There is a very kind commenter in my last thread really furiously pimping out a post I wrote a couple weeks back at The League called “Free Market as Forest” (though the commenter keeps calling it “Free Market as Beautiful Forest” for some reason…). Anyways, since there seems to be some question about markets and how I view markets and so forth, I thought I would reproduce the post here, beneath the fold.
I’m a believer in free markets. Indeed, my support for organized labor is largely due to what I’ve been referring to as front-end-redistribution (negotiated between management and labor) as opposed to back-end redistribution (top-down tax-and-spend redistribution) because I think a great deal is lost along the way when we rely too much on what Mike Konczal has called ‘pity-charity-liberalism’. From the point-of-tax to the point-of-distribution there’s a tremendous amount of waste, not to mention the various other nefarious projects those tax dollars go toward (I’m looking at you Iraq war/TSA/Patriot Act/Guantanamo…). (Though there are many other services that are much more productive, such as public school, public healthcare, public transportation, etc.)
Besides, front-end redistribution creates more dignity and more agency for everyone involved, and especially for workers. So while I think we essentially need government (I cannot make the anarchist leap – democracy is good enough in my book) and believe it does indeed serve a legitimate purpose, I think a better long-term policy of redistribution is to give workers more power on the front-end. Pity-charity liberalism is often too-little-too-late, and creates in its wake a vast bureaucracy littered with red tape and fraught with bad institutional self-preservation incentives.
Besides this, much of the harm done to workers and to things like our healthcare system has been done through rent-seeking. Cartels have essentially ravaged the healthcare industry, making healthcare infinitely more expensive than it ought to be for most basic services by creating all sorts of artificial scarcity. Even the institutions of global trade are largely captured by a deeply entrenched corporate welfare apparatus.
Kevin Carson, in a comment to his Labor Roundtable post responding to another commenter’s assertion that outsourcing jobs is the fault of organized labor, notes that much of the off-shoring of American manufacturing can be laid at the feet of the Sloan model of accounting and the stupidity of the MBA class:
The workers at the recuperated enterprises in Argentina, forced to learn about managing factories for themselves, learned very quickly that the MBAs’ poor-mouthing about “labor costs” and “competitiveness” was so much horse shit. They found that when they eliminated all the high-salaried managers, most of the unit cost problem just evaporated. Since they didn’t have accounting degrees, they also didn’t know anything about ROI and the theology of direct labor hours. So they essentially reinvented, without knowing it, the cash accounting model of Henry Ford: if you have more money at the end of the week than at the beginning, you’ve made a profit.
And cuts in labor costs are undertaken in complete isolation from consideration of what Crosby called the costs of poor quality. In hospitals, nursing staff is cut drastically because the only thing that shows up in their cost accounting calculations is the actual decline in direct labor hours, which is the only thing that matters. The increased costs from falls, med errors, hospital-acquired MRSA infections, legal liability for negligent understaffing, etc., which MORE THAN OUTWEIGH the nominal savings from decreased staffing, don’t even show up as part of the same bottom line. And the reductions in efficiency that result from decimating the human capital, with all its tacit, distributed, job-specific knowledge, don’t show up in their cost calculus either.
So, my short answer to your question of why I think the MBAs are off-shoring manufacturing, is that they’re made as functionally stupid by their self-serving ideology as the apparatchiks at Gosplan.
I’d also throw in, BTW, the role of the state in facilitating the off-shoring model or what Naomi Klein calls the “Nike model” of TNCs outsourcing actual production to independent job shops while retaining corporate control of finance, marketing and IP rights. If it weren’t for a strong IP regime (including trademarks), the legal infrastructure for maintaining corporate HQ’s control of out-sourced production wouldn’t exist. The multiple hundreds of percent brand name markup between what the job shops are paid for a lot and the retail price paid by consumers in the U.S. would disappear.
The state also directly subsidizes the off-shoring model. The main item financed by foreign aid and by World Bank loans, over the past sixty years, has been the utility and road infrastructure needed to make much off-shored production profitable.
You’ve got a corporate culture that obsessively strains with a teaspoon at the alleged costs of “extortionate” union workers, while pouring corporate welfare by the billions of gallons down the swinish gullets of extortionate CEOs and coupon-clippers.
But yeah, you’ve got to keep them nasty unions in line because them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.
Too often, discussions of free markets, taxation, etc. focus on ‘the successful’ – on winners and losers. But what we actually have is a system of deeply entrenched favoritism, and a corporate class almost entirely insulated from risk and competition, sitting on more wealth and political influence than most of us can imagine. When libertarians talk about privatizing public services, I often recoil because often as not the big bureaucratic private firms are just as bad or worse than the governments they are replacing (often they aren’t actually replacing them, for that matter – just doing the same job with less oversight). Privatization is not the answer when the private enterprise in question is just a profit-based government service.
So I find the idea of a free-market system along the lines Carson describes very compelling, because it rips away this veil of success and puts a lie to the notion that anything even remotely resembling a truly free market system exists within our corporatist economy. The problem I have is figuring out how to get from the world we live in to the world that Carson envisions.
The Forest and the Trees
I realize analogies are limited by nature, but bear with me. Where I live, there is a huge, sprawling ponderosa forest stretching for miles and miles in every direction before tapering off into juniper and desert mesas. Once upon a time, this forest was thin. Large trees were well-spaced between one another, with light brush filling in the gaps. Fires frequently burned through the dry forests, burning the pine needles and small brush as well as many of the small trees. These fires very rarely grew large. They burned away all the debris and then sputtered out, leaving the ecosystem largely intact. The bigger trees very rarely burned.
