Things getting worse in Europe

[icenine]

This is really scary....

http://www.latimes.com/business/mone...,5861442.story

[ebacon]

Germany is seeing it, too. They are also drowning in Chinese goods. Last year I saw a homeless guy over there for the first time. It was shocking. Really. In Detroit I can see five homeless people a day. But that wast the first homeless person I ever saw in Germany.

This modern economics stuff is all a hoax designed to bring capitalism to its knees. All the true stuff we ever needed to know about economics was written a long time ago.

Just yesterday I saw that Dow Jones started a Global Industrial Average Index in about 2008. Guess what? It's flat. There isn't any growth. There's just money washing around in a giant pool and Wall Street takes a bucketfull every time a wave goes by. They aren't adding any value. They're just pilfering our retirement money.

[BlueStreak]

"If you want to destroy the Capitalists, simply appeal to their greed and they will destroy themselves."

Not sure, but I think it was Mao that said that.

What's up?

Dave

[Oerets]

Interesting, most economist's, captains of industry and finance all agree in global deregulation or free trade. All I see is a lowering of standard of living in developed countries for every country that raises theirs. A read race to level the playing field with the ones at the top getting all the riches.

Just wait until Google gets their way and puts autonomous cars and trucks on the roads. See how that effects the labor market. Better hope the roads stay cloud free!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car



Barney

[ebacon]

Originally Posted by BlueStreak

. . . What's up?

Dave

IMO? The philosophers are still pusing communism into politicians ears. After all communism is the only economic system with philosophical footing, as weak as that footing is. Ayn Rand was a hoax. Every philosopher knows that. Her propaganda is devoid of art, music, community, emotion, all the little things that make life real. Hell it doesn't even include children.

The fight all boils down to who controls the machines. The machines are the reason for the oil, the unemployment, the capitalists riches, the pollution, etc. etc.

The best a nation can do is adapt to the machines at its own rate. People that try to force the machines on a nation in hopes of makng more money are only going to end up making war, which ironically helps the same people make more money.

When one stands back and looks at the big picture it is easy to see how a brainiac like Ted Kaczinski (Unabmber) got his head in a knot trying to save the world from itself. Also, when one sees the big picture, it is easy to see how the American middle class is a metatable condition that is easy to topple but not so easy to stand back up again. Maintaining it requires the best behavior from its citizens. If someone can turn more than half of them into assholes then it's game over.

[icenine]

I would posit that capitalism has its' intellectual underpinnings, such as Adam Smith's Wealth Of Nations. I think it is a better system properly regulated than any of the various adaptations we have seen from Russia, China, North Korea, etc.

[ebacon]

Originally Posted by icenine

I would posit that capitalism has its' intellectual underpinnings, such as Adam Smith's Wealth Of Nations. I think it is a better system properly regulated than any of the various adaptations we have seen from Russia, China, North Korea, etc.

It does. But note that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations includes issues of jealousy, war, strike, wages, city, rural, machines, and all the other nuances of real life. Add to that the nuances of Keynes, Hayek, and so forth and we get a good roadmap of how people react to perturbations in the economy and, therefore, how to use self-government to navigate through them. That assumes, of course, that our citizens are familiar with all of those texts. Which they aren't anymore. They disappeared from school in the 1970s and are being replaced by Ayn Rand. That story is told in the book "The Closing of the American Mind". The biggest irony is that the camp that cheered the Closing of the American Mind is the same camp that's pushing Ayn Rand. They can't tell one philosophy from another. It takes great professors to teach that kind of stuff in a way that sticks. Otherwise it all becomes goblydegook and students believe that none of it matters when in fact it might very well be all that matters.

[merrylander]

Europe's problem stems from going the austerity route rather than stimulating their economis. Of course having surrendered control of the Euro to those mandarins in Brussels it was only a matter of time before the whole house of cards fell.

Now thanks to the prices of electricty and natural gas European companies are having to move over here, BASF is building a large operation in the south. Notice that they are heading for "right to starve" states, so much for their alleged love of fair treatment for workers.

[ebacon]

I have to disagree with stimulus. They are suffereing the same thing that we are suffering from. Traditional small manufacturing jobs are being replaced by imported goods from China. At the same time their food industry is consolidating in corporated structures that are pushing wages down. They are going from an economy that naturally matched labor to the work that needed to be done to an economy that is managed by CEOs that live in bubbles. One can throw all the money they want at such a system and all it will do is bury consumers in more plastic shit. It's basically the third-party distribution model of communism with corporate flags in the front lawns instead of state flags.

[BlueStreak]

Originally Posted by Oerets

Interesting, most economist's, captains of industry and finance all agree in global deregulation or free trade. All I see is a lowering of standard of living in developed countries for every country that raises theirs. A read race to level the playing field with the ones at the top getting all the riches.

Just wait until Google gets their way and puts autonomous cars and trucks on the roads. See how that effects the labor market. Better hope the roads stay cloud free!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car



Barney

To my mind, if all of those guys favor the same thing, it must be designed to benefit no one but them, and a warning flag should go up...................

Dave