HD
 
 
After  reading
http://www.investor-message-board.com/cgi-bin/forum/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1268933627/ 10#10
 
and
 
 
http://www.investor-message-board.com/cgi-bin/forum/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1268933627/ 10#11
 
I would like to ask when will you organize a march on Capitol hill?
 
As you see I am re reading all your challenging posts.
I am sorry if I cannot contribute creatively and can only react to your posts.
I enjoy them very much.
 
sc

Can we get a good and precise notion of what capitalism is?
It has already been well explained here. It's just that no one who is a statist wants to hear it. They can't believe that human beings can function without a gun at their heads.
 
Yes, there are many common definitions but they are almost all tainted with the above bias and belief system, all tainted with politics. One could argue that these definitions are in fact the most common usage and,  therefore, make the definitions. That may be true, but if so, the definitions are self contradictory and created from mass ignorance.  
 
Better to talk about "free markets".  
 
Free markets are nothing more than free people acting in their own best interest and not against those of others. Are their disparities? Of course, but in a free market, those disparities do not come from one class taking from another. That can only happen with the use of criminal force or the aid of a gov't.  
 
Socialists love to portray the market as some inhuman force to which we must submit. But free markets are just a simple way of describing free people in commerce. Socialists also like to claim that laissez-faire markets require chaos with no rule of law, and ultimately the rule of brute force. But capitalism has always and everywhere recognized the need for the rule of law for it cannot function without it. In fact, capitalism and the rule of law are almost synonyms. Socialism is the opposite of the rule of law; socialism is arbitrary rule by a group of elites.  
 
It is most often fascists who seize upon socialist discontent (for it is always there) to establish -- with the state apparatus -- a distortion of socialism, often misguidedly called capitalism (Note that Hitler and Mussolini where both socialists), where the fascists become the elite. I suspect the fascism we have in the US today is the outcome of the reaction to the FDR socialist regime.
 
Typically fascists are more competent than socialist at producing goods and services. but in the end the fascists end up with all the real benefit -- until they are shot, and that usually ushers in another round of socialism. People simply going between on band of thieves and another.
 
But if you really want to know about capitalism, if you really want to get beyond the ignorance of the masses, read "Human Action" by Ludvig von Mises.  
 
Is capitalism an imperialism ?
No, but very often capitalists(the people who deploy capital, not necessarily the people who philosophically recommended capitalism) are responsible for much of what we call imperialism, but it's just another version of statism that reckons to give privilege to an elite class it creates -- with the use of force.
 
Fascism (capitalists in charge of the gov't) is necessarily parasitic. At some point when resources or victims are used up, there is a need to go abroad with the same parasitic agenda.
 
Is a landlord a capitalist?
Yes, assuming he/she owns the property rented. But the capitalist could also be the state or similarly, the landlord could own the property with a privilege or franchise from the state.
 
The real issue here is whether or not the the renters can freely negotiate in a market where others vi for the renters business. When the state is the capitalist, the state rarely likes or allows competition. This is why the state can never deliver what people want because, basically, it doesn't know. It has essentially deprived of itself of the mechanism (the market) to know what people want. And because it doesn't compete, it is usually incompetent to even deliver even what it promises, and it has deprived itself of the mechanism (the market) to learn how.  
 
The old soviet union promised to produce shoes for $1 per pair. It did produce some shoes, but they were a great deal more expansive than promised and they were never what people needed. The soviet response? "Shoes are not very important anyway."
 
If the owner-capitalist has a legal monopoly granted by the state, then the he/she operates very much like the state, giving little value to the customers for high prices.
 
Are all entrepreneurs capitalists?
Not necessarily. An entrepreneur is simply one who sees value in items or processes that others don't. What make them entrepreneurs, however, is the ability to make something of little value into something of greater value. Typically, such a process requires capital. The entrepreneur may or may not have the capital (be the capitalist) to do this. If the entrepreneur is successful and creates greater value, he/she will likely profit and become a capitalist (own capital).  
 
