U.S. Economic Myths

France? Belguim? Netherlands? England? South Korea? Australia?

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Cool shapes and dynamics and colors. We had fun discussing and modeling this various ways. The Sampling Theorem is like Conservation of Energy: it comes up everywhere in diverse, neat ways, and is a simplifying principle in many complex situations.

Fred, you enjoy nothing. All you post is bitterness.

That doesn't sound smart to me.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

[...]

Also from The Guardian:

Beware False Prophets: Equality, the Good Society and The Spirit Level

The report link yields a 404, the URL has changed:

Enjoy...

Frank McKenney

--
  The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are 
  right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly 
  understood.  Indeed the world is ruled by little else.  Practical men, 
  who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual 
  influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.  Madmen in 
  authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from 
  some academic scribbler of a few years back. 
                  -- John Maynard Keynes, British economist

Consider liberating Kuwait from Saddam's army. It only took a few days, and the kill ratio was enormous. US pilots devastated miles after miles of Iraqui convoys, turkey-shoot style; some said that they felt bad fighting such an unbalanced battle. A American tank could turn, aim, and kill before an Iraqui tank could notice we were there. That's the sort of thing the US military is good at, scientifically blowing things up. Not so good at holding a primitive tribal country, full of suicide bombers and religious factions, together.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

So, you go to a store and pay them sales tax, without buying stuff? That's awfully generous.

There is debate, among the advocates of a national sales tax, as to whether used stuff should be taxed. That would be unenforcable in many situations.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

The "consumer spending" thing is a widely accepted falsehood. Spending is a symptom of productivity, not a cause. If everyone went out and bought mahogany firewood and tacky paintings, on their credit cards, GDP would leap up, but we'd be worse off.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

As usual you have your wires crossed. What the US is good at is annihilating third world (read primitive) military opposition. You'll probably be bragging about the Grenada "invasion" next.

I am thinking of a bit more modern US military interventions, such as Vietnam (though it has recovered a bit), and with Iraq and Afghanistan being the primary examples. And of course military, political and economic intervention in Israel and Palestine has done little to make that a happy, peaceful area.

As for Korea, I believe North Korea were the target there - and that country does not top many lists of world's best countries to live in.

Would these countries be in a mess without the US "helping"? Quite possibly (look at Syria, which has destroyed itself without outside help). Would they be in even more of a mess without the US having been there? Who knows. Is the US to blame for the original state of these countries? Not really, though it is not blameless - much of that fault lies with the colonial powers from Europe.

But did the US invade these countries under false pretences, bomb them into the stone age, poison their land (agent orange, depleted uranium, etc.), cripple their infrastructure, provide massive untraced cash supplies that promotes corruption, leave dangerous weapons in the hands of barely trained and barely loyal local troops, encourage rampant exploitation of resources (including their own tax-payer's money), and then leave the countries to chaos and anarchy? Yes, they certainly did.

And to my knowledge, the US never had any military invasion of the UK or Australia.

If you mean classic military blow-em-up conflict (and not occupation/nation building) Kuwait is a good modern example.

We did help them to not become one of the Japanese islands. I think we helped the Philipines, too.

We sort of saved the UK, too, when things were grim. According to the locals, we did invade England. "Over paid, over sexed, and over here."

I think most Americans respect the military for what they do well, when assigned to do it. They don't respect the politicians who decide what to do. Lybia is good (or rather, bad) example.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

and

e-spirit-level

But don't take it too seriously. The objectors cherry pick their data - cla iming, for instance, that the advantage in life expectancy in more equal co untries is entirely due due to Japan. They don't show plots of the data - w hich "The Spirit Level" did - and they don't quote the numbers they get out of their cherry-picked data or compare them with the original Spirit Level data (which you can get off the "Spirit Level" website).

This is standard "construct a vaguely plausible counter-argument" denialist strategy. It ignores the fact that the Spirit Level authors started off as medical epidemiologists, and would seem to have a much better grasp of sta tistics and statistical argument than the objectors.

df

My objections to Saunder et al don't owe anything to this comment - I had w ritten my paragraph before I chanced on theirs.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

How so? Where the F does the money come from?

Well, "credit" Obama for destroying the umpteen contracts between bond holders and GM. Not exactly Constitutional. Natch, that was not the only time he F'ed U.S.

rote:

government is a necessary requirement for a free market, he did not say it was sufficient. Government regulation of free market is positively ANCIENT , especially as it relates to the most basic business dealing, the contract . Without the regulation and especially enforcement, you would have pure ch aos.

This seems a trifle unlikely - it would amount to a Soviet-style centrally managed economy. Why not post a link to the document that you think makes s uch a proposal?

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

The asshole is a true idiot.

The Democratic way; printing presses.

It's John Larkin's moronic proposition - ask him.

He posted it on Friday, 13 March 2015 06:28:05 UTC+11.

You've been remarkably slow reacting to it. Even for John Larkin, it was a pretty stupid image. Only few percent of the Ugandan population has access to electric power, so it seems unlikely that expensive dishwashers would be a popular item.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

One of the essential functions of government is to maintain stable currency, but thanks to the Progressives, no Western government has done that in 100 years.

It's most interesting that the Progressives have nearly nothing to say about the 1920 Recession.

That depends on what you mean by "stable". SFAIK, you can't say "everything must cost exactly what it did in 1965" realistically. For one thing, nothing is the same - you can't buy a 1963 Buick new no matter what - it can't* be built.

*at least not as a mass-market item - perhaps you could find a junker 1963 Buick and have it restored. But unless you're Jay Leno, why? Likewise a 1963 color TV or loaf of bread.

The most "stable" monetary regime I know of is Market Monetarism, in which an NGDP growth target is set, and inflation is used to make up shortfalls in RGDP ( think of this as if it were buffering of the memory type, not impedance type) .

They do this in Australia ( more or less), and there was no Great Recession there.

NDP is Nominal GDP; RGDP is Real GDP. As in all economics the words' meanings are twisted; Nominal is actually Real and Real is sort of fictional. Real is output from accounting systems...

It's the "most stable" in the sense that it entails the least surprise. But it's not an economic "Village Green Preservation Society".

--
Les Cargill

Gold tended to be stable.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com