The biggest single component of the cost of a car (at least prebankruptcy) was health care. Nationalize health care, as it is in every other developed country, and watch your car costs go down.
As a Christian, I know from First Timothy, 5:18, that Scripture says, "Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain," and "The worker deserves his wages."
If the desire for working men to support their families in decency is a hallmark of liberalism, so be it.
Once you can fake sincerity, you have it made?
"
How do you think capitalists make money? From the labor and talent of others. Warren Buffett is a very wealthy man because he helped himself to what other people have earned. Buffett's most important talent is his eye for recognizing the talent of others.
Alinsky wasn't interested in acquiring personal power as such, but rather in acquiring political influence, which isn't quite the same thing - for one thing it is somewhat harder to convert political influence into money in your pocket.
He wanted to see this political influence directed to moving society to the left, which he didn't see as a destructive aim. Comparing Europe and the US, it's hard to see that slightly more left-wing societies than the US have been destroyed or are on their way to destruction.
You seem to be able to sustain your delusions in this area by being very selective about the indices that you pay attention to, but then you are a right-wing nitwit of the more unrealistic kind.
There's no good reason to attribute the 1%'s 1-percent-ness to a power imbalance. Even assuming some sort of error causes it, chances are better that the error that causes it happened in n emergent, unplanned way than by exercise of power.
"Bugs" are shaped by thought processes, but are not (usually) directly or intentionally caused by them. This assuming it's even a bug.
If you look at how the 1% gets into the 1%, it's not exactly a conspiracy. It's really a lot about default behaviors.
We don't have much of an aristocracy *really*. YMMV, but read "The First Tycoon" - it describes how Cornelius Vanderbilt invented the industrial class in America. Before that, there really was a(n) (land based) aristocracy and everybody else.
I think that the bottom 99% percent pretty much give that power, if it exists at all, to the top 1%.
Are you sure? Maybe what is happening with industrial labor jobs is the same thing that happened with subsistence/freehold farming - the rest of the economy got bigger, and made it harder to stick with that way of life.
GM yes. Maybe not so much Ford. Maybe not so much the IBEW.
Unions also were kind-of, sort-of an... echo of Tammany style democracy. T. Roosevelt successfully painted Tammany style democracy with the "corrupt" rubric, but the political forces that fed Tammany styles democracy did not go away.
When people call Obama a "machine style politician", SFAIK, this is what they mean - even though T.R. was about full of it when he did his whole "shining city on a hill" thing... but there was a big shear between the immigrant-cities and the Vast Interior, best exemplified by Prohibition...
Just IMO, but I think the "union problem" is more that:
1) There was an equilibrium about the time of the publication of John Kenneth Galbraith "Modern Industrial State" where you had large, monolithic firms that could be "opposed" by marge, monolithic unions, said unions supported by large, monolithic government to achieve a Bismarckian Balance of Power.
2) Over time, smaller, faster firms undermined the large firms. Firms specialized more, and there wasn't the "slack" necessary to make the union thing work.
there's about four dimensions of hubris riding on all that. The main one is that firms are never eternal things.
Taking GM, I would say that GM was *probably* doomed when it was forced to adapt to war production in WWII. Sorry, I lost the reference, but there's a guy... the book had something to do with how Roger Smith decided to do Saturn.
That's actually a pretty good question. Was it? Or was "liberalism" the chicken that crowed while the whole thing went belly up?
If we observe that global GDP rose from 1820 to pretty recently at 4% a year, then from 1945 to 1995, that's 1.04^50 = 7.10 - a 610% increase in global GDP. IOW, it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place...
jefferson et al really were Aristocrats; i.e. people who thought they should prepare to be called on to lead *militarily* ( even though Jefferson never did ). R.E. Lee was an example of this.
The whole industrial rubric would have confused Jefferson no end.
Yes, I have a boss like that and we've been having some words lately, mostly because he has noticed that I have been coming up short with diagnostic solving problems with failing devices and changes to correct such issues.
Guess that makes one less person he can use to get shoulder educated to claim fame and glory for this years bonus check.
Point of the matter is, if you have something of value to offer you should be rewarded for it and not have it stolen for credit else where and you swept under the rug until your skills are needed to make some one else shine again.
It wouldn't be so back if credit for skills was at least recognized to the correct person, but that isn't the case. In the end, the one doing the shoulder viewing and stealing usually ends up in a ditch, especially now with the way things are heading.
If you are guilty of such actions and know just about nothing on the field that you profited from by stealing it from those that do, I think now would be a good time to take the money and run.
A sort of "Maxwell's Demon" for wealth and power? The probability that half the country's wealth spontaneously flowed to 1% of the people has to be small.
If you're not part of the 1%, you obviously are lacking in one or more ways. How Calvinist of you.
If so, it was through inaction and passivity. Getting it back will take effort.
That's not what I pointed out. What I pointed out was that the welfare state has allowed a certain number of bad marriages to end in divorce, which hadn't happened to be a financially accessible option in earlier times.
I don't happen to think that this is destructive - being stuck in a bad marriage damages spouses and kids even more than separation.
I was objecting to Sowell's appropriating irrelevant consequences of the development of the welfare state as evidence to support his bizarre delusions about its effects on African-American families.
Tom Del Rosso doesn't seem to be able register this kind of fine distinction.
Heh. I like the Maxwell's Demon idea. No, as productivity per unit work applied grows ( and it has ), you *kind* of expect the "work" to move up the food chain ( you have three people minding the CNC mill instead of several machinists minding the multiple hand mills ) and that the remaining hard problems - coordination and logistics - end up employing more people than they did.
They there rises increasing arbitrage and trading/hedging to buffer prices... and you get sensitivities to supply shocks you didn't used to have...
If work per unit input is a "lever", then you expect more "movement", but more "error". That will influence firm design.
I think the Calvinist bias is inherent in our system, which was largely built by a bunch of Calvinists. Nice observation, though.
You're assuming an asymmetry that's not clearly been shown.
Anybody who knew enough theology to tell the difference between a Calvinist and a member of some other branch of the Protestant faith would have wasted too much time studying theology to have made a significant contribution to building our system (which doesn't have a lot of specifically Calvinist content).
When US income tax payments - as a proportion of income - peak at incomes around $5M per year and are appreciably lower for people earning $10M per year or more, there's obviously at least one asymmetry built into the system.
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The US rich have been creaming off progressively more of the profits for the last thirty years. It's theoretically possible that they've earned them - fair and square - but fact that income tax stops being progressive in practice for incomes over $10M per year does suggest that the rich have more political power than they should have, and that they are using it to get even richer.
It's what the rich have always done in the past, and Karl Marx built a political philosophy around the idea that we ought to reorganise society so that they couldn't. That proved to throw rather too much baby out with the bath-water. Socialism is a rather more practical way of coping with the problem that money generates political power and political power has a way of hoovering up money.
European socialism does seem to deliver a more equal income distribution in tolerably prosperous countries
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Norwegians get more money per head than US citizens, but Norway has got a lot more oil per head than even the US. The average income in Germany is about 80% of the average income in the US, and while the German economy is growing faster than the US economy, it's going to take some twenty years for them to catch up (though the massive US balance of payments deficit and the impressive German balance of payments surplus does suggest that the German economy is in rather better shape than the US economy and likely to do appreciably better in the long term).
Our system is *significantly* Calvinist. There's a BookTv of "Coming Apart", and that's the main distinction between the Haves and Have Nots - the Haves do things in a relatively Calvinist way.
It's a faded .. version of that, but the echos of Calvin still determine who wins and who doesn't.
its not like the exploitative Congregationalist Abolitionists in the US, working people to the bone whilst decrying slavery, but it's a ... better upholstered version of same.
What produces all the people who oppose you here if not that?
In order to concentrate on event of that statistical unlikeliness, you have to ignore the relative impact.
I think that, for one, people understand basically that outliers are outliers, and that "the rich" aren't a fixed cadre.
Maybe not; maybe it's all just fantasy.
Karl Marx was the second-worst economist who ever lived. At the end, it wasn't even economics any more. Since his principle emphasis was on economics, he is to be discarded.
he eventually clung to a collectivism unworthy even of Goethe, and reversed himself. When he jumped the shark on liberalism itself...
As I've said before - there's no fixed bag o' money, and inflation works better if you really want to experiment with socialism.
We're really talking about filing debt down; the rest will take care of itself.
Sure does. But there's more than one parameter in the distribution - those countries still don't have *quite* the income we have.
And the EU will probably mask any advance they'll see.
At least you brought that up.
If they ever do, and why should they?
Phbbt! it is to be grown away *from*. If we can't grow it any more, we deserve what we get.
Zappa thought the same, more than twenty years ago...
So sharp elbows in Germany == good; sharp elbows in the US mean Bad. Never mind the Austrians...
In theory, I'm a Congregationalist. What has filtered down from the last-generation-but-one who still took it seriously doesn't have much ideological content.
Mainly an unwillingness to do critical thinking. They soak up ideas from their environment, and don't notice that they don't make sense.
It's not a lot of people - about 0.6% of the tax-payers - but it is a lot of money - 4.2% of the income tax collected.
Some of the people who end up earning more than $10M in a single year are outliers. Some - like Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney - have been doing it for many years, and pay out closer to 17% of their incomes in income tax as opposed to the 26.3% average for the group. I'd say that those two were representative of a residual fixed cadre. If the one- off tax payers pay 30%, like the average $1M up to $10M income per year group, then the fast cadre would be about 0.2% of the tax-payers, but still a couple of percent of the income tax take.
"Follow the money" is always a good strategy.
That's not what economists think. He found a new and useful way of looking at the economic world. His political ideas weren't all that useful, but work that he and Engels did with economic statistics was original and useful and effectively created modern econometrics.
When he endorsed the "leading role of the party", effectively turning his back on democracy, he'd lost touch with political reality. Not getting it entirely right doesn't disqualify you as genius level innovator - look at Linus Pauling who was almost right (at the Nobel Prize level) in two very different areas.
There's no fixed bag of money, but the people who hold very large bags of money tend to behave in very similar ways over the years.
I don't think so. At the moment money buys a lot too much political power per dollar in the US, enough to feed an instability that is concentrating more money and power in the hands of a very small minority - more the 0.1% than the 1%.
Somebody needs to get in there and damp down this particular trend.
As I discussed in the next few sentences.
Really? The federal system has been working in the US since 1776. It will evolve into something at least as effective in Europe - probably more effective, since we've got more history to tell us what not to do.
It's sort of obvious.
They've still got a manufacturing industry - one that's internationally competitive and remarkably productive, despite relying on expensive (if well-trained) labour.
You've spent thirty years not growing away from it. That doesn't point to a good outcome.
But then West Germany was re-united with East Germany, and the thriving West German economy was diluted by the third world East German economy. It's taken a lot of investment to bring the former East Germany up to close to western European standards, and the investment is still going on. It sort of parallels US investment in the Sun Belt, but that was motivated in part by a desire to invest capital in areas where the trade unions weren't well-established. More recently, the capital has fled to Mexico and China. In Germany, the trade unions are built-in.
It's not just sharp elbows that sustain the German economic miracle, but also a well orchestrated coordination of capital and labour. There's plenty of competition in Germany, but also a great deal of negotiation and compromise.
The 1948 West German constitution was tolerably innovative as modern constitutions go, and seems to form the basis of a state that runs remarkably smoothly. The US constitution is overdue for revision, and the German constitution would seem to be current best practice. It's been running long enough that careful examination should reveal any rough edges - I don't know of any, but I'm not exactly deeply interested in that kind of question.
Most mainline European religions don't. It's different from the early
19th Century.
Yeah, I don't see that. When people quote Bastiat, they're thinking.