Gov'ts don't have and typically don't like entrepreneurs. That is another reason why gov't can never provide innovation or actually make things better.
 
Can we invent a worldly system that is less individualistic and more collectivist?
I could answer your question better if you explain why you want more collectivism and the purpose it might serve.  
 
In a free market people can act individually or collectively, which ever suits their needs best. But in a a free market the onus is upon those who strongly desire one or the other to be convincing. With state apparatus in charge it is typically that the people are treated collectively (maybe like cattle) whether they like it or not. It is only the elite politicians who act and are treated as individuals.
 
Whether we use individualist or collectivists philosophies in a free society is typically a cultural issue that changes back and forth as needs change. Very often, like the market itself, such philosophies are prone to fads and overshooting.
 
M

Quote from captbob on Jul 28^th, 2010, 9:53am:

 
 
Except perhaps for point B, I would certainly fail all these requirements  
cauz, all I really wanna do is be friend with you.
 
I don’t want to fake you out
Take or shake or forsake you out
I ain’t lookin’ for you to feel like me
See like me or be like me
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you
 
 
 
sc

SC,
 
Whatever you may or may not know, you certainly ask good (and hard) questions. Often questions are much more important than answers. For if we don't ask the right questions, we can never get the right answers. I hope my answers are as good as your questions, but I doubt my answers will ever be complete enough. We seem to have to find them for ourselves, often the hard way.
 
Quote from Snake Charmer on Jul 28^th, 2010, 6:49pm:

The judgment may seem harsh because the people who exhibit this trait rarely are. Take MT. I've known him for many years. I've spent time in his home. I know him to be very sincere about what he says. He's as good a person as you can find.  
 
I suspect two things: 1) he's angry and frustrated (with good reason and in fairly good company); 2) he doesn't say it but, he basically doesn't trust human nature (not necessarily specific humans -- he's not paranoid). He just has a sense that people need to be constrained, controlled, regulated . . .. Regardless of how he would constrain humanity (there are thousands of political notions out there that believe the same thing, they just recommend different methods (take for example that article he just posted on the "The Family". Same sense of humanity, different method to control them).
 
The greatest problem I have with all these notions of control is they they assume someone among the people who needs to be controled can step forward or be selected to control the others. Aside from this not making any sense, looking at the empirical evidence, if it has ever worked at all (any of the these notions), it has never worked except in isolated circumstances and only for very short periods of time. (there are many other internal contradictions in these various schemes but almost all stem from this one)
 
Now, knowing human nature as I do, I can't guarantee that left purely to its own devices , i.e., without institutionalizing the use or threat of force, that the human race can indeed learn to live peaceably and sustainably. It may be that we were doomed long ago; maybe it just took longer for us to eat up own environment than many of our defunct evolutionary cousins. But I can say with a great deal of confidence, that the use of institutionalized force cannot be, will not be and has not ever been successful at creating these states of being.
 
As an aside: unalienable rights, i.e., the right to do what ever one wishes so long as it does not harm another or diminish another's right to do the same, are inherent in our nature. The protection of these rights will provide all the constraint needed.
 
The other side of the coin is experiential, i.e., my experience with human beings; something I think almost all of "these people" have but ignore for some (probably emotional) reason or the other.
 
I find that when people cannot resort to violence (institutionalized or otherwise) to get their way, when the natural consequences of decision making can reward or punish people -- with no guarantees -- they become very reasonable, very peaceful and very cooperative. Also, I find that it is the use of institutionalized force that disrupts this pattern of action more than anything else.  
 
Training might help to refine what we need to do and how, but it is likely unnecessary. In my view, we were born with all that we need. We all have compassion. It just gets covered up -- mostly by the institutions that are ostensibly there to make life better for us.  
 
Quote from Snake Charmer on Jul 28^th, 2010, 6:49pm:

If we are to have a gov't, I would say that it should be limited to defending only unalienable rights. For all else, it is very easy to show how corruptible and, really, ineffective gov't becomes. Logically, this state would simply be an extension of our unalienable right to defend ourselves. However, I'm not certain even this is possible. For any time we give anyone the power of violence over us, we find ourselves on a slippery slope. But if such a gov't existed, I would likely be happy with it.
 
A better solution is to somehow come to a cultural norm where violence (force or fraud) of any kind is simply socially never tolerated. (I don''t know how to do that but I suspect it may evolve by itself -- if we manage to survive). Than means we don't drop nuclear bombs and we don't beat our kids --ever. The threat or use of force always represents failure.
 
We cannot survive as human beings without organization and at least some modicum of cooperation. The use of force (gov't) always destroys both in the end.
 
I can find no need for gov't. This has the same internal logic as I stated before. If we can, given our nature, do for ourselves, we don't need a gov't; If we cannot do for ourselves, gov't won't help and, in fact, will simply hasten our demise.
 
The Mafia is a form of gov't. Gov't is the moral equivalent of the Mafia, a protectio0n racket. When people find that they don't need gov't (or the Mafia) because they somehow learn to live peaceably with one another, gov't or the Mafia will simply go away.
 
M

Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years
 
by Thom Hartmann
 
This weekend, House Republican leader John Boehner played out the role of Jude Wanniski on NBC's "Meet The Press."
 
Odds are you've never heard of Jude, but without him Reagan never would have become a "successful" president, Republicans never would have taken control of the House or Senate, Bill Clinton never would have been impeached, and neither George Bush would have been president.
 
When Barry Goldwater went down to ignominious defeat in 1964, most Republicans felt doomed (among them the then-28-year-old Wanniski). Goldwater himself, although uncomfortable with the rising religious right within his own party and the calls for more intrusion in people's bedrooms, was a diehard fan of Herbert Hoover's economic worldview.
 
In Hoover's world (and virtually all the Republicans since reconstruction with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt), market fundamentalism was a virtual religion. Economists from Ludwig von Mises to Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman had preached that government could only make a mess of things economic, and the world of finance should be left to the Big Boys – the Masters of the Universe, as they sometimes called themselves – who ruled Wall Street and international finance.
 
Hoover enthusiastically followed the advice of his Treasury Secretary, multimillionaire Andrew Mellon, who said in 1931: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down... enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."
 
Thus, the Republican mantra was: "Lower taxes, reduce the size of government, and balance the budget."
 
The only problem with this ideology from the Hooverite perspective was that the Democrats always seemed like the bestowers of gifts, while the Republicans were seen by the American people as the stingy Scrooges, bent on making the lives of working people harder all the while making richer the very richest. This, Republican strategists since 1930 knew, was no way to win elections.
 
Which was why the most successful Republican of the 20th century up to that time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been quite happy with a top income tax rate on millionaires of 91 percent. As he wrote to his brother Edgar Eisenhower in a personal letter on November 8, 1954:
 
"[T]o attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon 'moderation' in government.
 
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt [you possibly know his background], a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
 
Goldwater, however, rejected the "liberalism" of Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and other "moderates" within his own party. Extremism in defense of liberty was no vice, he famously told the 1964 nominating convention, and moderation was no virtue. And it doomed him and his party.
 
And so after Goldwater's defeat, the Republicans were again lost in the wilderness just as after Hoover's disastrous presidency. Even four years later when Richard Nixon beat LBJ in 1968, Nixon wasn't willing to embrace the economic conservatism of Goldwater and the economic true believers in the Republican Party. And Jerry Ford wasn't, in their opinions, much better. If Nixon and Ford believed in economic conservatism, they were afraid to practice it for fear of dooming their party to another forty years in the electoral wilderness.
 
By 1974, Jude Wanniski had had enough. The Democrats got to play Santa Claus when they passed out Social Security and Unemployment checks – both programs of the New Deal – as well as when their "big government" projects like roads, bridges, and highways were built giving a healthy union paycheck to construction workers. They kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for things, which didn't seem to have much effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up, in fact), and that made them seem like a party of Robin Hoods, taking from the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class. Americans loved it. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections.
 