When lumber operations began, people would put out the fires as soon as they began. This was relatively easy at first, because they were always very small fires. As the years went by, the forest became more and more dense. Many more small trees and shrubs survived, and the forest floor grew thick with pine needles and other debris. The area was settled and developed and putting out fires became more and more necessary because more and more people were at risk of loss of life and property. Add to that the fact that more and more people were out in the woods potentially causing fires. But most importantly, if a fire was started either by natural causes (a lightning bolt) or by people, it didn’t burn itself out anymore, because the trees were too thick, and the forest floor too covered in kindling.
And so you get fires like this one which burned near my home last summer, and which led to massive flooding during the monsoon season.
If we’d never put out the small fires, these big ones never would have existed. But when your livelihood is threatened by a small fire what choice do you have? If the market is a forest, and society is trying to live in that forest, we would be wise to leave the ecosystem in as natural a state as possible. But since we’ve put out so many fires, and changed the natural landscape into something so unrecognizable already, what do we do now? Intervention in the free market leads to this sort of complicated relationship between society and markets. But then again, the complicated relationship existed before as well. A fire is a fire. It doesn’t take long before a few small disconnected fires lead to concerted efforts to combat them.
That seems to be the fundamental problem facing a truly free market. The forest will burn horribly if we take a laissez-faire approach to forest-fire-fighting now that the markets are so protected. The whole thing will burn down. So we do controlled burns. We work with the forest we have. We try to minimize risk. And we work furiously to put out every single fire. The TARP bailouts were the most obvious effort to control an economic system that may as well be a tinderbox.
So how do you get from this forest to that one? I’m not sure it’s possible, and even if it were, I’m not sure we’d ever be willing, as a society, to let the small fires burn.
And so there must be other ways, some mish-mash of market and state and cultural ideas that can at once address our need to let the market ecosystem exist in as free a form as possible, but which also tackles the risk and inequity of such a wild system.
jurassicpork
Signs o’ the times, thanks to text and image generators.
The Bobs
Aren’t you leaving out the fact that a big part of the problem is that all the large trees were cut down for lumber? Thus putting the forest back to its original fire resistant state is nearly impossible.
This was “addressed” with the Republicans “Healthy Forest” plan which was supposed to encourage thinning of the forest to discourage fires. The problem was that only the large trees were cut, so it really had the opposite effect.
eemom
omg, what have you DONE? Now she’ll NEVER shut up.
Delia
Hmmm . . . I remember something someone once said about ever-widening crises. Not that I believe it’s a dialectic that will lead to a workers’ paradise. I have too much faith in the ability of human nature to always screw things up. But the ever-widening crises bit does seem to fit the present state of affairs.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
hehe
Yes, the free market already harvested the valuables, the big timber.
I really liked this part the best.
Be honest EDK.
Unregulated capitalism leads to human flesh for sale in the marketplace.
We just empirically OBSERVED the free market in action.
The invisible hand of the free market just punched American working class families in the face and strangled American Public education with the NCLB free market solution.
You seem to want to forget what free market solutions did over the last eight years. You want a do over.
No. Fucking. Way.
If you believe in the free market, you are America’s enemy. Free Market solutions have nearly destroyed this country.
Now if you want to talk about social solutions augmented with regulated market solutions to REPAIR what your beloved free market did to this country, I will enjoy reading those posts.
But right now you are just another free market boggart.
Riddikkulous!
Hawes
Didn’t read the tree stuff, but read the post over at Forbes about the budget. I would LOVE to see a Democrat come out with that budget. Of course, it doesn’t involve screwing anyone but Richie Rich, so it’s not “serious” except for the fact that it is.
Maybe we could have a real debate about future priorities and the meaning of the social contract.
Ha! I kid, of course we won’t have that!
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@The Bobs:
Just like putting the budget back to pre-Bush is impossible.
@Hawes: Dude, its the same post. All the big trees got sacrificed to the free market gods long ago. You can’t put the forest back to initial condition. Just like we can’t wipe out 8 years of crappy Bush free market solutions.
EDK just wants a do over, he is still a free marketeer.
taylormattd
Ugh, you’re giving crazy-chan too much attention.
Hawes
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: Well, the Forbes post was much clearer to a Concrete Random thinker like me. Showing how to balance the budget with actual numbers in ways that are neither cruel not politically suicidal is… nice.
Simon Taverner
This post is almost completely content-free.
Maude
@eemom:
You have brightened my afternoon. Thank you.
Paul in KY
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: I wish he’d debate your points. I think you might have slagged him so much in prior threads, that he won’t ‘lower’ himself to responding to your post(s).
Shame, makes me think he may be scared of you or scared of you verbally whomping on him.
joeyess
I’ve spent the last 30 years watching this free-market bullshit unfold and the only thing that is certain about it in my mind is the fact that if you don’t make 80k or higher and have employer based healthcare, you’re basically fucked. And that 80k figure is going up every year.
Stillwater
@Paul in KY: Shame, makes me think he may be scared of you or scared of you verbally whomping on him.
Don’t we all live with that fear? Even you Paul?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Hawes: Dude, he is just magically putting the big trees back for a do over.
There is no way that distributed Jesusland would go for clinton-era taxes and military buget slashing.
Its a head fake with pretty numbers.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Paul in KY:
he prefers to try to slur me as a racist.
look. I am sorry i behaved immaturely.
I thought it was cool to mock people that were honestly trying to understand his “viewpoint”. But you see…. I had already read this free market crapology for 2 years at TAS when i was a republican.
I couldn’t believe you guys would fall for it.
Paul in KY
@Stillwater: In a way. I have sparred in past with her & have learned stuff & maybe even got her to re-examine some of her beliefs.
I think I’m closer to her politically, so what I say probably doesn’t raise her dander as much as what EDK says.
If Hermione thinks she has you on the run, she’ll go in for the kill. I like that in a comrade, we Democrats need more people with that attitude.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: aww Stil, you are one of my favorite adversaries.
You are well armed at least and fiercely honest.
;)
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: Let’s turn things around a bit here, HG-W/M_C? EDK puts forward a budget plan as an alternative to Ryans, which you think is unpossible, in which Medicare and Medicaid funding isn’t cut. 1) What’s your proposal to reduce the deficit that would be less unpossible?
You continually accuse EDK of being a ‘free marketeer’, even tho you have no idea what that word means, and even less of what EDK means by it. 2) What is your solution to creating equitable domestic economic systems, one which provides the greatest good for the greatest number within the constraints of efficiency and practicality?
Ash Can
@Paul in KY:
One’s ankles can be bitten for only so long before they start getting sore, that’s true.
bcinaz
Your Forest/Tree scenario is timely; whenever I hear/read free market stuff, I always wonder about two things. Does the Free Market know how to price the environment, including damages and human health? Does the market know how to price the direct costs of life on planet earth? How weird and warped will the climate have to become before China and others decide to levy sanctions against the United States for planetary negligence?
With the recent BP oil spill, what is the true true cost of destroying irreplaceable habitat, and killing 11 platform workers, plus the current plague of dead dolphins and turtles?
Or the Massey Mine collapse – how many dead mine workers justify implementing regulations that would make it possible to retrieve living miners ala Chile?
I think government has a role in regulating industry, unfortunately no one has figured out how to regulate without industry capturing the regulators.
Paul in KY
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: No need to apologize to me. I usually don’t even read what EDK writes & I hate libertarians (people who are too chickenshit to call themselves Republicans).
I think you’ve generally been doing much better lately. Watch out though, this thread may wind you up ;-)
E.D. Kain
I figured that a full discussion of my heartless glibertarianism was in order.
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: Twas snark, Matoko.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@E.D. Kain: can there be redemption for free market boggarts? Can you renounce the innovation of the market?
Usually Dark Creatures just disapparate.
I don’t know if they can actually be turned.
I have never heard of that happening.
;)
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: that is good.
I liek to know that you are Not Afraid.
;)
Stillwater
@E.D. Kain: I figured that a full discussion of my heartless glibertarianism was in order.
Apparently the caricature is much more interesting than actually reading what you’ve written.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Ash Can: haha. cross my blade and i will wear your guts for garters, Ash.
Looking forward to it.
;)
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: You gonna answer my questions? Get some skin in the game instead of sitting on the sidelines complaining?
russell
I’m not sure the whole “forest analogy” thing hangs together, but I’d like to bronze everything E.D. said in this post prior to that.
Roger Moore
@eemom:
I think the idea is to distract her with a post that’s dedicated to her particular brand of crazy so she’ll spend all her time here instead of randomly disturbing all the other threads. It’s a neat idea, though I’m skeptical that it will work in practice.
dmbeaster
There is a better way to frame this free market stuff than the alleged alteration of pristine forests in balance. Just like any other concept, it comes with benefits and costs. The problem with its near-absolutist proponents has always been its naivete with regard to its costs – for some dumb reason, its keeps getting characterized as cost and problem free.
Here is a partial list of some of the things basically necessary for free markets to function in a non-toxic manner.
Anti-trust and fair trade laws to police deliberately anti-competitive practices. A myriad of disclosure requirements and trade regulations for anti-fraud purposes (from basic consumer protection to SEC level disclosures). A myriad of other trade regulation devices that are a species of anti-fraud but not generally thought of as such, like weights and measures regulations or packaging and labeling regulations, or basic product quality regulations (unless you want to experiment with free market forces to police tire design). A rather large number of financial product regulations as well as capital regulation (unless you want crazy banking and loan-sharking), such as bank and insurance company capital requirements and regulation, or stock brokerage regulation. A rather large number of licensing agencies to certify that the professionals manning various parts of the machinery have required levels of competence (unless you think it more efficient to require do due diligence every time on such people, which is in fact not more efficient).
Various trade regulations for various types of industries for which open free market competition is simply not realistic, such as telecommunications, broadcasting, some shipping, utilities.
There are various “industries” for which it makes more sense for the government to be providing the service, like roads and bridges, police and fire, schools.
Labor unions are an example of stacking the deck in favor of the weaker class for a better overall system. There are other examples of when that makes sense.
A vigorous court and tort system to extract money from those who do not follow the rules.
There is a reason why we have this construct of “limitations” on free markets – the experience of not having it has been found to be less efficient and desirable.
This has nothing to do with trees or a natural state of things, and the regulation of free markets does not result in an alleged alteration from a more desirable balance. The natural state of unregulated free markets is barbarity and a destruction of the free market, with massive transaction costs to do anything cause you cannot rely on anything.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: But his budget plan, just like his forest plan, is unrealistic. Like the market as forest can only succeed if you can magically put back the old growth trees that have already been made into free market tables and chairs.
His budget is a fantastical unicorns farting medicare benefits plan that relies on turning the clock back to pre-Bush destruction America.
And everyone knows time travel to the past is impossible, because of closed form time curves.
Oh, that is right…libertarians/conservatives don’t believe in science.
Eureka! I guess that is why EDk thinks it can happen! He thinks we can go back and wipe out Bush’s 8 years of free market “solutions”!
