great talk about politics and silicon valley and bubbles

Anybody who wants Trump to win has to be realistic about the consequences of his getting elected - and totally unrealistic about the (essentially benign) consequences of Hillary Clinton winning.

Anybody who can see much difference between recent Republican and Democratic administrations has got to be using the eye of faith.

You are not killing nearly enough dissidents to look like Saddam's Iraq. In Putin's Russia the male life expectancy has dropped dramatically, largely due to alcoholism

While the Guardian is a bit puritan, the Moscow Times merely take longer to get to the point.

Cold war East Germany was a miserable place to live, and difficult to get out of, but even Trump would be hard pushed to reduce the US that level.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

e y e

to keep

umstances?

James Arthur and Thomas Sewell are perfectly happy to see the government ta king money from the population as a whole and spending it on the army, the police, the justice system and roads, all of which benefit the people who o wn the country rather more generously than they benefit the rest of the pop ulation.

They start talking about "giving it to somebody else" when the money starts getting spent on universal education and universal health care, and get ap oplectic when it gets spent on social welfare.

The reality is that universal health care is primarily a defense against pl agues, but since you've got to deliver regular health care in order to suck the patients in, the rich resent paying for it, even when it's the cheapes t way managing the service.

Universal education is a device for getting a more productive work force, b ut - at the moment - it's cheaper for US capitalists to out-source the work to other countries who have paid to educated their own work force and US c apitalism is too dumb to realise that there's only a finite number of third world countries for which this is a good deal, and that that number is goi ng to get smaller as the rest of the world play catch-up.

The Germans have always invested more in educating their work force, and no w export about as much as the US despite having only a quarter of the popul ation.

James Arthur and most of the Republican Party are too dumb to get the messa ge.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

r

The

hey

ore

ant to keep

's

r

ds

at's

I don't see anything wrong with that--we're better off without companies if they're being run that stupidly.

If there's a profitable market--namely, a demand for what the company was selling--then a new, better-run company will quickly materialize to take advantage of that market.

If there is no profitable market, then that's society's judgement that we don't need/want the product anyhow, at least not on the terms offered. In that case everyone's better off producing something we're better at.

This is how we efficiently allocate labor and resources in a free society--we let people buy what they want, and the system adapts itself to meeting those wants and needs.

Interfering with that process traps us in outmoded, inefficient pursuits.

atisfaction.

Demonstrably it *has* happened and had been the norm in the United States--people change jobs quite often. But that is slowing and will slow further as federal intrusions make it harder to hire, and harder to move and change jobs. (E.g., fiscal policy to support our overspending has made it harder for people to get mortgages, which makes it harder for them to relocate to a new job.)

But it's *their* company, *their* property. It ain't pretty, but they can sell it if they want to.

If you don't like it--if they're jerks or slave-drivers or PHBs, start your own! That's the natural, healthy solution.

(And we should make sure it's *easy* to start a new venture so that'll happen, and as I've seen many, many times in my own experience. Instead we're making it hard to do.)

But you don't have a right to force other people to make employment for you--that would be a weird sort of pathological bondage. And it would make for a pretty miserable work situation all around.

You do know that "trickle-down" never existed and was never proposed by anyone, right? That was a strawman invented by Reagan's critics.

Reagan simply suggested that people could spend their own money better than any government could spend it for them--more wisely, more carefully, and in ways better suited to their individual situations, wants, and needs.

We need a federal government for national defense, for minting a currency, and negotiating trade, but it's a wickedly inefficient, awful way to run almost any other enterprise, an economy, or to micromanage people's lives.

s

Automation is a good thing--increasing the amount each person can produce means that same person will have produced more goods he can trade with other workers for goods that they have produced.

I.e, raising productivity increases standard of living. It's the only thing I can think of offhand that can.

Yes, we have fewer people growing all of our food, and fewer washer-women pounding clothes clean every Thursday on smooth river rocks, but we find other things to do, other ways to contribute things society needs.

Here that particular outsourcing is driven more by government impositions on employers than anything. People hire consultants to avoid the many agencies that pounce on you with monthly demands if you dare hire an employee.

Cheers, James Arthur

:

for

. The

they

more

want to keep

se's

der

oods

The problem is that the merger and acquisition bonus distorts the prioritie s of the managers.

Unless an importer pops up and grabs enough of the domestic market to make is unprofitable to provide the capital set up a new company to exploit what 's left of the market.

That grossly over-simplifies how markets work. After the UK had joined the EU the Italian washing machine manufacturer Indesit expended a lot of capit al tooling up to produce in European market volumes, and ended up with pret ty much all the cheaper end of the washing machine market. The expensive en d went to the up-market German machines, which also sell well in Australia these days.

Sadly, the free market has to be watched carefully to make sure that somebo dy isn't organising it into cartels. Given half a chance, the big players w ill turn your free market into defacto monopoly, and give you centrally pla nned "quality" at exorbitant prices.

Not interfering with it leaves you stuck with cartels, which are just as ou tmoided and inefficient. Remember Ralph Naders "Unsafe at any Speed"? The U S free market wasn't doing well there, and went on to react to European com petition by giving the US consumer as series of ever-expanding "compact" ca rs.

This rather ignores the gross and growing income inequalities in the US. Th ere's no free market in labour - or at least none that moves people to bett er paying or more attractive jobs, except for the top 1% of the income dist ribution.

That's the capitalist perception. When the company gets sold to be dismantl ed, because a close enough product can be imported from a lower-wage countr y, the value - "goodwill" - embodied in a working organisation is destroyed .

Technical development does involve creative destruction, but shipping jobs off-shore is destructive without being creative.

If you've got access to that kind of capital, and a distribution network to peddle what you produce. It may be natural and healthy, but it's also rema rkably tricky, and 80% of new businesses fail in the first five years.

But 80% of them failed ...

That's not what's proposed. The aim is more to preserve existing organisati ons and move them on to doing something different and more profitable as th e technological possibilities open up. In the UK companies tend to be run b y accountants, who are happy to sell up at the drop of a hat. In Germany mo re of them are run by engineers, who want to keep on making things. Thatche r might have dismantled British industry, but she had lot of willing helper s in British management.

It's not just the CEO's who are over-paid. The whole top 1% of US society g ets remarkably high wages, to the point where the US 99% has had thirty yea rs of more or less constant wages, and the benefits of economic growth have pretty much been creamed off by the 1%.

The Laffer Curve predates Reagan.

s.

Sure. And there really is a Santa Claus.

, .

If you let American's run it. Germans and Scandinavians can do it better, p robably because their political system isn't quite as antiquated, and less devoted to letting the poeple who own the country run the country.

The service you are happy to have the government run, and collect taxes to pay for, are services that benefit the people who own the country a whole l ot more than they benefit people who work for them.

e's

All of which problems correlate with income inequality.

most_Always_Do_Better

Seems unlikely to be true. Consultants and employees do different kinds of jobs. If you are doing anything particularly complicated, consultants can h elp you with isolated bits of it, but you need to grow your own in-house Ph il Hobbs for the system engineering.

The US collects about 30% of it's GDP in taxes, Germany about 45% and Swede n 55%. James Arthur doesn't like those figures but Thomas Piketty is a whol e lot better at economics than any of the people that James Arthur turns to for his counter-evidence.

There's rather less poverty around in Sweden and Germany than there is in t he US, and while James Arthur is happy to blames this on American exception alism, more objective observers are more inclined to think that Americans w ith money are better place to avoid getting taxed than the inhabitants of b etter run countries.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney