of lobbying is about maintaining the status quo and the flow of subsidies to inefficient industries that need the funds to survive, at the expense of tax payers and consumers. In fact, the whole process could help corrupt the political system without adequate checks and balances.
Perhaps we should consider the exporting of a steel-worker's job from Pennsylvania to Romania instead. You don't have to predict technological trends, you are making rolled steel. But the plant in Romania makes it cheaper - lower overheads, not need to pay for expensive healthcare and benefits, probably fewer people in the process. Clearly, if the steel plant closes, that would be bad for the local community. A lot of the problems of long-term unemployment stem from people living in areas where the big employers have gone down, possessing skills which are useful in those defunct industries but not much elsewhere, and nothing much has come to replace the lost jobs. It's bad for those people and it is bad for the fabric of the society in which they live.
But...
What can you actually do about it? There is actually plenty of manufacturing going on in developed countries, but it tends to be high tech. The answer, surely, is to ensure that people are provided with the skills they need. But what about the users of that steel? Why should a car company have to pay over the odds for steel? And to whom would it pass the costs? Well, the consumer. And what about competition to the car firms from firms using cheaper, non-US steel - unless you decide to protect the car firms too. Of course, a company that doesn't have to compete doesn't have to try very hard either, of course - so you'll probably get an expensive, s%*# car made with s$@$ steel that actually no one would buy if the Japanese cars weren't so expensive due to tariffs. How is the consumer benefitting? He (or she) isn't. A small coterie of uncompetitive steel and car workers are, at his expense. Is that fair?
And, bluntly, economic development has winners and losers. When push comes to shove, I'm more sympathetic to 1) a worker in a developing country who has come from grinding poverty in a village where subsistence farming is the norm, who is working in a factory to provide a future for themselves and their family, than 2) someone sitting in a first world country who has lost their highly unionised job because of competition. The needs of the former feel a bit more urgent than the needs of the latter, social issues created notwithstanding. Because the flipside to non-competition from developing countries is non-development in developing countries - you know, infant mortality, malnutrition, that sort of thing.
[quote=]A: And anyway, what would you do about it? The Chinese are here. Economies adapt and change over time. Trying to prevent that, especially through protected markets and government spending, is simply storing up trouble. Southern Europe is finding this out now.
B: Fair trade not free trade. American companies are fighting with one hand tied behind their back. They're competing with China where
1) there are lower labor costs
2) there are human rights abuses-you strike? The government runs you over with a tank.
3) There are no environmental protections.
4) China keeps its currency devalued.
5) American goods are taxed to high heaven coming in.
China is already violating the trade agreements we have in place. Tax their goods the same way they do ours, but higher until they start giving their workers a decent wage, bathroom breaks, and air they can breathe.
People line up for these factory jobs precisely because they offer a way out of a poverty neither you nor I can imagine. Bathroom breaks? Sure, I wouldn't want to work on a Chinese production line either, but then consider the alternative they face. They aren't coming home to US standards of living.
Also, if you go on strike in China, you don't get run over by a tank. Tiananmen was about democratic rights, not wages. Actually, there has recently been a rash of strikes in Chinese factories and they got - guess what? - pay rises rather than the jackboot. In fact, wages in China are rising quite fast - the endless pool of young workers is drying up due to the one-child policy. I'm not claiming that China isn't a dictatorship in which human rights are not the primary concern of the leadership. But they tend not to interfere so much in business - challenging the authority of the state, on the other hand, is something different.
I think the US going on about pollution is also a bit rich consider that the US produces massive amounts of greenhouse gases and has caused plenty of environmental degradation in its time (plunging water tables in the South-West, for example). People begin to care about the environment the richer they get, so arguably the development of China will help with environmental standards. There is a nascent Green movement in China. And while environmental concerns aren't that high generally, there seems to be a growing appreciation that it can't be ignored either.
The currency devaluation thing is moot, as well. I've seen conflicting stuff about that and whether it is fair valued or not. Their tariffs I'm not clear on, but China's world trade is actually fairly balanced overall - they import lots of raw materials and capital equipment, and export finished manufactured goods. So someone is doing alright - just not the US.
You talk about "fair trade" as opposed to "free trade". Fair according to whom? In the end, you are basically talking about protectionism. That doesn't have a good reputation for solving anything, as it leads to beggar-thy-neighbour retaliatory responses. Part of the reason the Great Depression of the 1930s was go awful was because of Smoot-Hawley and its impact on trade.
[Quote=]A: The stuff about the environment is something of a red herring. Yes, there are environmental abuses, but they are hardly confined to China or the developing world (like BP in the Gulf). The issue is cost of labour, land and productivity of resources.
B: In America BP in the gulf was a disaster. In china its Tuesday.
A: See above. This is lump of labour fallacy again.
B: You're making the opposite error in assuming that labor is perfectly fluid: that for every job lost another will be made. That is patently not the case: we're seeing a good pit of friction from the labor balloon expanding.
See above re the environment in China. I'm not denying it entirely. But again, America produces its fair share of pollution too.
Well, that's lump of labour for you. But I also don't deny that on a local level there will be pockets of unemployment (and obviously, in a recession like this, big, big pockets on a cyclical basis). But technological change creates new and different opportunities that cannot necessarily be foreseen. For example, ecommerce has been a boon to courier companies. So while the rise of Amazon has been bad for brick and mortar booksellers, it's been great for couriers. Should we protect bookshops, and tax courier companies? Which employs more? Whole new industries (especially in services) have grown up in the last century (apparently PR, for example, didn't exist until the early 20th Century - you might not like PR people, but I can't see how they have displaced other workers). So, overall, I don't buy it except on a localised level. And skills and labour mobility are the issue then.
[Quote=]A: Not so much in the UK, to be fair, Murdoch notwithstanding.
B: Right, because he only broke the law and bribed the government agency that's responsible for catching him breaking the law... do you want to put bets on how many days he serves in jail? I have 210 to 1 odds on 0.
That's something of a distortion. He himself didn't seem to know what was going on (the paper in question providing less that 1% of corporate revenues) and he didn't "bribe" police officers to look the other way. Police officers were paid for news on current stories by some News International employees, rather than for them to actually do anything. Not saying it's right, and News Corp seems a bit ethics-free and to have appalling corporate governance. But yeah, on that basis, I can't see Rupert going to jail.
[Quote=]A: The rules in the US strike me as pretty stupid, but then again it can be seen (not that I do) as free speech. I can see how it is potentially corrupting, but politics is at its heart about compromise and relationship-building, so a lot of this will go on anyway.
B: And what you have is the interests of the entire country being compromised with the interests of an incredibly small segment of the population with equal or greater weight being given to the smaller segment because they have the money.
Quite - see above re vested interested.
[Quote=]A: It depends on political culture - talking about Europe, things seem to be cleaner in northern Europe rather than southern Europe, and we can debate Protestantism v Catholicism and its effects in that, for example.
You can. I can't. I have noooo idea how religion enters into it over there.
It was more a non-sequitur comment than anything else.
[Quote=]A: But it strikes me as somewhat beside the point. The rioting doesn't seem to me to have much to do with evil corporations. There are issues about the collapse of the traditional manual jobs done by the working classes, which is associated with the trend for these jobs to go overseas.
B: The connection is patently obvious: The evil corporations wanted to roll around in even more money, so they sent the labor jobs overseas to china, screwing hard working people out of a living so they could get richer.
To some extent, since a lot of these people seem to have had jobs, but this is an example of localised problems. I've already commented above on this.
[Quote=]A: But I don't consider that trying to stand in the way of global economic trends is a great way to address this - it has been tried, and it didn't work so well (see Portugal)
It has worked ok for highly socialized nations putting high taxes on said corporations, so that the people they're collectively screwing over are at least getting food and medical care.
Except, of course, it seems to be unravelling in many of those places. Southern Europe are examples of such a places, and it's not going so well now.
[Quote=]A: It seems that having a well-educated, flexible workforce is the way to go about it. For me, this is the deficit which has not been addressed.
B: The same corporations that are shipping people overseas are the ones against the taxes that might be used to pay for a well educated flexible workforce.
I agree - this is the role of the state in all of this: to provide education that equips people for the markets in which they live and operate. It doesn't require punitive taxes to get there, though.
If i deleted something its because i was essentially giving the same response in multiple places
Hmm. So everyone is getting excited about nothing, are they?
They’re being made to get excited about nothing. Its what the party out of power always does to the party in power: try to keep them from exercising their power of the purse.
Actually, the US doesn't need to default to do itself a lot of damage. Yes, a lot of Chinese money is tied up in US Treasuries, and falls in the value of that debt would hurt them. They hold that money as foreign exchange reserves. That could come from falls in the value of the debt due to credit downgrades and from falls in the value of the dollar itself, which would probably happen in concert if some serious downgrades happened and also be self-reinforcing
Right, so if we present an actual “we’re going to spend our way to a better economy” plan to them they have every reason to float us “just one more loan” and the markets would have every reason to keep full faith and credit with us.
So you can see that not paying attention to your credit rating will impact on how much it costs the government to fund itself, so in fact that would impact on how much money, after interest costs was left over for spending. Also bear in mind that corporate borrowings are also priced off US Treasuries, so companies would have less to invest. In the US (not the UK) mortgage rates are also priced off US Treasuries, so it would raise prices for the average guy in the street. Couple that with a falling dollar, and you would see rising inflation along with rising debt costs. That's not a recipe for a happy economy. And that's before you even bring the costs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security into the mix.
