Posted on 03/07/2009 9:48:58 PM PST by Lorianne
Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...
We can’t do this anymore.
“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
How much of our oil consumption do we ‘own’?
How much of the goods we buy do we own the materials and means of production?
There is no end to the high-falutin’ theories people like Friedman will invent in order to avoid discussing:
The Gold Standard;
the removal of gold and silver coins from circulation;
the Federal Reserve.
Well, for example, we hear there was not enough governmnet regulation in the markets and we hear that there was too much government regulation in the markets ... which is it that was the problem?
GLOBAL WARMING CAUSED THE STOCK MARKET TO PLUMMET!
You had to know it was only a matter of time before someone made the connection; but my hats off to Friedman, he certainly took Rahm’s words to heart and isn’t letting any crisis go to waste.
And that overreach extends to goverment as well.
You were taking issue with the article, no?
The author was specifically referring to China.
He threw in some other nonsense about global warming or something, but his point in the top post was we cannot continue to send our jobs and our money to China without repercussion.
We increasingly are tearing down our own ability to do things. Make things. Innovate. Produce. And save.
We’re going broke. Fast. Our banks are imploding, because we’re spending all the money in the banks. Our people don’t have jobs, because we’re outsourcing all the jobs.
We’re sending it all primarly to ... CHINA.
Well said. The left is so confused. They claim local control and more individual input in the public process is better, but they vote for larger central control and LESS individual input in the public process.
They want it both ways.
But then, so do many on the Right. "Hey, we called for more regulation way back when" ... and "government regulation is what got us into this mess so we should have less goverment regulation".
Communist crap, have no clue why anyone would post that horse sh*t
You’re assuming some people actually READ the article before posting.
Just saying.
“Government needs to stop meddling in affairs that it knows nothing about”
Like when President Osama referred to a P/E ratio as “profit/earnings ratio?”
lol!
Obama is a colossal fake. One doesn’t have to be an economics major to have heard of price/earnings ratio. The guy is said to have been in classes at the fanciest private school in Honolulu, to have attended Columbua College for two years and Harvard Laws School and to have served on Law Review. How many worth their salt would not know what “price/earnings radios” are or at least know the phrase? God help this country. This fake continues to leading the United States on a suicide mission and does so out of personal arrogance and greed for power. The media are the conspirators giving him cover. The man needs to be impeached asap. He isn’t qualifiied to sweep the streets.
Like when President Osama referred to a P/E ratio as “profit/earnings ratio?”
He’s also had a little problem understanding how the capital gains tax works as well. This is what comes of putting Ivy League lawyers in charge of important things like the economy. They just don’t have ability, either through experience or training, to even understand the concepts involved.
God help the Republic.
Oops. Doubled with you.
Sorry Mack.
Schiff is saying this is the end of the FIRE economy. The service economy. We have to get back to producing and saving. How long could we support “growth” by just pushing paper around?
American creativity and optimism is unique in the world and will always create sectors for growth and employment that nations like China and even Japan simply can’t touch. Well, as long as we are free. Once we succumb to full-blown socialism, then our own creativity and optimism will cease to exist and what you say will happen. But not as long as we are free. There is a reason we absorb many of the world’s best and brightest people.
“How much of the goods we buy do we own the materials and means of production?”
I didn’t write that we (meaning Americans) have to own the means of production of the goods we buy. I wrote that for the price system to do its job of rationing natural resources in such a way that they don’t disappear — so that they become a “renewable flow” — there must be private ownership of the means of production and a sound monetary system. I didn’t specify WHO should own the means of production; only that the means of production ought to be privately owned and subject to market forces.
Government ownership leads either to wasteful production with the eventual disappearance of the product, or to artificial restriction of production with mandated shortages. Government enterprises can never strike the right balance because they are, essentially, not “in” the market at all. They are all “extra-market” (i.e., lying outside of the market) activities. They are immune from competition (which always has the effect of lowering prices and raising quality), and immune from the flow of information represented by prices in the market.
The protectionist notion that Americans must be “self-sufficient” by owning the specific means of production of the specific goods they buy and sell — oil, coal, wheat, shoes, etc. — is a fallacy, exploded long ago by the great David Ricardo, which he summed up as the “Law of Comparative Advantage.” Ludwig von Mises restated Ricardo’s insight regarding free trade, but renamed it the “Law of Association.”
In essence, it says this:
If you’re a brain surgeon, and I’m a janitor, more value — more wealth — is created for both of us if we follow a strict division of labor by having you do nothing but brain surgeries and hiring me to do nothing but sweep your floors, than if you do fewer brain surgeries and sweep your own floors. Yes, you are certainly capable of sweeping your own floors (while I, the janitor, am incapable of performing surgeries), and you might even be better at sweeping floors than I am. But the time spent on performing lower value work such as sweeping floors subtracts from your time spent doing higher value work such as neurosurgery. So even though you COULD do everything yourself, it’s better not to. It’s better, from the standpoint of creating wealth, to TRADE part of your wealth-creating ability (surgery) for part of my wealth-creating ability (sweeping), even though my skills are inferior to yours.
The Law of Comparative Advantage is a very compelling argument for free trade and is routinely ignored by leftist-socialists and rightist-protectionists alike.
I hope the above example was at least intuitively convincing that Ricardo and Mises were right. I’d be happy to post mathematical examples proving that more wealth is created through free exchange than through “self-sufficiency.”
The capitalist system in the U.S has been slowly poisoned since the FDR Presidency.
Federal "make-work" Regulations and Unfunded mandates have all but destroyed American Business. Its no wonder Manufactoring is either running for foreign shores or charging headlong into robotics automation.
As far as the Federal Government is concerned American Business is a Lab Monkey and they want to keep it locked in a cage and suck its blood till it dies.
Well those chickens have finally come home to roost, and what is the Liberal's Rx? To add even more Regulations and Unfunded Mandates and then Nationalize all of it.
I swear Ayn Rand should unseat Nostradamus as King of the Prophets!
Folks its time for Americans to Shrug!
Every year a nonprofit in our areas hosts the “woods tour.” They bring legislators into the woods and show them how various areas of the National Forest are managed and how private timber lands are managed. I have attended a few of these and, for the most part, the legislators are astounded that they can stand on a high hill and see forest and trees as far as the eye can see in every direction. From all the environmental group’s propaganda, they are under the misconception that we have clear cut all our forests and that we need to preserve every stick that is left.
More and more, however, the forests are burning because the government is no longer managing them - they are preserving them to death. The fuel buildup has become horrendous from lack of harvest. Last year, in my county alone, we had 300,000 acres burn.
We are not running out of forests, we are just putting them off limits to human use.
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