<Can Western societies remain fair and affluent?>

This is a trick question, right?
Since when have Western societies and affluence been "fair"? I mean, fair suck of the sav!
Tarriff's and protectionism are based on the maintenance of monopolies. "Fair" has never come into it, ever!

Peter Hume is quite right:
<The welfare states are financially unsustainable and are on a collision course with reality> there is no <titty out there somewhere>
100% correct, or at least it's drying up.
The present system has only ever been there for capitalists.
It blows my mind that people still don't get this!
Experiments with welfare were based on virtually virgin markets,unsustainable post-war booms and creative credit.
Those days are over. Which just goes to show that political economy (capitalism) has never been based on human society, but on drawing off profits (which, ironically, rely on human society for their currency).

Of course, in our world of economic fundamentalism, I'm talking complete mumbo jumbo.

So yes please, more austerity.
The masses need a cold shower!

Political Capitalism is Socialism of the Right; and as Peter had so stated, this is a fact that has existed for many many years; The System has not been corrupted to become as the third world, it has mutated and morphed into to fourth and fifth world ; or The State is out of control; - it has gone far beyond that point; Monopoly control, Mercantilism, State Institutions, and Industry for what is left of it in this country, are all of and are Political enterprises. And not of Free enterprise or Private property.

Run by Despotic Plunderers for their own purposes out of delusional Ideological perversity and only supported by Subversion , perversity and obscurantism with a Bias doctrine so lace in Criminal conspiracy that is tantamount to Treason. And is Treason.
You’re Governments. Three tiers of it. And then their minions in the millions.

And it will never recover due to level of predatory Mafia like theft and its State Created Poverty and Mendicancy , only to self justify its existence; - Billions of dollars debt compounding on more billions of dollars, but wait, there is more, Hundreds of Billions dollars of more debt, and still not a single product or potential for the future.
Just more robbery and theft.
There cannot be a future if this is how it is to be .

Peter,

Could you please give us a historical example for a functioning economy run along the lines you are championing. Your bullet points seem a little abstract.

PETER HUME:

My understanding of the current financial crisis (GFC) of the western democracies is not related to problems associated with failure of any welfare system attached to those democracies. I think you need to move out of your “tin shed” Peter. There certainly is a crisis in redistribution of wealth, though not as you seem to be alluding to: A cause of over-expectation of the citizens desire of a “free feed” and a life of ease at the expense of the beleaguered tax payer; a taxpayer by your apparent reasoning that should be non-existent. No, a crisis exists by way of the movement of wealth in the economy successfully migrated away from the bottom majority to the top minority in society and a manufacture of deliberate dependence on all who dwell in the chord of that bottom majority often referred to colloquially as “us” in order to sustain that unequal migration of wealth.

I venture to add from my personal observations of welfare recipients, the pennies thrown their way constitute an indemnity of hunger and a crisis of accommodation most undesirable; a group you deride as “damaging to the deserving” (Would you be John Howard by another name perchance)?

Diver Dan
“My understanding of the current financial crisis (GFC) of the western democracies is not related to problems associated with failure of any welfare system attached to those democracies.”

I think it’s both. The welfare liabilities are unsustainable in their own right, which goes to finance. Government controls the supply and price of money, which also goes to finance. They use their control of the money supply as a source of revenue, to partly fund whatever they want – whether industry handouts, corporate welfare and war for the right wing, or every kind of economic intervention, wealth-redistribution, and war for the left. Government spending, monetary policy, government economic “management” and the GFC are all related economic phenomena.

“No, a crisis exists by way of the movement of wealth in the economy successfully migrated away from the bottom majority to the top minority in society and a manufacture of deliberate dependence on all who dwell in the chord of that bottom majority often referred to colloquially as “us” in order to sustain that unequal migration of wealth.”

I agree. However remember it’s a majority-rule system of government. The unequal and unfair results are not the *intent*, but the *effects* of redistributionist policies. What many redistributionists are trying to achieve is a fairer, more just society. What they’re actually achieving is crony capitalism, bloated bureaucracies and a society of privilege.

Economics explains why. Total government control of the economy is not viable. Partial government control *must* produce the results we are seeing, and with which we are both dissatisfied.

“The pennies thrown their way constitute an indemnity of hunger”
Please don’t bore me with a presumption that you care more about people than I do. The question is whether more of the same will fix the problem; whether the means you favour are expedient to achieve the ends you aim at.

Besides it’s not “pennies”, it’s hundreds of billions of dollars per year and a major part of all production affecting everyone else’s livelihood, future, and all politics, but that’s not the point.

The point is that these problems of privilege and disadvantage do not just arise spontaneously out of unregulated capitalism, as social-democrats, conservatives, and Keynesians irrebuttably assume. We know so because the capitalism is not unregulated, is it? On the contrary, over 50 percent of everything everyone produces is confiscated to fund many coercive bureaucracies who produce a choking plethora of regulations and interventions forcing the price of everything, including and especially labour, to something other than it would be on an unhampered market.

Now the entire argument against these interventionist policies is that they will produce exactly the results that they are in fact producing, and that are worse from their own advocates’ standpoint.

Government illegalises and marginalises employment with more and more regulations every year and then has the effrontery to appear as the saviour of the unemployed by subsidising their miserable condition – all in the name of the greater good!

But the advocates of these policies, not understanding the economic connection between what they’re doing and the results they’re getting, keep hoping that more inflation and micro-management will make bread from stones, or make a fairer society. It won’t. The interventionists’ economic theory is wrong and government intervention is the main single factor causing the problems the interventionists are trying to fix with more government intervention.

“damaging to the deserving”
I didn’t say that, did I?

You have not established that crony capitalism and leviathan bureaucracy based on chaotic coercion, is in any way morally superior to more personal and economic freedom as a way to a better and fairer society.

PaulL
There are loads of examples but first what distinction do you make between state and economy?