I’m not saying lets not pay attention to it, I’m saying use it one last time for something credit is supposed to be used for: a crisis or a rough time. The problem is that under Reagan, bush I, Clinton, and Bush II we used the credit to pay for things we didn’t need: huge tax cuts and a massive world conquering army.
And then think of the political implications. A US government that doesn't stand behind its own credit rating would have a lot of trouble telling anyone else what to do, which could damage any diplomatic efforts. There would almost certainly be reduced spending of stuff like defence, which would mean that the US's role as the world's policeman would suffer. And who would you like to step into that role? China? I've nothing against the Chinese as such but at the moment they are an autocratic dictatorial oligarchy with no genuine respect for human rights. Would was want to leave the world in their grasp?
I’m tired of playing team America world police. The cost is too high, we’re getting too much flak for it, and quite frankly we can’t be trusted with the power. Its far too easy for an American corporation to dump a few million into it, and get America’s armies to take over a country for them in order to make a profit. United states foreign policy was dictated by slavery’s interests for the first 100 years, United fruit did it in south America, and Haliburton did it to get us into Iraq.
And even if China did bail out the US (assuming they could afford it, and actually their economy isn't that big even if it is growing fast) what would be the impact of that? Increased Chinese dominance on the world stage, in business (NEWSFLASH - CHINA BUYS WALMART!) and so on. China doesn't have much of a consumer culture and if the Chinese start selling to themselves, they won't even need the US as a market that much. And if the Chinese don't blink? I mean, there's lots of developed countries who would like to borrow from the Chinese at the moment. What if they decide to hold their reserves in euros or sterling?
China’s lack of a consumer culture is exactly why they need us. If they don’t float us the cash they lose their biggest market. If we can’t afford to buy from them, they go under on both their currency side and their productivity side. All their eggs are in the same basket.
US dominance is not a given. In fact, it is a fairly new phenomenon (from the Spanish-American War). Remember, I'm British - we had a global empire considerably less than a century ago, and are now very much a middle-ranking economy on the edge of Europe.
Well, we’re still much bigger than you in terms of land and population. You had your world dominating military/economic empire, but when that went through you just had a small island. When our world dominating military/economic run comes to an end we’ll still be A huge economy, just not THE huge economy.
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You can't design policy for individuals.
You better. If “the system” is running fine but all of the money goes to the top and almost none of it trickles down (trickle down economics does not in fact work) people are not going to put up with that for long. Even baring second amendment remedies, if individuals can’t buy then the system can’t move money.
Plus, individuals change. Economies change. Tastes and technology change. My mother used to use a Kalamazoo counting machine, a sort of mechanical computer / calculator, in the late fifties and early sixties to do the payroll for the company she worked for. Now, that technology is clearly obsolete with the advent of computing. But what did the guys who used to make the machines think about the rise of computing think? Were they worried they would be laid off, flung on the scrap-heap with irrelevant skills? Maybe. Should they have been protected, by placing restrictions on people using computers, the purchase of computers, extra taxes for computerised payrolls to discourage the use of computers, and so on? Clearly, such a policy would have been ultimately bad for everyone, given that computing has revolutionised pretty much everything.
I’m not suggesting anything that severe. I’m suggesting moderate changes. And the reason the competition isn’t going so well for the us is because we’re using ADVANCED ideas like not dumping arsenic in the water, not because we’re stuck in the past.
So maybe that's a silly, straw man example. But how do you choose which industries to protect, and which to throw to the wolves?
Protect the industries at the same rates that china is protecting theirs. There’s a 20% tarrif on heavy farm equipment moving into the country. Why on earth WOULDN”T john deer build stuff there rather than face that?
Perhaps we should consider the exporting of a steel-worker's job from Pennsylvania to Romania instead. You don't have to predict technological trends, you are making rolled steel. But the plant in Romania makes it cheaper - lower overheads
Right, because they can just dig a hole in the ground and toss the toxic waste into an open pit, so when it rains and the pile of dirt holding it back breaks it can cover a few towns in cyanide.
It's bad for those people and it is bad for the fabric of the society in which they live.
But...
What can you actually do about it?
Tarrifs on goods coming in so that its an actual competition with American goods. Tariffs high enough to raise revenues and make American workers competitive WITHOUT being so high that American companies can completely forgoe innovation.
