Perhaps there is something useful here, but nobody really knows what to do because we now live in a globalized world which is culturally, politically and economically completely different to anything that has ever appeared before.

A world in which powerful corporations and money interests rule to here and not any government. And which thereby set the parameters as to what can and cant be done---the "markets" wont let you do it. A world of 24/7 stock-markets and even more importantly of a world-wide speculative casino "economy" which has nothing whatsoever to do with human well-being, and in fact is completely indifferent to the well-being of any living-breathing-felling being, human or otherwise.

In the meantime these two references describe the reality created in the image of the "free"-market as boosted by Moran and all the other adolescent Beavis' & Buttheads

http://www.ispeace723.org/gcfprinciples4.html

http://www.ispeace723.org/youthepeople3.html

A families financial assets follow proven creativity in adding tangible values which individuals and the community can appreciate. When big governments and their safely employed servants-public waste taxpayers money through prescribed adventurist and costly political solutions, private savings hide for their survival to protect their families. Labor is now orchestrating their prescribed collective savings & taxation burdens long wanted by their zero growth advocates (smaller population = less = more).The nefarious greens and their lazy left liberals will now soon find themselves on the wrong side of the fence which they helped erect. Is this the end of private savings which are normally used to buttress families against theft and lazy government? What ever MP Craig Emerson may say is a poor reflection on labors application, actions and knee - jerk results.

Alan Moran wrote: “Mr Rudd’s remedies for addressing the current economic downturn are conditioned on his views of how the US pulled out of 1930s Great Depression. Unfortunately his understanding of the event is deficient. For example, he seems to be unaware that the US stayed in recession throughout the 1930s in spite of continued pump priming by the Roosevelt administration.”

In the above Mr. Moran exhibits the corporate mindset that is just concerned with corporate balance sheets in the near future,

Roosevelt did nothing less than save capitalism in the US and ensure US dominance in the postwar world.

It is true that the US stayed in recession throughout the 1930s. However, I would mention some of FDR’s policies and their consequences.

A prominent cause of the economic downturn of the 1930s was a glut of inventories. Warehouses were bulging with products, but people could not buy them because they didn’t have the money to do so. Since the producers could not sell their goods they laid off workers, and unemployment grew.

FDR through the National Labor Relations Board and empowering the unions ensured that workers would get paid at levels high enough to buy the products they produced when the economy got going again.

When FDR was elected old people who had worked all their lives had to live in poverty if they had not managed to put money aside or were forced by some unforeseen calamity to use up all their savings. FDR introduced social security which gave old people both security and buying power which helped the economy.

FDR introduced the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) which gave unemployed young men work, repaired infrastructure and helped the environment. Under recent administrations in the US infrastructure has been increasingly neglected, and the environment under Dubya Bush has been disregarded. Dubya has as a rallying call, “Cut taxes.” This was done to such an extent that essential services have been neglected. There was great grumbling as FDR taxed to provide these services. The grumbling was short sighted as a further collapse could have produced a Lenin or Hitler.

(continued)

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The worldwide recession continued through the 1930s, but the effects would have been far more damaging in the US had not the Rooseveltian policies been adopted.

In his fireside chats Roosevelt gave people hope and a feeling that they were being thought of. Although FDR did not eliminate racism in the US his non-discriminatory policies saw that minorities shared in relief measures.

Before Roosevelt most Americans did not graduate high school. FDR encouraged both education and the arts. The WPA Writer’s Project gave a start to such literary eminences as John Cheever, Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Malcolm Cowley, Edward Dahlberg, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, Kenneth Rexroth, Harold Rosenberg, Studs Terkel, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, Frank Yerby and Eudora Welty.

Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Frank Yerby were black writers who might have languished in obscurity were it not for the WPA Writer’s Project. Saul Bellow won a Nobel prize.

FDR introduced the GI Bill. This gave all veterans of the armed forces an opportunity for further education. Since 14,000,000 had served this made for an educated populace whose contributions were felt in the tremendous increase in industrial productivity, technological and scientific progress and artistic and literary output. I was one of those 14,000,000, and I am grateful for the change in my life due to FDR.

The future of a country depends on much more than its corporate balance sheet. FDR realised that. Alan Moran doesn’t.

Davidf - you are missing a very important aspect of basic economics in your praise of FDR. The basic fact is that you must have a healthy and dynamic industrial sector to generate the necessary taxes and jobs to pull the economy out of a recession. FDR did not address this at all until the advent of WW2 when he inadvertently hit upon the silver bullet. The government started buying zillions of goods and services from businesses rather than just printing up and handing out potloads of money to the unemployed.

Margaret thatcher had a wonderful saying "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money"

david f

none of what you said pulled the US out of the recession

what eventually pulled the US out of the recession was war, ie Great Britain paying for US to supplied war material and food. That popped up the US economy and filled out the factories and the warehouses, which made them rich. US got riched because of the war

After the War, there was the re-building of Europe and Asia, and America got even richer

Very little of what FDR did worked

david f, Harvard’s Robert Barro has estimated that the net multiplier effect of Roosevelt’s initiatives was not significantly different from zero (WSJ 22/1/09). That is, his interventions did not increase GDP, and the US recovery was later than in many other countries. In any event, our circumstances, and the causes of the recession, are different. I have argued before that Rudd’s “splashing-the-cash” will be extremely costly in terms of higher medium-to-long-term interest and tax rates, and that spending should be directed in ways which improve the structure and functioning of the economy. Interestingly, New Zealand is taking that approach, treating this as an opportunity rather than a disaster.

Re Alan’s points on GST and public service salaries, the Queensland Government blew the GST windfall, with QPS salaries and employment growing far faster than in the (wealth-creating) private sector (on top of a no-redundancies policy), with no commensurate improvement in services. (Probably a decline, given the tendency to appoint and over-promote apparatchiks.) So withoit drastic action by government, QPS employees are shielded from the recession, the whole burden being shifted to the non-government sector. Budget cuts will fall not on employees but, e.g., hospital equipment.

(More later, I have to do a family taxi-dash.)

Alan is right.US Congressman Ron paul thinks likewise.We are repeating the exact same scenario as the 1930's.This will only deepen and prolong the recession.

They all have no friggin' idea.

Alan Moran is on the right track but I think that's the result of an accident.

Bruce why aren't you more vocal. Your theme works.

Damn I was going sailing ... now I'll have to wait till the cyclone's gone.

One question never answered is what happened to our money .

If I took your money and invested it unwisely in the US and lost everything you would bury me , but if I was a Bank all you could do is cry .

Clearly there must be some retribution for giving money to people who had no hope of fulfilling their commitment . Why wouldn't we describe that as irresponsible . The renumeration these people have enjoyed suggests that they are the ultimate mandarins of what they do . Now we know them to be fraud's who knew how to look out for themselves then present with a cavalier attitude , apparently protected by law .

In my view these problems are to continue , I am not aware of the per Family Credit Card Debt , the Rubbity tonight agreed it to be about $16 grand , my card a Virgin turned into a Wales card via a letter and also a nice Interest rate increase advice , you would expect a decrease in these times in order to make the ex Virgin a viable Mare .
But the road ahead is paved with greed , better to sell up the now unemployed and run away with his family's pride , future and cash .

I sent a letter to the editor to The Australian in response to Alan Moran’s article when it was published there. My letter was not published, so I reproduce it here:

‘Alan Moran’s most recent attack on public sector employees (“Even FDR was keen to slash pay packets”, 25/2) has ticked the usual boxes - “generosity”, “profligate”, “bloated”. (He forgot “squandered the rivers of gold of the GST”.) However, as per standard practice from the Institute of Public Affairs, he fails to provide any salary figures to justify his claims. This is not surprising as the figures show he is dead wrong.

‘If Victorian teachers on the top subdivision were as well paid today as in 1979, they would be earning around $97,000, not the $20,000 less that they do earn. Nor is it the case that workload has improved to justify a cut to pay: the current secondary pupil-teacher ratio of 11.8:1 is worse than the 11.1:1 of 30 years ago. I expect a long-term comparison of the pay rates of nurses, police and general public servants would show exactly the same picture.

‘Given the seven years of suffering that Victoria endured under its previous government, whose program was devised by the IPA, no one should listen to its continued fact-free campaign against public sector workers

‘No one who attacks the public sector ever produces long-term pay figures to justify their nonsense and no one ever will – because the figures just don’t exist.’

I Would think it to be a rather safe option for the Country as a whole , if Kevin Rudd actually presented himself to an Elephant proctocology unit where he could be deployed as a Repository for constipated elephants; at least he will be within his element and might actually learn from the experience , instead of spraying a Nation with it.

It is not as if Rudd is about to put up his hand and admit that Mussolini and uncle Adolf are his heroes and his political bent - is it?
Of course the useless idiot is going to say FDR – and there are some ominous parallels to be known in that.

Bruce wrote: Davidf - you are missing a very important aspect of basic economics in your praise of FDR. The basic fact is that you must have a healthy and dynamic industrial sector to generate the necessary taxes and jobs to pull the economy out of a recession. <SNIP>

Margaret thatcher had a wonderful saying "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money"

Dear Bruce,

That is nonsense. The US had a healthy and dynamic industrial sector in the 1920s. Due to a low wage economy it lacked buyers for its output. A glut of unsold goods led to the Depression.

Thatcher equated meeting human needs with socialism. FDR was not a socialist but an enlightened capitalist. Margaret Thatcher’s statement was not wonderful but stupid. She did not want to put more resources into addressing social inequities. The end of that path can be a Lenin or Hitler as increasingly impoverished people look to a messiah.

However, Margaret Thatcher was not as stupid as her saying. She did not dismantle Britain’s National Health Service. Her statement appealed to the neoliberal mindset that Rudd criticised. She knew better. She knew she would be out of office if she destroyed the NHS.

I did not claim that FDR’s policies pulled the US out of the depression. The war did it. I claimed that the consequences of FDR’s policies were US dominance after WW2 and a more decent country.

The depression would have been worse without FDR’s intervention.

Dovif2 wrote: After the War, there was the re-building of Europe and Asia, and America got even richer

Very little of what FDR did worked

Dear Dovif2,

Most of the effects of FDR’s policies were felt after WW2. Social security, an educated nation, TVA, economic dominance and a creative outpouring after the war were consequences of FDR’s policies in the 30s. He left a wonderful legacy.

FDR’s social policies improved the lives of many Americans including me.

Thatchernomics left a wider gap between rich and poor. People are currently suffering from her legacy of inadequately regulated financial markets.

Alan Moran wrote
"it was only the onset of World War II that brought economic recovery."

And how would you describe the re-armament leading to and during WW2 other than as a Keynesian recovery? Unless a command war economy is just another example of unbridled capitalism.

That's the problem when you let ideology get in the way of empiricism. There's all these annoying facts that just don't fit.

You are totally incorrect davidf; America did not have a vibrant economy due to low wages at all – If you go back to Harvard – and the implementation of Taylorisms Scientific Management systems- or the pseudo science – Yes there were very low wages for the worker, just as there was now a de-centralised mechanism to employment and skilled manufacturing and less skilled – and the addition of the battalions of parasites, who's functions where to respond to a greater voice dictating the terms and how things were done.

This was not ever done to gain the most productive venture, it was a typical Socialist paradigm of perceptions, and as true of then as it is now, the Fascist looting and exploitation of employees and employers being the host to fund the ever growing etalons of Useless Idiots ready to exploit the newly found methods of the equivalent of Armed robbery- and the victim feeling good about it.

It was in place long before Bolshevism was deployed to the toilet bowl for some to dissect and implement.