It may or may not make all that much difference.
I think George Romney is more interesting. The book "Borrow" referred to him, and his role in the rise of financialization.
But constructing the code to detect and "fix" all that is vanishingly difficult.
it can be when you can actually follow it.
Modern economists? No, they don't care for Marx at all.
True enough, although that's one small contribution that's been made important mainly by others.
Sure. Marx remains quaintly erroneous....
it "didn't work" for quite a long time. Read of Jackson and the Second Bank of the United States. American specifically had a continuing series of deep monetary crises. Yurp+Britain had a handful of deeper ones.
One read of our Civil War is that as we continued to have deflation, only slaves, gold and land retained value.
yeah, I don't see it. It makes 19th Century Determinist assumptions.
Somebody needs to do a compare-contrast between that and the decline of manufacturing in the US. Smells of Mercantilism right now...
We haven't kept the money supply up.
The Sun belt was more about land use and such than trade unions. But like I saw, I haven't found the book that really teases all this apart yet.
Another way to look at it is that they pick winners. All the top ten or so there are pre-WWII firms, with significant government control.
IMO, they've managed to implement Galbraith's "Modern Industrial State" in the present time.
I'd really like a good analysis of it, but haven't been able to find one.
Back to the EU, it's all worked for Germany, but the rest of the EU is varyingly in dire straits.
As if anybody thought that nothing had changed in the last 200 years.
Quoting Bastiat is clear evidence of not thinking. He was a right-wing nitwit who was scared out of what wits he had by socialism, and his irrational anxieties only find favour with people who share them. If Bastiat had been any kind of prophet, Germany would have crashed and burned as soon as Bismark introduced national insurance. James Arthur doesn't seem to have got his head around the historical fact that Germany has been doing fine ever since (though a bunch of guys who were nearly as silly as James Arthur - but called themselves socialists - did put a kink in the curve from 1933 to 1945).
So you are running another Great Experiment. It's filling your land with vice and crime, but some of you think that you like it.
Twaddle. There's no point in trying for marginal tax rates above 60% - anything more makes tax avoidance too profitable - but many countries have maximum income tax rates around that level and collect rather more than 30% from the incomes of the high earners.
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Real economists, as opposed to Chicago school tell the rich what they want to hear monetarists?
Pioneers may only make a small contribution, but it's a crucial contribution.
"1. Money buys the votes of the general public. (Maybe savvy donors just donate to candidates who will win in the hopes of influencing them.) "
A lot of politicians and a lot of donors are convinced that money does buy the votes of the general public. If the reporter think that political scientists haven't proved that this true, he probably ought to be more sceptical about the political scientists than the proposition they haven't managed to prove yet.
Reporters do like playing the contrarian, but you don't want to take them seriously.
If it hadn't worked, it wouldn't still exist.
But the industrial north flattened the "rich" south. that industrial capacity did have some value after all.
James Arthur doesn't see it either. His reasoning is that the US constitution is perfect, the EU has got a inferior constitution and has to do worse. In the meantime, US manufacturing is down the tubes and Germany - with about a quarter of the population - is exporting more than the US. Time for a reality check.
Merchantalism tells the US that it pays for it to export it's manufacturing industry to China. Pragmatism points out that the Chinese aren't going to give it back.
Monetarist voodoo economics. Your balance of payments deficit is pretty much exactly what you pay for the oil you import. If you were more economical with energy, or exploited renewable energy sources that didn't cost you foreign currency, you wouldn't have a problem. Both require investment which you aren't making. Anthropogenic global warming is a great excuse to invest in renewable, locally generated energy, and your oil companies have invested significant amounts of money in persuading the voting public that anthropogenic global warming isn't happening. You seem to have some kind of death wish.
Perhaps. Do you think that this is a bad thing?