;)
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater:
regulated markets and social justice.
;)
next question?
mclaren
Kain and the commenter who remarks that “my short answer to your question of why I think the MBAs are off-shoring manufacturing, is that they’re made as functionally stupid by their self-serving ideology as the apparatchiks at Gosplan” sidle right up to the issue of whether capitalism and free markets are fundamentally workable.
But neither Kain nor the commenter actually address that question.
We’re now seeing increasingly compelling evidence that free markets and capitalism can’t work.
Let’s summarize the evidence, shall we?
[1] Free markets and capitalism lead to ever increasing efficiency of production which eventually bumps up against the available resources of the planet. Scientists now tell us that within 50 years all sea life will be fished out of the oceans — by 2060, there will be nothing left. Zero. Nada. Zip. Diddly. No fish, no marine life, nothing.
In case, you haven’t noticed, that kind of economic system won’t work. It’s unsustainable.
[2] Ever increasing efficiency of production means that eventually all products reach an optimum design, so that there’s no longer any meaningful product differentiation. At that point, manufacturers can no longer make money by selling a “better mousetrap,” since all mousetraps will have gotten as efficient and cheap as they possibly can. Capitalism then self-destructs because the only alternative is for the capitalists to resort to scams and cartels to sustain their profits.
We see this with the software industry, where Microsoft Windows XP represents the pinnacle of their product line. After that, their operating systems got progressively worse, and consumers have systematically abandoned them for free pirated downloads of Windows XP. In the automotive industry, we see this in the 1964 introduction of fuel injection, the last significant improvement in the internal combustion engine. After 1964, no meaningful improvements have been made in the internal combustion engine, and as a result the industry has stagnated and died. In home audio, we see this with the failed introduction of the DVD-Audio/Super Audio CD formats, both of which failed and were rejected by consumers because no one could hear an audible improve by going to 24-bit 192 khz digital audio. Consumers have now abandoned physical media for lower-fidelity mp3 files which are theoretically not as good sounding as CDs, but which in practice sound audibly identical for all practical purposes.
Everywhere we look, in every industry, whether in the computers whose CPUs have maxed out at 3 Ghz or in dish detergent or toilet paper which are unable to differentiate themselves from any other brands because they’re all now effectively identical, products in every area have reached an optimum design point and ceased to be economically competitive. At that point, the only option for a company that wants to stay in business is to become Enron and resort to fraud and scams because no profit can be made from improving a product which has gotten as good as it can get.
[3] Baumol’s Cost Disease is destroying capitalism because as more and more factories grow increasingly efficient, the cost of human labor grows exponentially greater in relation to manufactured goods. This means that high-skill high-wage jobs increasingly get destroyed and replaced by robots and computer algorithms, while low-wage low-skill jobs like elder care workers in rest homes can never be replaced. This is unsustainable, since the market for highly educated highly skilled workers plummets, while the cost of low-skill uneducated work continues to skyrocket without end. In fact, Baumol’s Cost Disease is the basis of the current American crisis in health care.
[4] The free market is doomed because of the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem, first discovered in 1972.
Source: physicist Lee Smolin on “Thaler’s Question: What debunked theory do scientists continue to widely believe?” at The Edge website, 23 November 2010.
You can argue with assertions or rhetorical constructs about the viability of the free market, but you can’t argue with mathematics. The Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem has been proven mathematically. It is a matter of mathematical fact, and its implications doom capitalism.
Free market boosters claim that if only we got rid of cartels or properly regulated capitalism, we would get workable markets and a livable society. But the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem tells us that no matter what we do, capitalist markets will always wind up hung up on some severely suboptimal equilibrium which results in an unlivable society and markets that seize up and fail to work. There are many reasons for this, all obvious: putting market regulations in place only encourages market actors to indulge in increasingly more ingenious ways of evading them; progressive tax laws only work as long as the income being taxed is made within the confines of the United States; rich people can only be forced to contribute to a society if they are part of it, and today’s globetrotting billionaires spend most of their time, and have most of their assets located, outside of the United States. Last but far from least, advocates of market regulation assume that capitalists will not simply remove their factories to some other country with no anti-pollution regulations and no worker safety regulations, but experience tells us that this is exactly what happens.
[5] Advocates of the free market persume that free open source peer production can’t destroy existing markets. But experience shows that this is exactly what’s happening. Wikipedia is destroying Encyclopedia Brittanca, free mp3 downloads are destroying the music industry, free bittorrent downloads are destroying the movie industry, free downloads of pirated e-books are destroying the book industry, free craigslist ads are destroying the newspaper business…in industry after industry, “free” is driving paid services out of existence. Open source is crushing proprietary systems. Volunteers who come together to offer services and goods at zero profit are destroying capitalists who create greedy inefficient cartels to maximize their profit.
This is unsustainable for capitalism. A business that offers a good or service can compete on price, but they can’t compete with “free.”
1991 proved that communism was a failed system and could not be made workable. Communism melted down and disappeared.
The years since 2007 are proving that capitalism is a failed system and cannot be made workable. Market capitalism is in the process of melting down, and within a generation or two, market capitalism will be as thoroughly discredited as Leninist dialectical-historical communism is today.
The final nail in the coffin of market capitalism will be the personal rapid relpicator, a machine tool that can print everyday goods (including everything from pliers to lamps to bicycles) from dirt cheap raw materials. These rapreps are coming, and they will put an end to market capitalism once and for all. Biologists are already using crude version of these devices to print human organs; sometime in the foreseeable future, such devices will print just about anything you can buy at a store, using downloaded plans freely available as open source on the internet.
In retrospect, capitalism was a phase civlization went through, like the reign of the god-kings of mesoamerica. It was inefficient and eventually died out. Now something new will replace it.
Cat
Of course a Free Marketer would prefer a ‘front end’ solution to a ‘back end’ solution.
The Gov’t actually has the ability to enforce laws and effectively threaten a business with enough harm to bankrupt it.
A business can always break a union, ship the jobs overseas, or just claim poverty to get the union to break its own contract.
The question is is EDK stupid or Evil?
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: So, you like Ryan’s plan better, since it doesn’t require turning back the clock and is therefore possible. I guess that means you support the elimination of Medicare and Medicaid, increased tax burdens for the lower 80% of taxpayers, and increased wealth and income disparity. Good. We’re making progress here. At least I now know where you stand on these issues.
How about the role of government intervention into markets to create equitable economic systems? Specifically, what specific steps ought government take in permitting or prhibiting private firms from making a profit, and if it’s permitted, how ought the government – if at all – balance corporate profit-maximizing self-interest against broader public concerns like environmental, health and safety, and labor concerns?
Zifnab
To take your analogy and run with it – in the old model, the big trees survived while the small shrubs and plants burned up. And so it was in society. When you had a drought or labor problems or a sudden devaluation of currency or a war, all the poor folks on the ground floor got the brunt of it. The local aristocrats, high and tall and strong, shrugged it off.
Then we had a truly big fire. A Great Depression of a fire. The little people – the shrubs and the kindling and the pine floor – revolted. And the smaller trees that suddenly couldn’t survive the fire decided maybe letting these blazes run rampant isn’t such a good idea. The system changed.
Now we’ve got huge sprawling economies. We’ve got networks of thousands of small businesses. The markets are thick with growth. Why on earth would we want to go back to the economy of the 1800s? Who wants to live in the thinned out groves of a century ago?
We regulated ourselves into the most prosperous nation on Earth. We’re a big, strong, healthy forest. And when you look at our peers through the ages – Russia, China, the new Eurozone, Brazil – they’ve accomplished similar growth through similar regulation.
We’ve got a better solution to fire-resistance. Now we don’t dick around and watch our neighbors burn. We put the damn fire out. Why would we want to go back to the squalor of the old ways just to spare us the trouble of dealing with the inconvenience of the new?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Cat:
the free market boggarts like Sully and EDK have made their own reality. They honestly believe the oakeshottian/humian/burkean/hayekian bullshytt in spite of repeated fails.
They think they just need one. more. chance. to make it work.
Reverend Mother Taraza, Heretics of Dune
mclaren
@Zifnab:
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Zifnab: because we are doomed.
We are broke, we have no jobs, we are in debt, we are spending three billion dollars a month trying to push our jc-democracy onto people that won’t ever take it.
Because we are loosing the global education race, and we are losing the human capital race.
Time to change strategy.
;)
But EDK wants a do over for free market policies.
Do you honestly think that will help?
Stillwater
@mclaren: I agree with a lot of that, but… Capitalism is as a general view (ie., private property and profits thereby derived) isn’t a new system at all – it’s been around (as they say) since the dawn of man. Modern (Marxian) capitalism, which is sorta the industrial version, has been around a shorter time, and it is/will be fleeting. But making profits by selling goods and services will be around for as long as human psychology remains unchanged.
The current incarnation might be doomed, but the over-all principle will persist.
arguingwithsignposts
Can we just dispense with the entire notion of “free markets,” FFS? There is no such thing in a modern market economy.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: I like Obamas plan. Whatever he wants.
Stil, they are our enemies, the free marketeers, the glibertarians, the boggarts and death eaters and invertor-dementors. You don’t befriend them and rationalize their positions. You fight.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@arguingwithsignposts: talk to EDK about that.
EDK, right in the post.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@dmbeaster: The natural state of unregulated free markets is human flesh for sale in the marketplace.
–Dr. Jerry Pournelle
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: I like Obamas plan. Whatever he wants.
Really? That free-marketeering glibertarian? Christ, he’s all about free markets.
You really wanna go with a guy who supports ‘free markets’ when we all know that’s just a glibertarian head-fake?
The Raven
Congratulations, you have just discovered Fredrich Hayek.
russell
We actually have an example of a relatively unregulated, industrial economy. It’s the US in the 19th C.
In the US in the 19th C. we had economic failures of fairly catastrophic scope about once every 15 or 20 years.
So yeah, regular burning off of the underbrush, but not particularly harmless.
dmbeaster at 32 I find to be right on. Thanks also the mclaren at 35 for a thought-provoking comment.
Alex
I wouldn’t be surprised if “Hermione Granger-Weasley” weren’t a slightly upgraded version of the half-mongrel matoko chan. Whenever matoko shows his or her face, he or she should be endlessly persecuted for being the low IQ, tongue-waving, slobbering, lower species of human trash that he or she so clearly is.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: haha, you know Obama is a social justice advocate. Obamacare is social justice in action. He is just spoofing Distributed Jesusland.
We only have to do that a little while longer.
tick…tick….tick….
Obama is just doing what EDK does here. spoofing the audience.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Alex:
?
une part du chien?
Judas Escargot
@arguingwithsignposts:
Can we just dispense with the entire notion of “free markets,” FFS? There is no such thing in a modern market economy.
Yes, this. Especially since most wealth generation today is based upon exclusion/barriers to entry (e.g. intellectual property, the IPO system, the rentier and finance sectors, etc) and not production.
