Cont'd

What we have is the mother of all ponzi schemes, where anyone starting from the bottom now is highly unlikely to become a "self-made man" or woman. And I didn't say impossible just a whole lot less likely.

The fact, Col Stern, is you are unable to adjust your focus into the situation business find itself in the 21st Century as well as your continuous snide offsides to people, means you continue to be a waste of time to debate with. Just thoroughly unpleasant. You repeat yourself over and over.

At Peter Hume for all his long windedness can put an intelligent argument together, even though he has a similar myopic view of contemporary global corporatisation. He, like you is not seeing the forest for the trees.

There is no way you can describe the domination of Woolworths or Coles (for just one example) as healthy capitalism.

Instead of government collectives we have something far more dangerous, with no regulations or controls: corporate collectives. Corporations like Unilever, Exxon have swallowed many an independent enterprise. They set the prices, the wages and the quality of produce. They are why we are having so much difficulty in implementing radically new technologies such as alternative, clean energy. They are why we have mass-produced food with the resultant decline in standards.

Consider:

"Global Reach

*

Fifty-one of the world's top 100 economies are corporations.
*

Royal Dutch Shell's revenues are greater than Venezuela's Gross Domestic Product. Using this measurement, WalMart is bigger than Indonesia. General Motors is roughly the same size as Ireland, New Zealand and Hungary combined.
*

There are 63,000 transnational corporations worldwide, with 690,000 foreign affiliates.
*

Three quarters of all transnational corporations are based in North America, Western Europe and Japan.
*

Ninety-nine of the 100 largest transnational corporations are from the industrialized countries.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=37

Get of your proverbial and do some homework.

Squeers
“...tendency of capital creation to always radiate outwards and utilise cheaper labour.”

This does not prove capitalism is unsustainable, because conditions are not static. The rest that you say depends on this.

The reason you think nothing can be proved is because you keep using an illogical method which consists of concluding its own premises; even after the error has been pointed out.

Marx considered himself to be first and foremost an economist, and his theory to be a theory of economics. Yet it was the economics departments that abandoned Marx’s theory first. Its influence lingered on in departments in the humanities in which they neither knew nor cared about their own economic illiteracy.

To talk of Marxian ‘philosophy’ in the absence of his economic theory is meaningless, and would have been meaningless most of all to Marx.

Poirot
Economic phenomena are all interrelated, not in separate boxes. A derivative is, by definition, the wrong place to look for the origin of something. The function of a derivative is to hedge risk in the underlying contract. Government grants a licence to print money to its pet favourite bankers in exchange for a share of the loot. The bubble caused by this violation of property rights is the boom, which must eventually collapse in the GFC we are now witnessing. The derivatives bubble is part of people's attempt to hedge against the risk which cannot be understood in isolation from the government monopoly abuse of the money supply. No amount of regulating it will fix the problem, which is caused by regulation in the first place.

TBC
Your method consists of confusing government policies that violate property rights with “capitalism”. This is to confuse the category “A” with the category “not A” and render your thoughts on this topic a jumble of fallacies.

But perhaps you can answer this: if capitalism is unsustainable, then how is adding more government taxes, inflation, spending and bureaucracies going to make it more sustainable?

For the boneheads out there, here is the forward to Tim Jackson's report TBC alluded to earlier:

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours
is the myth of economic growth. For the last five
decades the pursuit of growth has been the single
most important policy goal across the world. The
global economy is almost five times the size it was
half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the
same rate the economy will be 80 times that size
by the year 2100.
This extraordinary ramping up of global economic
activity has no historical precedent. It’s totally at
odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite
resource base and the fragile ecology on which
we depend for survival. And it has already been
accompanied by the degradation of an estimated
60% of the world’s ecosystems.
For the most part, we avoid the stark reality
of these numbers. The default assumption is that
– financial crises aside – growth will continue
indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries, where
a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but
even for the richest nations where the cornucopia
of material wealth adds little to happiness and
is beginning to threaten the foundations of our
wellbeing.
The reasons for this collective blindness are easy
enough to find. The modern economy is structurally
reliant on economic growth for its stability. When
growth falters – as it has done recently – politicians
panic. Businesses struggle to survive. People lose
their jobs and sometimes their homes. A spiral of
recession looms. Questioning growth is deemed to
be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.
But question it we must. The myth of growth
has failed us. It has failed the two billion people
who still live on less than $2 a day. It has failed
the fragile ecological systems on which we depend
for survival. It has failed, spectacularly, in its own
terms, to provide economic stability and secure
people’s livelihoods.
Today we find ourselves faced with the imminent
end of the era of cheap oil,
cont..

