The Establishment needs a pool of voters to keep them in office.
The Establishment has no interest in making the voters unhappy/dissatisfied. The Establishment does have an interest in screwing the voters, and will do so until they are /almost/ sufficiently unhappy/dissatisfied that they riot or vote for non-Establishment radicals.
The far left is as bad as the far right, and - as both Goebbels and Stalin articulated - it is simple to turn a raving farleftie into a raving farrightie or v.v.
I think there is more than one governing class (at least in the UK).
Both are educated elites but one lot believes in low taxes and a devil take the hindmost capitalist race to the bottom and the other believes in sharing all wealth out according to need to avoid poverty and suffering. Both of these extremes are ultimately doomed to failure.
Somewhere in between there is a workable optimal solution.
Creating the poor unhappy voters is a side effect of extreme free market capitalism destroying jobs to make an instant paper profit.
Philip Green's wrecking of the BHS chain will serve as a perfect example of rapacious capitalism destroying jobs to maximise profits. And then sheltering the profits in an offshore tax haven in his wife's name. Selling it on to a serial bankrupt Walter Mitty character only adds to the story's likelihood of entering the canon of business school "how not to do it" case studies. Or how to do it if you are shameless. It didn't help that he had just taken delivery of his latest superyatch when the shit hit the fan.
Fred the Shred's destruction of RBS/Natwest was similar. Too big to fail so he got to keep his incredibly generous company pension. Taxpayer bailout of private banking company gone bad.
The "haves" can now affect the laws so that ever more wealth is concentrated in their hands. Super rich are now de facto above the law.
But if you look at what is happening at the moment the CEOs are giving themselves 10% increases every year while screwing their employees with below inflation wage rises. Something will have to give sooner or later.
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It beggars belief that CEOs that destroy companies by their reckless actions still get rewarded with generous bonuses and golden parachutes. Shareholders and non-executive directors have proved to be spineless.
Land tends to hold its value rather better than stock shares in the longer term. There is a very finite amount of it and a lot of demand.
That happens too although the supermarkets in the UK have recently been shamed into not throwing away perfectly good food to maintain prices.
Few politicians believe in anything but telling the story that will get them re-elected.
A competitive market makes companies hire as needed. Unless govenment punishes hiring, as it largely does here.
You can't expect or demand that businesses be charities. Government policy shapes *how* businesses make profits. US tax policy encourages companies to export jobs and profits, so they obligingly do so.
Flooding a country with cheap illegal labor doesn't help the locals get good jobs either.
Shareholders want short-term profit, and one way to get that is to RIF employees. Wall Street runs Congress.
A tax on short-term investments, or a sales tax on all financial transactions, would radically damp down the casino that is now called "investing."
Farmers in California have to throw away tons of "imperfect" fruit and veggies, which drives up prices. It's the law.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
Pseudo elites here, mostly. Nancy Pelosi, PE, has the wits of a turnip.
It needn't be a race to the bottom. Libertarians / classical conservatives (until recently called 'liberals') merely want to let free people, voluntarily exchange goods and services, at prices they mutually agree, and find mutually beneficial. What's wrong with that?
That freedom, minimally discouraged, produces a whirlwind of creativity, innovation, a general prosperity, new and better methods of production, etc. And it's self-organizing. (Necessarily--turnip-head Pelosi & pals have *no* idea how to run things, however hard they try.)
The advantage of free enterprise is, in part, that the producers and consumers all constantly, actively seek that globally and locally optimal solution.
Herb Stein's Law applies--that's self-limiting.
That result is inherent--wherever the government tightly controls businesses, businesses will make it their business to tightly control the government. That's rational--they have to.
(E.g., Obamacare just dictated insurance co's operating margins and business practices. As a result, they're losing billions. (Thanks, Obamacare!) Gov't intervention has made lobbying life or death for them. (Wasn't before, but sure is now.))
Good riddance to a sanctuary city >:-} ...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
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| 1962 | Liberalism is a persistent, parasitic, vegetative state.