The “free market” is like “free quarks”, or “free love”: An interesting and sometimes even useful abstraction, but not anything you’ll ever encounter in real life.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Judas Escargot: oh quit it.
The free market is unregulated capitalism . There is too much hayekian/burkean/humian/oakeshottian bullsytt out there for you to purge the record.
EDK is a free market advocate.
You and AWS don’t get a do over either.
What the fuck is wrong with liberals? You are going to bend over and let the free marketeers assrape you AGAIN as long as they call it something else?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@The Raven: but Hayek was WRONG.
Wanna fight?
chopper
why is m_c back under a different name anyways? wasn’t she banned?
cyd
No need to be so defensive about outsourcing. Over the last 30-40 years, the practice has produced a greater increase in net human welfare in history. Even if Americans lose out, relatively speaking, the net gain is very real.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
EDK’s Forest: Rush already covered this subject in “The Trees.” It sucked then. too.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@mclaren:
or Peak Oil.
Have you read Diamond Age?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@chopper: why don’t you threaten to leave unless Cole bans me too? Because that worked out so well for Hall Monitor Alan.
I know!
Send Cole an email about it.
He lurves that.
;)
chopper
man, the new-and-not-improved matoko sure likes dessert.
Judas Escargot
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Unregulated capitalism inevitably leads to huge monopolies and/or cartels within a few generations.
Those monopolies/cartels then proceed to use their money and the power it can buy to make the market as unfree as possible, to keep out potential competitors. They can also leverage massive asymmetries in information and access to distort the Market itself.
Before T. Roosevelt, it was Standard Oil. Now we have establishments like Goldman Sachs, which has the ability to massively profit from another companies’ downfall (by shorting the stock), the ability to make that happen at will (by being so big that they can tank your stock price at the time of their choosing, just by shorting it) AND the ability to exclude others from participating in those same markets (they have access to the backbone of the NYSE –their goal is a billion trades per second— and you don’t).
To paraphrase Voltaire (and Linda Richman), the Free Market is neither “free” (in any sense of that word), nor properly a “market”.
You don’t a do over either.
I don’t a do very often, But should I ever choose to do a don’t a do, what ya gonna do? Dosey-Doe?
Gotta go.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Judas Escargot: haha, you fail.
i changed it.
you don’t get a do over either.
You are going to bend over and let the free marketeers assrape you AGAIN as long as they call it something else?
lawl.
run little judas, run away.
;)
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: The free market is unregulated capitalism … EDK is a free market advocate.
From yesterday:
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@chopper: you should send Cole a dessert mail.
Cat
@chopper:
The only thing more intellectually boorish then making a your computer filter out posters you don’t want, is announcing to the world you did it.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: you should mail me, stil.
and that was before EDK put up a post.
I totally won’t bother him at forbes or the LoOG.
honest injun.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@chopper: oh, pardon.
I forgot the subtitles.
;)
Phoenix
I’m not sure how seriously I can take some of the dismissals of EDK’s work here. I am personally intrigued by a libertarian who has been arguing for strong labor unions, Clinton era taxes and less military spending.
I can’t say the forest analogy holds perfectly but I don’t believe that we should toss out the entirety of markets and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Human flesh sold on the street is being overly hypobolic. I don’t think the idea of markets isgoing away anytime soon.
I’ve been progressively enjoying EDK’s posts and if this is the new definition of glibertarianism than maybe we aren’t quite as doomed as I think.
Ash Can
@Cat: When the poster in question is doing nothing more than wasting space, it’s not an issue.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Phoenix: dude, he is your enemy.
The free market is the enemy of social justice.
There are no libertarians left in america. They are all closet free marketeers.
But….chu kno?
Like Cole said, it doesnt matter if you bury your heart at wounded knee or bury you uterus at waco.
It doesnt make a damn bit of difference.
live as you please.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Phoenix: dismiss this!
/rudely grabs crotch
Dude can’t even keep his lies straight in the context of a single post.
But you go right ahead.
Take the cheese, Margot.
E.D. Kain
If y’all read closely you will see that this is a critique of purely free markets.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@E.D. Kain: right.
Add ma emmak neketo la bayyak men tizo, hebil fik men bayadto.
Phoenix
It’s like boxing a glacier.
What’s that word for when people explain there are exceptions to a principle due to context and that everything is not absolute? That is apparently my enemy.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Phoenix: look. the free market boggarts are your enemy. EDK is a shapeshifter.
Choose a side.
Phoenix
Oh shit he’s a shapeshifter? Well I’m Team Edward so that changes things.
Stillwater
@E.D. Kain: Remember Jason and Hanley getting all prickly about this when you pointed it out? Gotta cut folks a little slack here.
Maybe if you outlined what constitutes ‘free’ from your pov, and what constitutes legitimate uses of government regulation/intervention people wouldn’t be so dismissive. Then we’d know what you meant by the word.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Phoenix: darn, im team jacob. i must kill you naow.
its that whole furry on human thing. so erotic.
Kewalo
I very rarely even read any posts on the economy and never post to them. For the most part there are usually too many people more formally educated about the issue then I am, and it makes me feel a little shy about speaking up. But I have to speak up and commend Hermione for seeing clearly what the libertarians are up to and adding a few observations of my own.
I first started looking into this when I first read about the Laffer curve. Misspelled of course, it should be the Laugher curve. That’s when I first began to realize that these folks believe in magic. Nothing they have done since then has changed my mind that because they believe in magic solutions that they don’t stand a chance of helping the country. It’s no wonder that they can actually believe that Ayn Rand had something very important to say. If that isn’t magic thinking I don’t what is.