Everybody understood at the time that economies are driven by demand. People with good jobs have money in their pockets, and want to use it to buy things. The job of the business community is to either determine or drive that demand to their particular goods, and when they're successful at meeting the demand then factories get built, more people become employed to make more products, and those newly-employed people have a paycheck that further increases demand.
 
Wanniski decided to turn the classical world of economics – which had operated on this simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years – on its head. In 1974 he invented a new phrase – "supply side economics" – and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn't because people had money and wanted to buy things with it but, instead, because things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money. The more things there were, the faster the economy would grow.
 
At the same time, Arthur Laffer was taking that equation a step further. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would go up!
 
Neither concept made any sense – and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies – but together they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness.
 
Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to suggest that he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, that those tax cuts would cause them to take their surplus money and build factories or import large quantities of cheap stuff from low-labor countries, and that the more stuff there was supplying the economy the faster it would grow. George Herbert Walker Bush – like most Republicans of the time – was horrified. Ronald Reagan was suggesting "Voodoo Economics," said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer's tax-cut theories would throw the nation into such deep debt that we'd ultimately crash into another Republican Great Depression.
 
But Wanniski had been doing his homework on how to sell supply-side economics. In 1976, he rolled out to the hard-right insiders in the Republican Party his "Two Santa Clauses" theory, which would enable the Republicans to take power in America for the next thirty years.
 
Democrats, he said, had been able to be "Santa Clauses" by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Republicans could do that, too – spending could actually increase. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people's taxes! For working people it would only be a small token – a few hundred dollars a year on average – but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. The rich, in turn, would use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus increasing supply and stimulating the economy. And that growth in the economy would mean that the people still paying taxes would pay more because they were earning more.
 
There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They'd have to be anti-Santas by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.
 
When Reagan rolled out Supply Side Economics in the early 80s, dramatically cutting taxes while exploding (mostly military) spending, there was a moment when it seemed to Wanniski and Laffer that all was lost. The budget deficit exploded and the country fell into a deep recession – the worst since the Great Depression – and Republicans nationwide held their collective breath. But David Stockman came up with a great new theory about what was going on – they were "starving the beast" of government by running up such huge deficits that Democrats would never, ever in the future be able to talk again about national health care or improving Social Security – and this so pleased Alan Greenspan, the Fed Chairman, that he opened the spigots of the Fed, dropping interest rates and buying government bonds, producing a nice, healthy goose to the economy. Greenspan further counseled Reagan to dramatically increase taxes on people earning under $37,800 a year by increasing the Social Security (FICA/payroll) tax, and then let the government borrow those newfound hundreds of billions of dollars off-the-books to make the deficit look better than it was.
 
Reagan, Greenspan, Winniski, and Laffer took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today. They and George HW Bush ran up more debt in eight years than every president in history, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined. Surely this would both starve the beast and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.
 
And that's just how it turned out. Bill Clinton, who had run on an FDR-like platform of a "new covenant" with the American people that would strengthen the institutions of the New Deal, strengthen labor, and institute a national health care system, found himself in a box. A few weeks before his inauguration, Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin sat him down and told him the facts of life: he was going to have to raise taxes and cut the size of government. Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous programs, declaring an "end to welfare as we know it" and, in his second inaugural address, an "end to the era of big government." He was the anti-Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as Republican politicians campaigned on a platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.
 
Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton by 1999, Winniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part: "We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the 'Two Santa Claus Theory' in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts..."
 
Ed Crane, president of the Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year: "When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they'd died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. Just cut taxes and grow the economy: government will shrink as a percentage of GDP, even if you don't cut spending. That's why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments."
 
George W. Bush embraced the Two Santa Claus Theory with gusto, ramming through huge tax cuts – particularly a cut to a maximum 15 percent income tax rate on people like himself who made their principle income from sitting around the pool waiting for their dividend or capital gains checks to arrive in the mail – and blowing out federal spending. Bush even out-spent Reagan, which nobody had ever thought would again be possible.
 