While these corporations are operating, tax them and SAVE some of the revenue for their employees so government programs can retrain them when new technology is required.. or perhaps make the companies/workers jointly pay for it, like unemployment.. or hell, just give unemployment checks to companies that are hiring and say “here’s a free worker, train them in something useful.”And, bluntly, economic development has winners and losers. When push comes to shove, I'm more sympathetic to 1) a worker in a developing country who has come from grinding poverty in a village where subsistence farming is the norm, who is working in a factory to provide a future for themselves and their family, than 2) someone sitting in a first world country who has lost their highly unionised job because of competition. The needs of the former feel a bit more urgent than the needs of the latter, social issues created notwithstanding. Because the flipside to non-competition from developing countries is non-development in developing countries - you know, infant mortality, malnutrition, that sort of thing.
A governments job is primarily to look after the interests of its own people. I don’t suggest US policy to help Romania.
I think the US going on about pollution is also a bit rich consider that the US produces massive amounts of greenhouse gases and has caused plenty of environmental degradation in its time (plunging water tables in the South-West, for example).
There is a difference between beating someone up and stabbing them in the eye. This is a bit of a et tou fallacy. As bad as what the US does to the environment is its not remotely in china’s league. China is a developing economy though, its to be expected.
The currency devaluation thing is moot, as well. I've seen conflicting stuff about that and whether it is fair valued or not. Their tariffs I'm not clear on, but China's world trade is actually fairly balanced overall - they import lots of raw materials and capital equipment, and export finished manufactured goods. So someone is doing alright - just not the US.
The only way to beat china at their own game is to become them: cheap labor, low quality of living, and massive disparities between rich and poor. While that may be good for “the economy” it absolutely sucks for the individuals involved… which yes, despite what you said, IS the goal of an economic system, to help PEOPLE, not itself.
You talk about "fair trade" as opposed to "free trade". Fair according to whom? In the end, you are basically talking about protectionism. That doesn't have a good reputation for solving anything, as it leads to beggar-thy-neighbour retaliatory responses. Part of the reason the Great Depression of the 1930s was go awful was because of Smoot-Hawley and its impact on trade.
Protectionism helped build American industries when foreign competition made goods too cheap for the US to start up manufacturing. The south got a little peeved by it and threatened to secede. It doesn’t always end badly.
wrote:
A: The stuff about the environment is something of a red herring. Yes, there are environmental abuses, but they are hardly confined to China or the developing world (like BP in the Gulf). The issue is cost of labour, land and productivity of resources.
B: In America BP in the gulf was a disaster. In china its Tuesday.
A: See above. This is lump of labour fallacy again.
-…huh? That doesn’t make any sense.
Well, that's lump of labour for you.
Whats the opposite of the lump of labor fallacy?
But I also don't deny that on a local level there will be pockets of unemployment (and obviously, in a recession like this, big, big pockets on a cyclical basis).
I don’t know how you can deny the unemployment on a national level when we’re SEEING it on a national level. A nation cannot remain purely a service industry economy without producing anything. The Netherlands and England both thought they could maintain power purely as a center for economic commerce… and then the world moved on to wallstreet. Numbers in a ledger or on a computer are easy to move, and there’s no reason for all the money to be made in china but played with on a stock market in NY.
A: Not so much in the UK, to be fair, Murdoch notwithstanding.
B: Right, because he only broke the law and bribed the government agency that's responsible for catching him breaking the law... do you want to put bets on how many days he serves in jail? I have 210 to 1 odds on 0.
That's something of a distortion. He himself didn't seem to know what was going on (the paper in question providing less that 1% of corporate revenues) and he didn't "bribe" police officers to look the other way. Police officers were paid for news on current stories by some News International employees, rather than for them to actually do anything.
Whats the difference, functionally?
Not saying it's right, and News Corp seems a bit ethics-free and to have appalling corporate governance. But yeah, on that basis, I can't see Rupert going to jail.
I don’t believe he’s that clueless. It made the news the last time it happened, he should have looked into it.
Quite - see above re vested interested. Your suggestion seems counter-productive in that respect.
You think I’m giving the government power to take charge of the economy. I’m not. I’m asking them to use slightly more or the power that they already have. I think the problem is fixable with a few tweaks, the sort of tweaks we make all the time. The government taxes all the time, the government spends all the time, the government has tarrifs all the time. Spending a little less on a world conquering military and a little more on education isn’t a radical change.
Except, of course, it seems to be unravelling in many of those places. Southern Europe are examples of such a places, and it's not going so well now.
Then scale it back a bit. There seem to be more than enough resources for a southern Europe socialist society, its just that people get panicked and turn over the boat. Sometimes I wonder if the boat flipping isn’t intentional.
I agree - this is the role of the state in all of this: to provide education that equips people for the markets in which they live and operate. It doesn't require punitive taxes to get there, though.
Its ONE important tool. No carpenter shows up to fix a house with just a hammer.
Did I mispost somehwere or is there a double thread?