There has never been a free market…NEVER. Go ahead and just ask one of them (free marketeer) to name a time in history when the market was “free” and people were doing alright. As long as there are people involved it can’t be free. One of my favorite moments during this whole mess was watching Greenspan when he admitted he was wrong. That damn old fart.
So Hermoine…for the days I’m not here…I mostly lurk. Please keep up the good work.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: what is your opinion of the free market vs social justice, Stil?
Stillwater
@Phoenix: See, HG-W/M_C thinks that by agreeing with someone’s view, your supporting them personally – like your their personal advocate. But even worse, if you agree with someone who’s a shape shifter, you’re endorsing not what they present to you, but their deeper core-type stuff, which isn’t revealed when their just presenting a view, but only when they sucker you into accepting that view. Apparently these folks have tremendous power to confuse otherwise rational people into supporting the opposite of what you think you’re supporting. Or atleast, they have this effect on HG-W/M_C.
For her, it’s really fucking complicated. For the rest of us, not so much.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Kewalo: awww. ty.
Are you maybe a furry?
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: Social freedom good. Market justice bad.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: its not complicated at all. I hate those fuckers that destroyed our economy and they don’t get a do over on my watch.
Here, Stil, i’ll lend you my crysknife.
Gut him.
Kewalo
E.D.#73 – “If y’all read closely you will see that this is a critique of purely free markets.”
Please tell us how you can critique something that has never happened. Dude, you believe in magic.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: jeeezus you dumbass, there is no “market justice.”
Step away from the crack pipe.
b-psycho
@mclaren: In other words, actual competition eventually ratchets profit down to zero. Hence the construction of barriers to it.
Personally, I’m on Kevin’s side on this: state props up capitalism, so end the state. That said, if we absolutely positively can’t have an actual market order with no grants of advantage due to the entrenched nature of capitalism, I’d understand a proposal to simply tax the living shit out of ill-gotten gains and establish a citizen’s dividend. But no one who’d do that has a chance in hell of obtaining power to do so…which leads us right back to where we started, the inevitable elites/state symbiotic relationship.
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: You just can’t get past the fact that you fell for all the neo-con, libertarian, free market, invasion bullshit once upon a time, and that you woke up one day realizing what a fool you were to believe it. And now you feel like since it happened to you, you must defend everyone from their sirens songs and evil charms and prices must be paid.
You’re fighting ghosts here, demons in your own head. You made a mistake. Just get over it.
Kewalo
Hermoine…I have no idea what a furry is.
And you’re very welcome. Honestly, I am totally stoked to read something that isn’t half BS.
I just wish we could everyone to study US history leading up to the Great Depression. About all those great Americans like Rockefeller and my personal favorite George Pullman. I have days carrying around just deep rage at what they did to our ancestors and the country. It’s right up there with the right trying to turn our teachers into union “thugs.” How crappy is that?
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: jeeezus you dumbass, there is no “market justice.”
Wha? Wut?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: yup. But I wuz RAISED THAT WAY from a wee baby grrl. What is your excuse, Stil?
@Kewalo: shukran for commenting. Can i bear your IQ-enhanced children?
Kewalo
Stillwater, you are truly an idiot. Anyone that isn’t angry has something deeply wrong with them.
Fighting ghosts? You think entities like BOA and BP are ghosts? You think that 1% of the population having 95% of the money is another ghost? What is wrong with you?
I just wish more people were angry.
Kewalo
Hermoine, I’m a woman and have borne my own child. Otherwise, I would be delighted.
Sorry, still confused about furry. But that’s OK, I’m not confused about Libertarianism…it’s BS.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Kewalo: nice.
Your children are fortunate.
My search for my very own sperm-broadcaster has been an epic fail so far.
I don’t understand why the free market boggarts should get a do-over. I think…it is because people like Stil and Phoenix are terrified of the thought that are no sane people on the Right anymore.
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: its not complicated at all. I hate those fuckers {{I voted for and supported}} that destroyed our economy and they don’t get a do over on my watch
Garrigus Carraig
Can someone explain what value Kain brings? Not only are his positions dicey, but now he’s going to not only feed the trolls, but pick them up at home & drive them to Peter Luger for a sumptuous banquet.
Seriously. What sort of person does this?
Mandramas
Sorry for being late. I think that the entire forest analogy is incorrect. You are assuming that a forrest ecology is a perfect thing that naturally are running ok. That’s is creationism. Every ecosystems evolves; a lot of ecosystems goes extincts, sometimes because they have a external factor (a outside context problem); other simply decay by itself after a long time. No ecosystem is perfect, nobody can grant that a ecosystem will endure the test of time. Maybe the soil is being harmed by the continual fires, and every tree generation is going sicker; who knows?
A free market (or any economy) is an ecosystem, but nobody can grant that it is perfect. It is a chaotical system that could fail or degrade or maintain stability. There are no perfect, winning, flawless strategies to maintain it.
Wolfdaughter
@mclaren:
I agree with most of what you say. But I do take issue with this:
Whether or not a new technology almost completely eclipses an old technology, or whether the new tech is additive, depends on the subject at hand. Mp3 downloads are doubtless cutting into the music industry as a whole. As a singer and a classical music devotee, I can tell you that I am not interested in listening to mp3 as it doesn’t offer what I’m looking for in a musical experience. I sing in a group which draws large audiences despite the “longhair” music we do. The thrill of listening to a large symphony orchestra or a beautiful opera, in the hall with other living, breathing fans, is a very different experience than listening to mp3, most likely a pop song of some sort, on your own, with perhaps less than optimal speakers. Both experiences are valid. But they are different.
Likewise with movies. I go to movies in a theater and I also rent DVDs. They are different experiences and I value both. Reading books–I and many other people still find a physical book for entertainment reading to be superior to something I can read on a PDA or my laptop. My eyeballs are aging so it’s difficult to read for any length on a PDA. I do read on the laptop all the time, but it’s for hanging on blogs, or looking up factoids, and I don’t have the patience for reading long books on the computer–it’s simply less comfortable than curling up with the physical version.
As for replicators–intriguing idea often present in sci-fi, but I can’t help but wonder if the availability of natural resources will impede such a development.
The Internet is changing human society, with its relentless equality of participants (as long as we keep ATT etc. from getting their greedy paws on it). We’ve only just begun to see the real changes. I submit that the recent uprisings in the Arab world, the sense of unity that we on the progressive side are experiencing with public sector workers in WI, etc., would have been impossible pre-Net because the ability to communicate was less. But it remains to be seen just how things will go. Que sera, sera.
Kewalo
Hermione, you have to admit that looking for a sane RWer isn’t that difficult. Just look in the boardrooms of the big corporations. It’s just the base that’s gone bat-shit crazy.
And I am really surprised at how much I hate those people. I’m sure it’s fueled by fury and the ability to see how stupid and dangerous they are. It’s perfectly logical to hate people like the RW base.
One of the reasons I started coming here was because John was a rightie. I think it gave him a perspective that a lot of leftie blogs don’t have.
I have a grown son and a dog that is insane, much like John’s dog. I would love to get rid of her but I can’t find anyone that wants a crazy, overenergized dog.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: yup. mea culpa. all the more reason for me to shred that disengenuous fucker with my crysknife now.
c’mon EDK, debate meh.
Lets lash our forearms together and fight to the death.
the free market vs social justice.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Garrigus Carraig: he is a faker. ..and these poor emasculated gormless wimps here are desperate for a “sane” rightie.
There is no sucha thing. The sane and the honest left the right long ago.
Along with the cultural and intellectual elite.
All that remains are the business class elite, the free marketeers.
Stillwater
@Kewalo: Hermione, you have to admit that looking for a sane RWer isn’t that difficult. Just look in the boardrooms of the big corporations.
Interesting definition of sane, when those guys are held up as a paradigm of anti-social pathology.
Stillwater
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: Lets lash our forearms together and fight to the death.
Why not try shelving the hate and anger (and resentment and embarrassment) until folks actually say or do something offensive. Or not even get hateful and angry even then? You know, give peace a chance.
Cat
@E.D. Kain:
hahahaha….
Free markets can’t fail, we failed the free markets….
/facepalm
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: they are sane, they are just deeeply, profoundly evil.
E.D. Kain
I’m pretty sure at this point that none of you actually read the piece. If you want my definition of free markets plus government follow the first link below the fold. If you want to just straw man me for no good reason after that ok.
arguingwithsignposts
@E.D. Kain:
See, now you’re just trolling for more HGW/m_c comments. She’ll be back, Kain. She’ll be back.
ETA: Ha! See!
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@E.D. Kain: nope.
and mostly we are not going to.
i banish thee to the glibertarian hell of Forbes!
/levels wand
riddikkulous!
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Stillwater: you know, i’m finding you a deeply unsatisfactory Stilgar. You are more like a Stilgar that digs Feyd Rautha and Baron Harkonnen or sumpin’.
You need to up your game if you are going to roll wid meh.
;)
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@E.D. Kain:
Link Whore.
Ima camp this thread incase you come slinking back.
/sharpens crysknife
Cat
@E.D. Kain: If you want my definition of free markets plus government
300baud
Oh my god. Thanks for posting that bit from Kevin Carson.
For a long time I’ve felt like the guy in John Carpenter’s “They Live” where he’s the only one that can see that the people in nice suits are actually parasitic space aliens.
The Sloan-derived MBA dogma is so pervasive that nobody’s aware there are alternative approaches, or that there might be something wrong. It is fantastic to see somebody calling it out with vigor.
In case anybody is interested in the topic, the book “Toyota Kata” is an excellent analysis of how the Sloan/MBA approach has decimated American manufacturing, and describes an alternative approach that Toyota has proven very effective.
Paul in KY
@mclaren: What’s worse than capitalism, because that is what will replace it, I’m afraid.
Good post.
Paul in KY
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: I like Shonen Knife better. This group seemed pretty lame.
Paul in KY
@Wolfdaughter: Unfortunately I think an MP3 download (at a decent bit rate) is good enough for me. I think alot of other casual music fans feel the same way & I guess that is bad for the paid music biz.
I still buy CDs & I upload from there. I’m a dinosaur, though ;-)
Paul in KY
@Stillwater: They are ‘sane’, however they cold bloodidly institute policies they know will hurt millions of people, just so they can get another few hundred thou to go on top of their millions.
The teabaggers are wackos.
Paul in KY
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: It’s a well padded hell, I hear. Lots of leather ottomans & smelly old people. Lots of harumphing too.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Paul in KY: WARNING CONCERN TROLL ALERT WARNING
look what EDK just said over at Forbes
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Paul in KY: man….you didnt get the subtext at all.
chopper said i liked dessert, so I linked the mailme song from Suicide Club. Dessart is a tweenie girl band and everyone that puts that song as their ringtone commits suicide.
If you hear that song you are supposed to kill yourself, like watching the video in Ringu leads you to be killed by the ghost of samara morgan.
I was just trying to get rid of some of Coles mailers for him.
;)