Germany takes hot seat as Europe falls into the abyss - Telegraph: "Germany takes hot seat as Europe falls into the abyss
We face extreme danger. Unless there is immediate intervention on every front by all the major powers acting in concert, we risk a disintegration of global finance within days. Nobody will be spared, unless they own gold bars."
Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
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7 comments:
I could not find your pos on Germany, there was no link!
That said, I want to congratulate you on the incredible photos you have posted in your Flickr slide show. I could not stop watching, because just as I began to think a particular theme had gone on for too long, the theme would change. Brilliant.
My only complaint: several pictures were unnecessarily repeated.
Your comment on HorsesAss.org completely misses the point. People who 'hoard' capital generally do not put it under their mattresses. Instead, they put it in banks. The banks use that capital in their own way (investments, loans etc.). The result is that, that money continues to work, enabling both the bank and its clients to do more than if the 'hoarder' had put it under his/her mattress.
It just does not work the way you suggest, except in weird instances, usually of some individual with, relatively, small wealth.
Link ... click on ntext in first line.
I disagree wioht you on the economics. IMHO it IS the banks that put the US at huge disadvantage on the flow of capita;.
Any US bank will naturally try to optimize its returns .. manily threw growth of the vlue of the investment. There is NO incen tive to use that investment tyo foster anything other than the bank itself.
In contrast, totalitarian and corporate banking systems .. Chin as an example of the first and Japan the second,have it in their own interests to develop national resources.
The result seems obvious .. any US bank will ship capita to wherever it grows best, even if that impoverishes the US. Sure the Bank will become richer but the productive resource is the main result of the investment so the investment has its greatest effect wherever the money is spent.
I do not know that acutal data but I would bet $1 that the growth of the US in the 1800s represented capital flow from Europe to the US.
BTW, I was not talking about hoarding capital. In fact one of the dumbest things about our society is the proportion of total cpital that is hoarded ,, that is lost because it is put into non productive assets such as homes, cars, love affairs, ... none of which make the US more able to compete. I suspect this iwill be the downfall of the Gulf States too,
I have wondered if the answer to this problem may not be soem sort of wealth tax that encourages investment but taxes property. I understand Sweden has such a tax and that it works well there. If nothing else this might rein in the excesses of golden parachutes.
That said, and before you cut me up for this, I do not know how big a problem harding is in terms of the total economy. Leavingfairness aside, I worry that the exmplae set by thie big time hoarders trickles down and is part of the reason our society does a poor job of saving or investing in infrastructure.
As for my stream ... I will have to lopk at again. In theory, the way Flickr works, this should not happen. In practice it does necause I sometimes post slight variations and they then appear under different names.
BTW .. do I know wou?
Well, I would not call spending one's money on what one enjoys, and derives benefit from, "hoarding".
Unfortunately, too many unwise consumers do not save, via banks and investments, spending more than is wise for them in the long term. That which goes to banks is usually invested by the banks wherever the money will do best, that way the bank demonstrates "best use" of funds to which it has access. It ensures the bank's solvency and could lead to higher interest rates on deposits.
You do understand that a tax of property (of any kind) is a tax on the productive effort of the owner... this is no different, in principle, from enslavement. Sure, the property owner is free to move about, but wherever he is, his productive effort is taken by those few men in Congress to spent as they see fits, rather than as the producer sees fit. Where the producer may spend it on his own enjoyment, or may invest it in some way to grow it further, the politicians invariably spend it on poor growth opportunities. This is worse than what you call hoarding, because the producer's moral and individual Right to his own property is abrogated in favor of someone who has not earned that property. It amounts to theft, via an immoral political system.
Concerning the present banking crisis, consider this article in Forbes.
As for clicking on the first line, that took me to the Telegraph article, and I was expecting more comment by you.
No, you don't know me, however your site is open to public viewing and your mention of Ayn Rand appeared in a Google Alert that I set.
