Greece, sad

Yep. Governments, with the wrong feedbacks, go unstable. Sometimes they rail.

The guys behind our government discussed that at great length, and built in safeties and feedbacks to stabilize ours.

One of the main safeties was distributing power among many hands, and requiring a great deal of agreement from a wide range of parties before imposing anything on the nation as a whole.

The feds are *only* supposed to do things the whole country agrees on. When a people doesn't agree, gridlock is good.

Cheers, James Arthur

Larkin's a fine thinker. A little terrifying on a ski run though.

Cheers, James Arthur

At least I wear long pants.

But the Uniroyal jobs and export numbers likely never come back. It's just a bunch of discount stores and offices, not much in value addition there. I hope that we as a society soon learn that relying on a service industry that serves only our own population isn't going to pay the bills.

It has more to do with unions. Eventually the cost to build a car in and near Detroit became so high that now many cars are no longer produced in the US but in Mexiko. In consequence lots of jobs dried up, supporting industries withered away, people moved out in droves. Those people will have to find a new dentist in South Carolina or wherever their new job is. If they find a new job at all. That's how you end up with abandoned dentist offices.

We need a conservative cleanup now and then. I'd (reluctantly) volunteer to be an immensely unpopular 1-term President, if all I ever did was clean up the tax code. Presidents have been promising that forever, and we're up to 27,000 pages or something.

It would be fun to be Commander in Chief and ride in an F15. Why does Obama golf, when he could be doing cool stuff like that?

Joerg, I totally agree. We need manufacturing back in the US.

(OK this is somewhat just my self interest, more vendors closer to home is easier for me.)

And of course, someone's gotta buy your "cars"! George H.

You sound jealous.

The problem with economies is the huge time constants involved. Things don't take months to fix, they take generations.

You can break things a lot faster than you can fix them.

The subject was Greece, not Detroit.

Democrats left Detroit in tatters.

Ahh, JL let me say that is part of my fear w/ the climate.

George H.

Putting up a few solar panels in California isn't going to Save The Earth. China and India and Africa want civilization, and they're going to get it, and they are going to mostly use fossil fuels to power it.

I personally don't think we'll get a lot of climate change, and if we do, we'll adapt. A few degrees C rise (if indeed we get any) won't make us all drop dead one Thursday afternoon.

Service economy: If everyone paid their neighbor to do their cooking and housecleaning, GDP would jump!

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Granting that the USA is responsible for 25% of the planets CO2 emissions, putting up a lot of solar panels could make a useful difference, particular ly if there were enough to power electric cars rather than hydrocarbon-burn ing vehicles.

China has got as far as it has largely on burning fossil-carbon, but they a re spending a lot on solar and wind power. They've got problems with air po llution that dwarf California's.

India and Africa might be ignorant enough to think that copying what we did is the only way to get where we are going, but India isn't actually that i gnorant, and Africa is getting educated at a surprising rate.

It would definitely pay them to skip the burning-fossil-carbon step - doubl ing the number of consumers of a progressively harder to extract and finite resource isn't clever.

Your idea of "thinking" is retailing the denialist propaganada you run into in the Murdoch media.

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Probably not. But the last rapid rise in temperature, some 56 million years ago

was accompanied by " On land, a sudden appearance of modern mammal orders ( including primates) in Europe and North America" which is to say that a lot of older-style mammals dropped dead to make room for the new orders.

We are a remarkably adaptable species, but when we were adapting rapidly to the swing between ice ages and interglacials, there were only a few millio n of us.

Our current adaption is exquisitely tuned to the current interglacial envir onment, and it may take a while to develop the technology to support seven billion people on a somewhat warmer planet.

Getting endorsed for the quality of your thinking by somebody who takes the Tea Party, Bastiat and the founding tax evaders seriously has to be a mixed blessing.

Larkin's thinking - as paraded here - isn't impressive. His tinkering seems to work a lot better than you'd expect from his written work.

Or that's what they said they were doing. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Funny how it never seems to be difficult to get the government to order barrels of pork from somebody who has a lot of them.

When the well-off people agree, the gridlock magically goes away ...