Hitler was an asshole, but he might have actually improved humanity. Ugh, I never thought I would be thinking this. I suppose that genocide of idiots would progressively improve our species.MaxTheReaper said:
Capitalism or Socialism choose a side and state your point
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Stalin actually claimed the comparative performance of the Soviet Union during the American Depression as a feather in the cap of socialism. Say what you want about compulsion, terror and purges, it worked for Stalin at the time. He was indeed able to rapidly industrialize a backward, feudal nation by scaring or charismatically inspiring people into working at the jobs handed down by central planning. I don't know what history you've been exposed to, but interwar Europe was already quite, quite economically... dire is probably the best way to describe it long before the crash of 1929. Germany was experiencing hyperinflation due to the war debt and printing money to pay it. Elsewhere there were other problems. No one was doing all that well, really.Lazier Than Thou said:
You're right that the policies of the United States contributed to the Great Depression. However, it wasn't so much the market intervention and (inadequate though still helpful) Keynesian style spending as it was Hoover's 'fiscal discipline' (he raised taxes and cut spending in response to the Great Depression, the opposite of Keynesian policy) and overoptimistic government assessments of the health of the economy. In 1937, Roosevelt was convinced by the deficit hawks that the government had done enough to combat the depression and moved away from deficit spending. And at that point a chorus of angels descended from heaven, 'Hark!' to spread the good news of the government's finally coming to see the truth, that Keynes was wrong after all-- actually, what happened is that the abrupt downward shift in money supply from the newly changed fiscal policy plunged the economy into an even deeper recession. Unemployment jumped and production faltered. If there is a lesson to be learned from the Great Depression, it is that successfully stimulating the economy was even more expensive than Roosevelt or his contemporaries could have imagined. World War II and its aftereffect was the stimulus package that finally brought us out of it, and the spending there dwarfed BPA, Hoover Dam, Tennessee Valley, all of it. Luckily, there is good reason to believe that WW2's economic impact was somewhat watered down by the fact that it was military spending and (mostly) not infrastructure development, so it could still be that a Great Depression would not require spending on the scale of the Second World War to recover.
As far as a company being too big to fail: financial companies were not too big to fail because they employed so many people. They don't really employ that many people. The problem is that financial companies and banks are the ones providing liquidity: businesses need loans to function. When the largest finance companies are in bankruptcy everything is screwed up. Businesses run out of money to pay their employees, to buy inputs, to replace machinery, etc. and can easily go under (or be forced to severely cut production) just because they don't have an immediately available loan for short-term expenses. Now you cannot possibly tell me that such a result is good for the economy, that the best course is to waste available resources hour by hour merely because of a temporary shortage of slips of paper... but I suspect you will just the same. Finance in particular has no "better widget"-- it only has better (or luckier) management. Enduring the costs of a financial services failure only to get another company with the same sorts of policies and employing the same sorts of people is needlessly and pointlessly masochistic on the grandest scale.
The largest problem with Schumpeterian creative destruction is entrance and exit costs and risks and the questionable availability of entrepreneurship. Economic recovery by replacement is very, very costly even aside from the fact that you're wasting millions of manhours of labor by letting unemployment reach its market equilibrium. New firms are not guaranteed to do any better, and a liquidity crisis is not exactly a good environment for any new firm. If you truly understand what a liquidity crisis entails, the reason why should be obvious.
Private welfare is still welfare. Your mother should be ashamed that she's getting treatment that her wallet indicates that she doesn't deserve. It is de facto theft from those who do pay (and because of those who cannot afford it tend to pay MORE) for such service. There's no such thing as a free lunch, and just providing a service for no fee merely because the person cannot afford it is the height of inefficiency and waste. Right?Lazier Than Thou said:
Take off the ideological blinders and realize for a moment that the problem is a whole ton more sophisticated than you make it out to be. For one thing, the crisis in housing was not even nearly the entire problem. Problems with private agencies utilizing bad assumptions to rate the risk of bundled subprime loans were a very, very big part of it. If deregulation were the answer, those private agencies would have realized that the CRA (if it was in fact a large enough factor to be the cause of the housing bubble) would have the effect that it did. But they didn't realize that so many of those loans would go unpaid because housing prices suddenly collapsed, suggesting that there was a problem with paid private financial information gathering. Know why they didn't get it right? Because there wasn't an incentive to get it right, just to provide the rating. They were paid by... the people selling the loans. Such is unregulated capitalism at its finest, and the real cause of the crisis. There was a structural problem with financial information... that regulation could fix. Sure, it could have been fixed privately too. But as you see... it wasn't. If you want to live in a world with financial mayhem of that sort merely because other people are failing to make sensible decisions, count me out.Lazier Than Thou said:
Oh, sweet hollow laughter.. how I've missed you.Seanchaidh said:
Correction: powerful assholes carry through with something that tends to shape history. Whether they are glorified as having the right idea later on, or if history simply attributes anything good that happens afterwards in spite of what happened - well, that's usually a toss- up, isn't it.MaxTheReaper said:
One thing that will never change, however, is people's infatuation with authority and strong leaders. "Oh, leader, lead our strong and right race forwards by the ears, please, I beg of you".
IMHO: a bit of both.
Capitalism seems to work for most things
however the exception is is for infrastructure/utilities/healthcare, for that you need a socialist system as there will never be enough effective competition to balance out the greed inherent in the capitalist system.
Sadly in the UK, the government has spent the last decade or so ineptly trying to apply capitalism to the infrastructure/utilities (and eventually healthcare if they get their way) with utterly disastrous results.
Capitalism seems to work for most things
however the exception is is for infrastructure/utilities/healthcare, for that you need a socialist system as there will never be enough effective competition to balance out the greed inherent in the capitalist system.
Sadly in the UK, the government has spent the last decade or so ineptly trying to apply capitalism to the infrastructure/utilities (and eventually healthcare if they get their way) with utterly disastrous results.
Capitalism, because I don't like when people call me evil for wanting the money that I actually fucking worked for. And definately not socialism because I don't trust other people for good advice so I definitly don't trust them to tell me what to do. Anyway, I don't really know all that much about either, so thats why I'm reading Ayn Rand.
That's the only thing that makes me hesitate in deciding whether or not it would work.stinkychops said:
Erm, but wouldn't that in and of itself prove that people are flawed because people created the systems? If people were not flawed then they would have created a perfect system or systems, no?veloper said:
Reading Ayn Rand is a great way to fool yourself into believing that you have any more of an 'objective' point of view than anyone else. Some of what she says is quite agreeable. Almost none of that is in Atlas Shrugged.clicketycrack said: