Posted on 11/02/2011 10:30:58 PM PDT by blam
Fabian Socialism or Marxism?
The implementation methods differ
The end result is the same.
Did you hear that Lindsay Lohan is going back to jail?
No, but the really important thing is what kind of nonsexual gesture did Herman Cain make 15 years ago.
There have been trillions of dollars spent overseas. If all the money was spent here, we wouldn’t be so deeply in debt.
BHO2 loves to give away the hard-earned money of Americans. He hates this country, and the people in it.
There are solutions to this problem.
Unfortunately, the solutions needed require the character traits of the American people living at the time of the Revolution.
I don’t think it’s simple. Spending our way out of debt has worked before, why not again? Well maybe there are reasons, but I think they are systemic, or maybe even cosmic. That is to say, we are in new territory now. I think there are similarities to the Great Depression. I recall a speech by Hoover ( I think ) when he cited the cause as “overproduction, overproduction, and overproduction”. ( Maybe that was an earlier episode. ) Anyway, we don’t think of overproduction now, but we do have incredible efficiency, which amounts to the same thing since it devalues labor. This gets into the whole commie thing. Heilbroner in his famous “Wordly Philopsophers”, opined that Marx had given a brilliant critique of capitalism when he described what he saw as its ultimate fate, a death struggle among surviving corporations to reduce cost of production, to the detriment of the laboring class, of course. I always thought that Marx failed to account for technological expansion, which always provides new frontiers for exploitation, where capitalism excels.
Before Marx there was H. G. Wells, in The World Set Free, where he imagined cheap nuclear energy ruining heavy industry. Has the internet created the real life version of these events? Have we actually entered a new age where capitalism must falter? Who knows! Who Cares! Tune in next week. Same Fire time, same Fire station!
Spend more on poverty, you get more of it.
I don’t have a problem with private charitable assistance. It used to be the Church responsible.
And when the state has spent itself into oblivion, it will be the Church responsible again. The wheel turns.
Nonsense. Efficiency is not the problem.
The problem is that demand is not there.
You cannot abort 50 million children and expect for there to be no consequences.
That's a point, but it only serves to show that capitalism is predicated on growth, which essentialy implies an exponential growth of the population. We're at 7 billion, so how far can it grow? 70 bilion? 700 billion? 7 trillion? Surely not. To argue that 7 billion is not the limit is a quibble. This is already way beyond anything Malthus imagined, I'm sure, but the limit has got to be around here somewhere.
You are quite right that capitalism is predicated on growth. Think about that for a moment.
What do you think happens when growth is no longer there? What do you think happens to capitalism?
As for Malthus, his arguments rest on one premise, that food production is an independent variable from the size of the population. But we know that this is not so. Like anything, the laws of supply and demand dictate that when demand rises, so does supply. When demand falls, so does supply in response.
Ergo, as most foodstuffs are inelastic goods, the production of food is a dependent and not an independent variable. We would expect greater land cultivation in response to greater demand. Which is what we do see. We would expect as the price of food goes up, that new technologies become viable in the production of food. Things like mechanical harvesting. Reducing the labor costs makes food that much more cheaper and increases yield.
If someone asked a man in the middle ages, how high that a man could climb, do you think any would believe it to be possible for a man to climb to the other side of the moon?
The only limitation on food production is really the cost of energy. With sufficient energy and low enough costs, you can grow sufficient food to feed the population.
So you think 7 trillion people can live on the earth, along with trees and birds and all that good stuff, no problem?
Because we are being governed by a bunch of crony crooks. Crony socialists and crony capitalists. They have few morals and make decisions based on feelings. Just look at all the money wasted on green technology companies now routinely going bust. A streamlined and profitable civilization does not need growth to sustain itself. Only a civilization riddled with parasites and flat out crooks needs constant growth to sustain itself.
Without that growth, there is only one option available for the cronies. War. Destruction of the excess baggage.
We have an ever expanding government consisting of union members, supporting the illegal aliens, fighting over the dwindling number of taxpayers and their dollars.
We have illegal aliens without any documented (key word; documented) income after those taxpayer dollars.
And then we have the baby boomer taxpayers that are coming up to retirement age. They will cease to be taxpayers and claim their Social Security benefits.
Something is wrong here.
Give it a little thought, nearly 50 percent of Californian kids are English learners. That means we hired twice as many teachers as we should have. Extrapolate that to everything the government does.
Twice the people that we would normally need working for 25 or 30 years and living the next 20 or 30 years at near the same income level.
It takes 30 tax payers to provide the income of a government employee when he retires.
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