It's a good segment. Socialists (many videosifters included, such as @ChaosEngine & @enoch) seem to be convinced that either they themselves know all the facts (i.e., narcissism?) or that the "rulers" know all the facts, or that the "majority of the people" know all the facts.

While it may be true that the masses, as a collective of course, are even more intelligent than any individual on his or her own, it is true only when individuals among the masses are acting and thinking independently of one another (i.e., pursuing their own interests as best that they themselves know how to do) and not when they are under the sway of one form of demagoguery or central planning or another.

Political democracy shows the masses in all their foolishness, while market democracy (i.e., anarchy) shows them in all their wisdom. I think it is this distinction that illuminates the discrepancy between the theory of democracy and the practice of democracy.

(Moreover, it seems that, when listening to Hayek -- or Milton Friedman or Rory Sutherland -- one gets the impression that one is listening to a highly intelligent individual. This is quite different from listening to someone like, say, Paul Krugman and other so-called "economists," who are in truth would-be pundits and polemicists and not at all cognizant of the underlying postulates that support their arguments.)

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-explains
as a quick explanation for why the belief that you can go out and make yourself rich is dumb.

*quality discussion.

If you want to learn more about being a debt peon, or the new feudalism a good explanation is here:

*related=http://videosift.com/video/You-Are-A-Debt-Peon-Economist-Michael-Hudson-Tells-You-Why

You Are A Debt Peon - Economist Michael Hudson Tells You Why has been added as a related post - related requested by notarobot.

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by notarobot.

The Economist had a couple of good articles about this. The US prison/detention system is amazingly screwed up.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21589903-if-you-are-poor-dont-get-caught-speeding-new-debtors-prisons
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21589868-shocking-number-non-violent-americans-will-die-prison-throwing-away-key

The famous Black economist Thomas Sowell speaks openly about such issues, ("Are Race Riots News?") so it's definitely a larger trend.

Would you object if African-Americans were 600% more likely to be convicted for murder?

Such an outcome would be completely just and fair because they are in fact 600% more likely to commit murder. That's where the bulk of the disparity in conviction rates comes from.


I'm a liberal who wants to continue living in a liberal world. Honest data is not evil, and when liberals downplay it, they fuel the rise of the far-right. The far-right is currently sweeping European elections only because liberals refuse to be reasonable. Please keep liberalism competitive, so the far-right would no longer be able to attract moderates.

@SDGundamX

Thanks!

@shveddy

Bit confused since you say there's a point of no return at the end, but yes your argument is not really about that.

People not meeting their nutritional needs right now is not due to an under supply but due to general poverty. If sufficient employment and income existed in impoverished countries the world supply of food would be able to cope. As far as a lack of balance, see my earlier point about bringing people out of poverty, closing global income gaps and all sharing the available resources.

I don't think you could characterise any of the global conflicts in the past 100 years as being primarily due to resource scarcity. Perhaps Japan's aggression in SE Asia around WWII because of its lack of energy resources but that's an isolated case in the post-Depression era brought about by misguided isolationist economic policies. If you really want to prevent resource wars, your best bet is to be a staunch advocate of free trade.

Large countries have gone to war because of personalities, territorial ambitions and a general desire for power, not out of necessity because of scarcity.

As far as a point of population balance, that's entirely subjective. Like I said before, his bandying around of exponential is completely unfounded. Population growth is rising at a much reduced rate, proportionate growth relative to current levels is much smaller than in the 1950s during the baby boomer period.

When you say 20Bn as an example, I don't think you appreciate how much we're going to plateau. Have a read of:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/06/daily-chart-10

9.6Bn by 2050
10.9Bn by 2100

There is a good chance we will never hit anywhere close to 20Bn short of life enhancing technology which at this point doesn't exist. If we do, then I could equally argue we will invent technology that will reduce our individual resource needs dramatically.

Do I wish population growth was lower and there were more for each of us? Sure. Louis CK has a great bit on it. Agreed on women's rights and education, but as with everything it's correlated to societal poverty. You may as well kill two birds with one stone by just focussing on that. Every policy action has an opportunity cost, given what I've said, I would rather focus on something more pressing.

Gotta love Krugman.. not as an economist but as a world class hypocrite rivaling Molière's Tartuffe. He's getting paid $25,000 a month to do zero work, while calling for the end of income inequality. <scoff> I wonder if he's ready to give up 70% of that to the federal government like he says all "wealthy" ought to do.