For low values of "big worry". I do know there was one building built with a flaw that could cause it to topple in a hurricane. They rushed repairs to get them done before hurricane season in no small part because of the domino effect. But otherwise they just build structures to not fall down. One building falling is still pretty bad so they don't give much more concern to a domino effect.
You can see it in action in Scandinavia and Germany. Their societies have a range of incomes - less extreme than in the US or the UK - so they aren't sharing "all" the wealth, but they are investing enough in the health and e ducation of the poor to sustain a productive working class. The US spends a s much on locking up the less productive elements of their least well-paid sector as it seems to spend on making the less-well-paid sector better educ cated and more productive, so they've clearly lost the plot.
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most_Always_Do_Better
makes the point that Japan has one of the least unequal income distribution s around while not using income taxes to level it out.
In the UK and the US a lot of the income inequality comes from very generou s salaries paid to top executives, senior surgeons, top lawyers and the lik e. That isn't socially acceptable in Japan, and doesn't happen. It needs to be come socially unacceptable in the US, the UK and Australia but it may take a while.
In Australia the claim is that if you don't pay top people top salaries the y will be hired away by the Americans, which is a touch implausible. Austra lian firms have been known to hire American executives at ridiculous salar ies, which might be seen as making the story more plausible, if the people had hired had done better.
If the US is in a fiscal crater, it's a fairly comfortable one. A lot more of the people are working and innovating than were working and innovating a fter three years of the Great Depression. James doesn't like admitting that eight years of Obama haven't done the damage that - as a rabid Republican
- he's been hoping for and relentlessly predicting since 2008.
The Republican Party is a spent farce, that's for sure. This may not be as much of a negative consequence as James Arthur thinks.
Shifting the US economy until it looked more like Scandinavia or Germany wo uldn't be raping anybody, though the rich might end off slightly less rich, if a long way short of poor. Hillary isn't going to go that far - Bernie S anders might have tried - and she won't wreck anything, though she may be a ble to derail a few particularly outrageous gravy-trains.
The current US situation where the top 1% of the income distribution gets s pectacularly richer while the median income stagnates is certainly setting
99% of the country against the richest 1%, but that's been going on since R eagan, though it's gotten a bit more egregious recently.
Hillary certainly isn't responsible for that, and she is showing signs (pro mpted by Bernie) of realising that that particular division needs to be mad e less glaring.
Sadly, the prevailing rules in the USA are making the rich richer and leaving the median income static or declining.
That's not a positive sum game (if you figure in the below-median incomes that are declining), and the rules need to adjusted until a lot more people get to share in the growth of the economy.
The choice is to do that or to have the majority of the population decide that it wants to play a decidedly different game - and revolutions are never profitable in the short term.
Right I'm familiar with that one, but I don't think that's what they're talking about for "wall system."
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I think the area available for the tower footprint is too small to use this for their piles, it makes no difference how strong the pile is, they need cross-sectional area to spread out the loading and reduce the weight per unit area.
decide that it wants to play a decidedly different game - and revolutions are never profitable in the short term.
Suicide bombers show that you don't need a majority to play havoc. Imagine the US prison population (.5%) armed and united. A large part of them are young, desperate and ruthless. Revolutions take place when one concludes that ones life is not worth anything anyway. That time is near.
This thought should be enough to convince the rich that they are better off with better education and better prospects for the population at large. And birth control and abortion. (A large part of prison inmates are unwanted children with an unhappy youth.) Of course this is the social-democratic solution, what US-denizens call liberal.
More realistic is that it will end in a violent overturn of the system ("old-fashioned" communist view 1]), at least in the US. Fortunately a total destruction of the US wouldn't mean the end of civilisation (historically speaken), because China has become the center of the Western civilisation, harbouring all technical and most scientific knowhow. A factory doesn't disappear when nobody knows who owns the shares because Manhattan has burned down. Maybe the blueprints for the Intel 86 get lost, but that may be just a blessing in disguise.
The historic perspective is missing from the Trump versus Hillary discussion. Don't they teach history in the USA schools? (Oops they don't. Maybe "THE" civil war.)
1] There is a long standing misconception that communists are striving for a violent overturn to happen. They just consider it inevitable, claiming it is a scientific conclusion.
--
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
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