Posted on 09/04/2011 4:26:04 PM PDT by chickadee
In fact, in Britain, the US and many other developed countries over the past 20 or 30 years, the opposite has been happening. Job security doesn't exist, the trades and professions of the past have largely gone and life-long careers are barely memories.
If people have any wealth it's in their houses, but house prices don't always increase. When credit is tight as it is now, they can be stagnant for years. A dwindling minority can count on a pension on which they could comfortably live, and not many have significant savings.
More and more people live from day to day, with little idea of what the future may bring. Middle-class people used to think their lives unfolded in an orderly progression. But it's no longer possible to look at life as a succession of stages in which each is a step up from the last.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Except it confuses industrialization with capitalism.
I would argue that misguided liberal policies have distorted true capitalism into a form which is bound to fail. Paradoxically, the growth of Government and entitlements has made it “safe” for companies to flee the USA. They can still make a fat profit while the Government kept the Middle Class afloat through deficit spending. Once the credit limit is reached, however, that’s when things start to get dicey because the domestic market will finally suffer. If Government was not there to pick up the slack, business would have figured out long ago that outsourcing was not in its long term best interest as it would destroy the Middle Class.
Or perhaps he’s mistaking state capitalism with free markets.
The article mentions Victorian values- one of which was thrift, and they would have held in abhorrence modern practices such as putting debts not yet paid to you in the profit column, borrowing obscene amounts of money relative to what you make, and considering a home as merely a financial asset. They also understood rightly that the government had no business screwing around with economics.....
I see some merit in your argument, but, it took both Dems and Repubs to allow open borders, another way of undercutting the domestic middle class’s jobs. I agree with you about domestic companies setting up shop overseas.
How so?
Industrialization is simply an effect of Capitalism. There are other, and more recent, effects, which I think is what Gray is getting at.
Excellent thoughts - the Beltway crowd truly believed that they couldn’t kill the golden goose. I think the poor thing is on life support.
The Golden Goose has been sold for a Needy Donkey..
A system utterly dependent on mass consumption, which is pretty much what we’ve had in the USA since 1946 (and in Europe since the end of WWII reconstruction, say, 1955 or so) has to mass consume—even by way of debt if that’s the last resort.
On the other hand, the reciprocal approach—producerism—doesn’t really work without a mass market to consume the objects of production.
The premise of this article is wrong. Neither Britain, nor the United States, have practiced capitalism for a very long time.
I appreciate your comments, they are worth some thought.
The immediate thought that comes to mind is that Henry Ford established the $5 hour wage to that his employees could buy what they built, AND HE PROFITED FROM THAT. But if government had handed out money and millions more high paying government jobs had been created, he could have just as well had the products built more cheaply (overseas in today's terms) and PROFITED EVEN MORE.
“state capitalism” = Corporatism
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It would be interesting to see how much damage has been done by the shift from a market economy to a status economy: i.e. set asides because you are black, Asian, Mexican; the hiring as wage earners minorities as opposed to whites etc. etc. I wonder if the dollar value of such a shift could be quantified.
So that's how they did it in the Soviet Union--capitalism!
Quite so, actually, and you can see the process again playing out in China.
I'm tempted to link the Mr. Jensen speech from Network, but instead I'll just point that what happened in the Soviet Union--and what's happening in China now--is that they simply copied the technical modes of production that had been developed by "revolutionary capitalism," as the author above puts it.
When you drop “free” from Free Enterprise you abandon Capitalism.
Given aging demographics in the West and expanding demographics in the East and Third World, would not capitalism dictate that the means of production shift to markets where the demand and the opportunity for profit is growing? American and European government policy is simply accelerating the process.
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