You've been reading too many US newspapers. Greece is in dire straits, but seems to have been stabilised. Italy has finally got rid of Berlusconi, and should recover rapidly. Spain relied too much on the tourist industry, and when the sub-prime banking crisis discouraged people from taking expensive vacations, they were in trouble. They are digging their way out, but it's going to take a while. Portugal and Ireland were dirt poor - even poorer than Spain under Franco - and they need a lot more investment. France is fine. The Netherlands and England have got right-wing nitwit governments who share the Tea Party's enthusiasm for putting the economy into recession in order to balance the budget. They aren't going to wreck either country, but they will slow them down. Sweden's fine, Denmark seems to be okay. Nobody seems to be worried about the new members of the EU - like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Presumably their guest workers in the rest of Europe will be remitting enough cash keep everything working.
If you understood socialism, it would inspire skepticism of it.
!. !!!. !!!!!!.
You *really* didn't just say that.
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The impulse response of that change is not very likely to be very large. That's the point. It may well play well in the press, and people will be happier in the manner of schadenfreude, but it won't make much difference.
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Think about how the alpha parameter for that works.
I don't know of any serious economists of any stripe who consider Marx important.
Of course. But the rest is not of any value.
Which is something we *DON'T* know.
You have a headache now, don't you? ":)
I am afraid I do have to take them seriously. That's not contrarian, that's the state of the art in social science.
Ezra Klein is a notorious liberal, anyway. IMO, he's centrist, but those words stopped working, so...
It doesn't exist in the form it exists in now. Read "Monetary History" by Milton Friedman. Trust me, it won't damage your brain. The present state dates back to about 1913 at the latest.
Not for a couple decades after.
There's good evidence for that. And it's not so much the Constitution as EUB policy, which is highly contractionary.
What Germany is doing is the manufacturing equivalent of Physiocracy. The EU mess should indicate that it's not that sustainable. And each individual German pays for it in quality of life. Of course, the pallitative is to define *that* as the standard and bias the data...
Tot up the total employees on this list:
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3, maybe 4 million worldwide.
So you don't know what mercantilism is.
Nothing in that sentence works.
Renewables are money down a rat hole. That's beyond proven. Classic subsidy cost shifting. Classic R&D is not sufficient.
Nothing about that is true, either. there's been agitprop by Big Oil, but they also go green in ads and on the shop floor.
I think it's weird. again, I lack a truly detailed analysis of how it really works - I'm biased by expats who say it *doesn't* work.
Why didn't the Galbraith model continue in the US? You can't say it was tax policy, any policy, really. I think the US economy is essentially open, and the German economy is closed.
if anybody knows a good compare contrast, I'd appreciate the reference.
Yes.
Well, the principal criticisms of EU policy are Monetarist, so you won't listen... I think it's much more doomed than even the newspapers. I don't think they can manage the productivity needed without pulling something out of the hat.
I'm sceptical about everything, but I've lived with European socialism for some forty years now, and it doesn't work the way Bastiat predicted.
The US has been scared silly of socialism for more than a century, and there have been quite a few episodes where this anxiety has reached absurd proportions. You really don't want to believe everything you read in your newspapers.
Compared with what Bastiat was predicting, Germany has been doing fine. The working classes have kept on working, rather than ripping off the national capital and spending it on eating and drinking themselves silly.
Doesn't work if you are outside of the US.
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One of the reasons for taking more money away from the rich is to reduce their political leverage. It's not all that effective, because the very rich can move their money faster than the government can get it's hands on it. Another way reduce the political power of money is to reduce the amount the rich can spend on influencing elections. Your legal system has sabotaged some of the recent initiatives in that area, but as more money gets spent US election advertising, it starts irritating more people than it influences.
There also the point that lobbying has a tendency to move over into outright corruption, and that's irritating the electorate too.
There already more than enough political corruption in the US to justify cleaning up the system - that would be motivated by fairness, not schadenfreude. The damage - schade - is going on now - and there'd be legitimate rejoicing if it were reduced.
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,
Why bother? We know that upping the maximum rate of marginal tax to about 60% isn't going to make much difference to the distribution, but it is going to collect more money from people who are paying rather less than they ought to at the moment.