The economy is based on people with ability and who have values and knowledge- Socialism is about the pillaging and plundering of the loot.
The twentieth century version of The Viking raids or any Barbarian looting, but with the laziness – Valueless – simplistic psychological manipulation and paradigm shifts.
That simple, and that is democracy now days- and the representation of what is known in biblical terms – End of Days.
Socialism is the ego of the metaphysical God of self appointed fools.

All- wrote: You are totally incorrect davidf; America did not have a vibrant economy due to low wages at all.

Dear All-,

It would be good if you had read what I wrote. I wrote that the US had a vibrant economy. I did not say it was due to low wages. There was a glut of goods produced that people could not buy. That was certainly correct. It is unnecessary to address the rest of your diatribe.

david f, Its probably time to throw Edwards Deming into the ring for good measure,as quality production is not really understood in this sheltered workshop, maybe someday we will end up in a position enhanced with a quality,productive and competitive position and maybe early developments encompassing reason,logic will deliver a productive society with something of value apart from the raw materials.

The Queensland labor governments election promise to deliver 3000 additional green jobs @ $19,000 pa each pulling weeds out down at the local creek will not be a sustainable career path even if a certificate/degree is the promised result.

Dallas wrote: The Queensland labor governments election promise to deliver 3000 additional green jobs @ $19,000 pa each pulling weeds out down at the local creek will not be a sustainable career path even if a certificate/degree is the promised result.

Dear Dallas, The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) under FDR was not a sustainable career path. However, it did a lot of good. It not only gave the young men who possibly would have been otherwise unemployed purpose and meaning in their lives, but it also helped conservation efforts in the United States. “Pulling weeds out down at the local creek” is a denigration of what might be useful work in preserving the environment.

I met an old man in a US National Park in California who proudly showed me a stone bridge he had worked on as a young man in the CCC.

Every job for a young person does not have to be part of a sustainable career path. It can be a valuable learning experience that a person who has a cut and dried career path misses. There is nothing wrong in taking a job to help make the world a little better even if it is not part of a sustainable career path.

I have three children. One is a highly regarded professor of anthropology. Another is a research biochemist. A third is an educator who works with culturally deprived children getting them in the habit of reading and opening the world to them.

All three had a period of over five years where they tried different things before they settled down to their current occupations. I think their lives are possibly much richer and their appreciation for the segments of society that they probably never would have come in contact with otherwise probably makes them better citizens than a person who has never experienced anything beyond his or her sustainable career path.

The election promise sounds great to me. I hope young people will take advantage of it if Labor wins.

I don’t apologise for not be able to read everything you write davidf, I made that mistake some months ago on another thread- After reading two of your commentary notes , I sort of figured if McDonalds needed a new clown or more of an Intellectual ham burglar – opportunities galore for you.

And it would sound like diatribe to you. – Of course davidf; that did not surprise me. But I have a need to find out for certainties sake. And a good sense of humour.

Dear Davidf, As a fifth generation Australian who is significantly worried about our countries future, we need a vibrant country also, which has a depth of industry to support ideas, innovation and inventions,instead of just watching bigger countries cherry pick our talent while the public sector build their taxpayer funded empires and irresponsibly regulating whats left. Everyone needs a job of some description to reinforce their worth, but 3000 jobs to weed the creek at $19'000 per year released as a green labor election promise when health and growth are a prerequisite, seems piffle to me. If the jobs need to be created by government, lets consider (float) other industry sectors other than the government environmental industry which could produce more useful results, say for instance indentureship's, cadetship's and apprenticeship's which support the private sector when the aim is to increase constructive advances in materials development & production, engineering & design, health needs are currently in short supply. Edwards Deming would probably agree to support these types of government spending programs which through observation,over time, would more that likely add value and create confidence when producing tangible products and quality results. Flora and fauna observations after leaving grade 12 seems highly political and a waste of hard earned tax, which is now being feeblemindedly dispersed.

Dear Dallas,

If those green jobs are the only jobs I agree that there is cause to worry. I thought that those who attacked those jobs wanted those jobs eliminated and denigrated the effort involved. Certainly there should be more than that.