The headline might as well read, "Rich economist constantly holds forth on the evils of income inequality, while...." You get the point. Here's the back-of-the-envelope math on his recent windfall:

Not counting the $20,000 in non-transferable travel budget, moving bennies, etc. that they offered him, CUNY is paying Dr. Krugman a nine-month salary of $225,000. I presume he won't be working summer semesters, so let's say that's all his salary from CUNY for the year. Now normal tenured senior professors at CUNY make at most $116,364 a year. Adjuncts at CUNY make about $3,000 or so per course; you can teach at most 9 hours a semester. So let's say you're an adjunct maxed out at a 3/3 load; you make about $18,000 a year for that. So if Dr. Krugman wanted, he could pick out 6 adjuncts at CUNY and *double* their yearly income, just by giving away the amount of money he personally makes *over and above what the best-paid senior faculty make*. If he were willing to do the job (*) for a nominal fee (as you may know, Prof. Krugman has another line of work), he could literally pick some lucky adjunct at CUNY and double their entire year's income -- *every month of the year.

And honestly, @radx, what did the "progressives" expect would happen? This so-called "Democracy" can never be anything other than an "oligarchy," if not a governance by "mob rule" (and sometimes a combination of the two). If "Democracy" is the "least bad" kind of state/government possible as some (like Mark Twain) have claimed, then it's high time "the people" climbed out of the dark ages and lived without rulers, altogether.

The resultant "chaos" that would ensue would not be any worse (and in fact far better) than the kind of unintended chaos that results from the centralized power structures of state governance.

------

*Which, let's be clear, involves no teaching load, and seems to mainly mean that maybe he'll drop by the office every few months to share his brilliance with whoever happens to be there. The point for CUNY is almost certainly to purchase some of the aura from his name on the letterhead

@enoch

I'd agree Friedman wasn't directly responsible, but served more as an academic influence and a proponent of a particular approach because many of the Chilean economists who influenced policy had studies in Chicago.

As far as exploiting a crisis, arguably the crisis itself warranted dramatic action. High levels of inflation caused by Allende's money printing to support wholesale nationalisation of industries pretty much required this.

As inflation is self perpetuation by its continuous expectation and can continue even after the original stimulus is gone, there was little choice here. After all it took Volker nearly half a decade of high interest rates to tame it in the US in the early 80s, to do that after an economic and political crisis in a undeveloped country was an entirely different scale of difficult.

Successive governments likely reversed some of the economic policies enacted under his regime, but the foundation I meant was particularly the budgetary position, free trade, and a competitive cadre of private sector exporters. The welfare, health and educational spending were all made possible by this. Without a credible tax base, trying to enact spending on this level while also raising the tax rises would have just precipitated another crisis.

Coming back to inflation and economics, I believe policies against inflation especially, are generally misunderstood in the short term and their benefits unrecognised in the long term. I would probably say the reverse of what you said, economic policy rarely shows tangible results in the short term but almost always in the long term.

It's certainly not perfect. After all economics has the unfavourable position of being the combination of social science, lacking the ability to test results in clinical conditions isolating a single factor and yet requiring highly specific answers to solve its questions. At its best, it offers answers based on the cumulative knowledge accrued from iterative policies, at each point being based on the 'best available knowledge at the time'.

But it has worked, as I like to often mention, with independent central banks, essentially the most technocratic and pure application of economic theory, inflation has become a thing of the past in those countries that have adopted it.

Then again I'm biased as I majored in it at uni

Not that I come here much for the discussion these days, but describing all economists as charlatan snake oil salesmen, followed by describing Friedman is an 'insufferable cunt', does not exactly fan the flames of reasoned debate.

@RedSky
that is not entirely accurate to state that it was friedmans economic policies that gave rise to chile.

i will agree to an extant that the original groundwork could be attributed to friedman and his economic plans but those plans were not all sunshine and rainbows.it was the chilean government who began to enact and implement solid policies to turn that state around after pinochet.dismantling much of what friedman had started.i.e: private pensions,schools,water etc etc.

and @Yogi does have a point.friedman is quoted often as saying that in times of crisis,it is a perfect opportunity to exploit that crisis in order to implement a policy that otherwise would have been rejected.

now we can argue just how responsible friedmen is in regards to a government who uses/abuses this tactic,but it does not change that fact that friedman was the author of "shock doctrine".

just as in this video,and one of those rare times i agree with friedman.the information should be public and governments only role in business should be that of "fraud police".it comes down to who is responsible.

which brings me to my final point.
economists are the charlatan snake oil salesmen.they consistently get it wrong,almost always.

economies are creations by and for people.
the human element seems to confound these intellectuals.
what plays out brilliantly on paper almost never does in real life..or at least for any protracted period of time.

which is also why i find friedman to be an insufferable cunt.
if there ever was a spark of humanity in that man,i have yet to see it.

You seem angry, unstable, and/or trolling. You'd do well to chill out, relax.

It's interesting that you take responsibility/blame for politicians being sociopaths.

On what are you basing your claims that a single-payer would be a net gain? You're an economist now?

And I did look up the Australian health care system. Another disaster.

"This is hacky propaganda, quit placing yourself in the same corner as these pieces of shit from Campus Reform."

Classy.

Look. I understand that you're upset. Obamacare is a failure like all state programs.
Politicians are sociopaths, and that won't change, it never has been any different and it never will. Tough.

You can complain all you want, and you can try to tell me what to do or what to not do. It won't get you anywhere. You won't change anything to your liking. You won't get your Australian healthcare (and it's a good that you won't).

Halfway in, Prof. Wolff's latest monthly update is already fantastic. Nothing new, really. But his presentation of the (post-)FDR period is rather captivating. For an economist, the man really knows how to tell a story.

Edit: also, Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone finally published the sequel to his epic "Vampire Squid" story about the massive wrongdoings of the banking sector, and Goldman Sachs in particular. I haven't read it yet, but the last one was one of the most outrageous things I have read in the last 30 years. Truly epic shit.

Just my opinion here, but I think there are better ways to solve the issues with soaring profits while paying people nearly nothing for said profits.

Negate tax loop holes. If you're making a billion more each year, you shouldn't be showing a 0 dollar tax burden year after year. Incentivize expanding (lower taxes, etc), heavily tax companies who sit on their money or offshore nearly everything but still call themselves a US company. You should not get both the benefit of low cost offshoring, while the US has to maintain a military presence, infrastructure, and other safety/security institutions that allow you to operate your business and live in safety as you do.

Regulations on speculation that have made a lot of markets spiral out of control. I'm no economist, but when you see prices rise and fall based on rumors and possibilities...look at fuel prices especially. People shouldn't be making money on commodities when they have no hand in adding value to said commodity. If they aren't processing/shipping/extracting/packaging/ANYTHING but sitting on something waiting for a price spike, you need to take that avenue of profit out of the equation. There are places out there with enough buying power they can literally buy all supply, hold it for a few days to jack up the price and sell it off. Creating false shortages should get you a kick to the nuts.

Basically put profit back into production and manufacturing instead of offshoring and screwing with markets to get profit.

Leads to stagnation and often times inferior products as people race to the bottom to drive costs down to increase profits.

For stagnation, look at the broadband market. They have done jack and shit to improve it for a long time now for the majority of the the US, there is absolutely no reason for them to because monopolies and ability to drive costs down while continuing to jack up the rates and influence laws in their favor.

Inferior products, a good example of this would be the Craftsman line of products. Or hell something as simple as kitchen utensils...they look the same until you've had em for a bit and your forks and spoons are bending and not holding up in the dishwasher like they should getting kinda "off" looking.....probably made in China or some other Asian nation with inferior stainless steel. Then you got your US made ones, they might be more expensive but they still make them the same way they did your grandparents silverware...which your grandparents left to your parents and they still look better than the inferior china ones.



This is why I don't believe offshoring lowers consumer prices, because you might spend less on a single thing..but it likely won't last as long and you end up either buying a "good quality one" or repeatedly buying shitty ones. I do however believe offshoring lowers COMPANY costs, and increases their profits. Rarely does stuff actually end up cheaper once they offshore it, and if it does it usually comes with a swift decline in quality.


Lots of ...."off" ways of thinking about things that have become ingrained into the media and people's minds. And I think it's intentional. Minimum wage debate puts the focus on the "greedy" worker, and gives them another reason to move more jobs offshore "to maintain low prices for consumers" yet the company profits continue to go up. IE they pay less to make it, you pay the same or more to buy it. And people are too busy blaming joe schmoe for his minimum wages to notice they just keep doing this shit.

ahh the slippery slope argument.

..gay marriage will lead to bestiality!

..marijuana is a gateway drug!!

..Anything Obama-related is the first step to socialism!

I can tell you this. No one enjoys asking their employer for a raise. I think if it were up to most people, they would never ask, but that's dependent on employers providing their workers with a living wage.

This is what happens when employers refuse to raise wages to match inflation. Even I think 15 bucks seems steep, but that's what economists say will give people shelter, food and healthcare. It's frustrating that the cost of living varies wildly in the US. I live in Nebraska where the cost of living is low so I always get sticker shock when I see prices nearby in Colorado, and even then, I know it's still cheap compared to the coasts. I wish we lived in a world where the cost of living was more even. But we don't

In a perfect world, I would say let the states figure out what's a good wage in their areas...and some do, But a lot ignore it, so it's on the fed to step in.

And it's absolutely a moral argument because it comes down to whether or not you believe even the lowest paid workers are deserving of decent food, shelter and healthcare. It's ironic because most of these corporate apologists probably consider themselves pro-life, yet they don't seem to have any problem withholding that which promotes a productive and healthy life.

It's kinda hard to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when you can't afford bootstraps...or if you're too busy dealing with health issues to improve your job options.