Not my experience.
But we do have a shrewd - and widely shared - suspicion.
Absolutely none
So much for social science.
There's good evidence the US has got a lot of land, a lot of natural resources and a large internal market. The US constitution would have to have been really bad to sabotage all that, and all the evidence suggests that it used to be no worse mediocre. The rest of world is now rather better run than it used to be, and you need to raise your game.
Not the way it's reported over here.
It's kind of difficult to imagine an manufacturing equivalent of Physiocracy, since that famously treated manufacturing as a waste of good agricultural labour. The Germans are certainly investing in areas outside of manufacturing - it's one of the reasons why their manufacturing industry is so productive. Did you have a rational point there, or where you just trying to look educated?
Really? The EU mess - such as it is - is basically about individual countries who tolerate dangerous degrees of tax evasion.
And what aspect of their quality of life do you see as compromised? German health care is as good as US health care - and it's universal.
omy_of_Germany#Companies
Why should I bother? What's special about the top ten German companies? They are responsible for a disproportionate share of the exports, or anything else much. Are you doing a James Arthur - citing meaningless numbers in the hope of looking numerate?
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tells me that it is one more antiquated economic theory. You do a lot of trade with China, but it doesn't seem to be making you rich.
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Until you figure in economies of scale, and the economics of buying an ever-larger proportion of a finite resource. Germany's subsidies halved the cost of photovoltaic power generation, and the there are another couple of orders of magnitude to go before renewable sources start approaching the installed based of fossil-carbon burning energy generators.
Scarcely. You are actually articulating a short-sighted misconception.
Economies of scale are driven by the development of better manufacturing techniques. Classic ivory tower R&D isn't always aware of what's needed at the sharp end.
The propaganda that can be traced back to them is usually green. The money that they feed to the "merchants of doubt" isn't.
Precicely to the point. That desire is soo not the objective of liberalism. Unless they expect to have that life style without any effort on their part, now that is _real_(tm) liberalism.
Bastiat would have been dumbfounded by how productive we've become. That's the big surprise for everybody. It's given us margin for error.
Basic agricultural production has become phenomenally productive in ... roughly a century. Industrial production arguably moves even faster.
Not really. There have been Americans who made noises that way, but we've had our share of socialism.
Of course not. William Randolph Hearst...
I address that down the page. We suspect, but cannot prove, that this is true.
Exactly.
Outright corruption is beyond the ability of most people.
You call it fairness, I'll continue to call it schadenfreude. it's motivated by mimetic desire, just like a pair of two year olds when one reaches for a toy....
Wow, then.
In the same sense that we had a suspicion that witches made cattle die...
Those only go so far.
Capacity utilization in the US is at historic lows.
It is what it is, whether it's reported properly or not. The figures indicate contraction.
I made the point elsethread. What , four million employed in all those vaunted German companies?
There's more to life than healthcare. Food price, real estate cost , the cost of moving around are all lower in the US.
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That's my question. I'm not the one saying "Germany gets it right".
I caveat-ed the entire line of reasoning with "where's the good compare/contrast"?
It's rather difficult to explain. Might not even be a good idea this year. Might be about doing good instead of doing well, too.
Good. We can piggyback on that when the time comes. The cost bottlenecks in photovoltaics have been *demonstrated* as much tougher problems than meres subsidy can overcome. It'll take more than halving the cost, and the bottlenecks aren't tractable by economy of scale.
No kidding. Besides, deployment of photoV is tougher than it looks...
Liberalism is a moderately right-wing political philosophy. Americans tend to confuse it with socialism, which is further to the left (although not all that far - there are lots of far left ideas that moderate socialists regard as lunatic).
Josephkk has a weird idea of what might constitute _real_(tm) liberalism. If he googled the term he'd be hard pressed to find a definition that included the rejection of economic reality implicit in the expectation of getting a good "life style without any effort on their part".
The use of the word "precisely" to begin such a dim-witted exhibition of sloppy thinking is exceedingly comical.
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