Is Fascism the Answer?

What effect does the transferability of virtual caital have on the concept of a free market?

Classical economics teaches that mercantilism, that is the pursuit of busingess to amass cash, fails unless the cash is invested to improve the productivity of society or entity generalting the cash. So Spain failed because they acquired huge amounts of capital at low cost by looting the new world. This might have worked fine, except that the Spanish invested their capital in France and the Netherlands, giving rise low cost industries there while nothing was developed in Spain.

The analogy to Seattle seems obvious. In our economy, a huge part of capital is in the form of intellectual property. In this economy, jobs are driven by where the IP is applied . So today, Boeing may have factories for the 787 all over the world but the highest paying jobs are in Seattle where the machine is designed and assembled. We read that Boeing is very leaslous of this skill set.

How difficult would it be to transfer the manamegement skills to China? The issue os even clearer if we ask how dificylkt it would be to transfer the proprietary skillsets behind Microsfot or Starbucks? The ease of transfer of intellectual property seems to me to have a huge effect on conventional nationalistic economic models because the cost of transferring the capital, in the form of the productivity engine, to another coutry is negligible.

The implication is that knowledge economies are NOT in the interests of a nation's workers unless the nation and the corporation are synonymous, i.e. fascism!.

For those too young to remember, fascism was once synonymous witn a model of governewmtn where large coprorations and the state merged. Mussolini may have ended up looking like Hitler's cousin, but his ability to strengthn the Italian econmy was touted by Roosevelt and other liberals as an example to the world.

In today's global economy we have both liberal/democratic societies and fascist societies. In the non fascist societies within this economy all jobs migrate to the lowest possible cost employers. This low coat, a la Ricardo, is acceptable to the source economy because productivity of the original workers ,,, now intellectual managers ... is vastly increased.

Of course, the usual implication is that the source economy will grow by investing more in the high productivity, IP generating sector. The latter assumption seems to me to be faulty. The Amerfican (or Seattle) corporation generating the IP is not the Nation. It may well be in the corporation's interest to transfer the IP generation to a lower cost market as well, iff that marlet is susccesful in producing IP. In a liberal/demcratic society, there is no motivation of coprorations to invest in development of an intelelctual workforce since that is the task of the nation.

So here is my scenario. Imagine the world does not go to war and global warming remaining a marginal cost. Suppose that 1/3 of USA capital is in IP rich industry ... from Boeing to Hollywood. Lets take any one such entity. What would it cost Microsoft or Boeing to become an Indain company?

Don't get me wrong. I believe in global economics and consider myself first a human then as SeattleJew. A global economy is probably the most good for the most people (ironically). However, if my model is corect, the fascist states will have an innate advnatge over the liberal domocratic states. Liberalism (classical definition) means the inevitable loss of productivity aka capital by the American worker.

I also see dismal solutions to this problem ... war or American fascism being the usual answers. The lateral term may not be totally firghtening. European countries, along with Japan and Korea, seem t me to be pursuing a model that might be called sate corporatism. At one level this means that there are incentives for Daimler, Airbus, or Nokia to invest in the intellecual infrastructure of the nation. How can tis effect the US? We still live under the dream of Jefferson where each Ameican is free to devleop her own business (well Tom would said his). Is there a European like model that can take root here? Is the alternative Bushism?

SeattleJew