..cont.

the prospect (beyond the
recent bubble) of steadily rising commodity prices,
the degradation of forests, lakes and soils, conflicts
over land use, water quality, fishing rights and the
momentous challenge of stabilising concentrations
of carbon in the global atmosphere. And we face
these tasks with an economy that is fundamentally
broken, in desperate need of renewal.
In these circumstances, a return to business
as usual is not an option. Prosperity for the few
founded on ecological destruction and persistent
social injustice is no foundation for a civilised society.
Economic recovery is vital. Protecting people’s jobs –
and creating new ones – is absolutely essential. But
we also stand in urgent need of a renewed sense
of shared prosperity. A commitment to fairness and
flourishing in a finite world.
Delivering these goals may seem an unfamiliar
or even incongruous task to policy in the modern
age. The role of government has been framed so
narrowly by material aims, and hollowed out by a
misguided vision of unbounded consumer freedoms.
The concept of governance itself stands in urgent
need of renewal.
But the current economic crisis presents us with
a unique opportunity to invest in change. To sweep
away the short-term thinking that has plagued
society for decades. To replace it with considered
policy capable of addressing the enormous challenge
of delivering a lasting prosperity.
For at the end of the day, prosperity goes beyond
material pleasures. It transcends material concerns.
It resides in the quality of our lives and in the health
and happiness of our families. It is present in the
strength of our relationships and our trust in the
community. It is evidenced by our satisfaction at
work and our sense of shared meaning and purpose.
It hangs on our potential to participate fully in the
life of society.
Prosperity consists in our ability to flourish
as human beings – within the ecological limits of
a finite planet. The challenge for our society is to
create the conditions under which this is possible. It
is the most urgent task of our times.

The critics of capitalism never rebut the reasonable inference that abolishing economic calculation tends to spread social and moral chaos all through the society it affects; and never show how the problems they are concerned about are necessarily the result of capitalism rather than of government.

We already know that it’s capitalism, not government, that is feeding the world’s population, because if you take away capitalism, you get mass starvation. That's “scientific” socialism's idea of an experiment.

Those who say capitalism is unsustainable, answer the question: what makes you think *increasing* the amount of government is going to make capitalism more sustainable?

And how is substituting a system based on the initiation of force and threats going to be be an ethical improvement on a system in which initiating force and threats are illegal?

But if any alternative to capitalism is not go to be based on initiating force and threats, then *how* is it going to work?

All alternatives to capitalism are just a throw-back to the belief that wealth comes from plunder and confiscation of other people’s labour. They are slave philosophies parading as piety.

It is term of description, rather than of abuse, to accuse the criminal stupidity of threatening millions of peoples lives, as the anti-capitalist Malthusian environmentalists are doing now, with policies intended to reduce private ownership of the means of production, when it has already been demonstrated, and never refuted, that any alternative involves increasing the abolition of economic calculation.

Peter Hume,

RE: Derivatives - "No amount of regulating it will fix the problem, which is caused by regulation in the first place."

So, your saying that it was the government's fault.

Robert Manne from La Trobe University wrote:

"In 1999 the derivatives industry turned its gaze to the booming US housing industry market and especially to the the market in sub-prime mortgages. Bundles of these hopeless mortgages were turned into derivatives products known as collateralised debt obligations, given AAA ratings and then insured against their failure through equally arcane derivatives known as credit default swaps."

Sounds like the market gurus knew what they were doing - huge profits were made from selling these "products". Even Greenspan admitted in the end that there should have been more regulation.