And it all seemed to be going so well, just as it did in the early 1920s when a series of three consecutive Republican presidents cut income taxes on the uber-rich from over 70 percent to under 30 percent. In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into the stock market, inflating a bubble that – like an inexorable law of nature – would have to burst. But the people who remembered that lesson were mostly all dead by 2005, when Jude Wanniski died and George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush supply-side-created bubble economies in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:
 
"...Jude's charismatic focus on the tax on capital gains redeemed the fiscal policies of four administrations. ... [T]he capital-gains tax has come erratically but inexorably down -- while the market capitalization of U.S. equities has risen from roughly a third of global market cap to close to half. These many trillions in new entrepreneurial wealth are a true warrant of the worth of his impact. Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize."
 
In reality, his tax cuts did what they have always done over the past 100 years – they initiated a bubble economy that would let the very rich skim the cream off the top just before the ceiling crashed in on working people.
 
The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided "conservative" Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts.
 
And now Boehner, McCain, Brooks, and the whole crowd are again clamoring to be recognized as the ones who will out-Santa Claus the Democrats. You'd think after all the damage they've done that David Gregory would have simply laughed Boehner off the program – much as the American people did to the Republicans in the last election – although Gregory is far too much a gentleman for that. Instead, he merely looked incredulous; it was enough.
 
The Two Santa Claus theory isn't dead, as we can see from today's Republican rhetoric. Hopefully, though, reality will continue to sink in with the American people and the massive fraud perpetrated by Wanniski, Reagan, Laffer, Graham, Bush(s), and all their "conservative" enablers will be seen for what it was and is. And the Obama administration can get about the business of repairing the damage and recovering the stolen assets of these cheap hustlers.
 
Common Dreams.org
 
More about Jude Wanniski and the two Santa Claus Theory

I thought partisan politics was done some place else, unseen.
 
Aside form the fact there is much misleading and even outright lies in the article, if you simply don't like Republicans, you can get plenty of sympathy here. Is someone here beating the drum for the Repubs? I haven't seen any. Of course, if you are just figuring the Dems are doing such a miserable job at being wannabe Repubs and trashing the economy faster that W ever did, that maybe the Repubs are actually beginning to look good by comparison, well, I guess you've got a point. But who cares?
 
Given the thread title, you think the Repubs support capitalism, a free market? (HAHAHAHAHAHA!). Or, are you pointing out the obvious, that the repubs are fascists (like the Dems)? But, what is the new threat? I mean, the Repubs are just barely a minority in office. You afraid they are going to win? And do what? Bailout banks (like the Dems); bail out (and muscle people out of there pensions) automakers? Keep the wars going (as have the Dems)? Increase the deficit? What are you worried about? What can the Repubs do worse?
 
M

I'm just trying to connect the dots, so to speak. How did we go from being the most affluent county in the world with a huge (and also affluent) middle class to where we find ourselves now. The 2 Santa Claus article helps explain that. Actually I don't believe we have a 2 party system anymore.
 
I do cling to the notion that we can vote ourselves out of this mess and if we don't, there will certainly be a violent revolution in America.
 
Mornings seems to believe that government is basically useless and has always been that way. I disagree emphatically. The government programs all so called "conservatives" rail most loudly against are the entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, etc. Programs the Republican Party has been trying to eliminate since their conception but got nowhere until Jude Wanniski sold the 2 Santa Claus theory to Reagan. From that point on, the wealth of the middle class stagnated and was replaced by mounting debt.
 
BR (before Reagan) the rich were taxed at much higher rates in order to pay for government programs. AR government borrowing replaced tax income. Worked out great for rich people and now 1 or 2 percent of the population owns as much wealth as the rest of us combined. The top %ers aren't in debt either - we are!  
 
And now the only "solution" conservatives can see is to end the social safety net programs that actually led to the affluent society we once enjoyed. Their solution is no solution at all, it's just a last grab at what little we have left.  
 
I see this as a problem of capitalism and capitalists and I see government regulation as a solution, just as it has been in the past.