Twenty five years ago I found that I could not defend my own right to spend my earnings as I saw fit. Someone reintroduced me to "Atlas Shrugged" (which I had once read, but not really understood). I read it again, but much more carefully, as I already knew the plot. I was looking, instead, at the choice of words, the many layered reasoning behind the characters and the metaphors, the numerous instances where ideas that seemed right proved wrong... that is the opposite was the moral and logically rational position.
After that experience I read as much Objectivist literature as I could, most notably her "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" and, when it came out, Leonard Peikoff's "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand" and realized that Rand's basic ideas were unassailable.
Since then I have seen many people attempt to disagree or discredit her, usually on blogs. So once in a while, when I see a blogger that shows intellectual quality I drop in to and comment. Your images showed a sharp eye for detail. I encourage you to make the time (that is the only way, really) to read more of Rand before discrediting her ideas.
In "Atlas Shrugged" the politicians, union leaders, and corporate leaders in bed with the government, pass a Directive that, remarkably foreshadows the recent Bailout Legislation.
Ayn Rand wrote, in part, to save America from the cancer of socialism that has been steadily growing over the last 70 years. She was and is right.
Sighhh ...
SWo tell me, do you actually know of a Valhalla where a free market actually exists? Like perpetual motion, the laws of socila thermodynamics make this version of an ideal society imppossible.
As for your concept of slavery, all obligations .. by your terms are slvery. If I am poor and work for you to eat, that is slavery too. Taxes are simply our shared set of obligations as a society.
My take, again is a lot simpler. The guiding principle should be equality if opportuntity. That means, as it must, that some shared needs are provided by the state. The laternative is indeed slavery.
My own view is that education and health care should be optimized to provide as much equlaity as possible. Other human needs may vary by a much greater ratio .. whether that is housing or the choice of what we eat .. but there needs to some floor that assures that each citizen has a chance to achieve her maxiomum based on the will to succeed and innate ability.
That is what Jefferosn taught. Ass t whether this is best done with 100% government control of the means of production or 0% seems t me to be a form of reductio at absurdam. Different needs are best served by different approaches. Somethings are far better served by a free market. some can only be achieved by government,
You do not need a Valhalla, national histories and the present day variation in types of national economies makes it clear that the freer a market is, the better the lives of the citizens.
There is no social law of thermodynamics.
Slavery entails one person, working under threat and against his uncoerced consent, for the sake of another. That is utterly different from obligations that arise by mutual agreement. Your conflation of the two is an extraordinary equivocation.
By what right do you have to claim a share of my productive effort? You can donate your own, but the minute you take mine you open a Pandora's Box of state confiscation for one cause after another. That Pandora's box necessarily paves the way toward making innocent people victims, and their efforts to keep what is there can put them in jail. Such is the unavoidable consequence of communist governments... You are, after all, arguing "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Equality of opportunity, does not mean equality of outcomes. You are merely asking that everyone has their child(ren) be born into equal circumstances. That means that all parents' outcomes, in their steps toward childbirth, be equal. That means some must pay for someone else... and you've opened that Pandora's box.
Jefferson believed that basic education, to grade six, was needed for people to develop enough understanding to understand Individual Rights and the events of the nation.
The only proper role of government is courts, police and military. Courts ensure contract enforcement and deal with crime, including fraud. Fraud can be subtle and complex (as with the Enron case). Note that the forgoing entails the government using retaliatory force against those who have initiated force, fraud being the sneaky equivalent of force used to obtain something the other person would not otherwise give up.
Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics, unlike most laws of science, is purely empirical. So be analogy it is reasonable to extend that sort of reasoning to other kinds of observations.
Jefferson
You need to read the man. He believed in free education through college for those who needed and could use it.
Opportunity
Of course not everyone will achieve the same but visiting on the children the sins of their parents is not acceptable to me. And yes, that does mean we need to share costs for education, healthcare etc.
Government
So, in your mind, Bill Gates could buy the rights o9t all the water in Seattle and charge what he could get???
Also, in your mind, Barack Obama should never have gotten an education?
Oh, and in your mind, we should never have cured polio?
Slavery
If I am starving, I am not free to make a choice w/o coercion.
Comparing Societies
Lets leave the US out for a moment .. rank these on your free market scale and then rank them again on a quality of life scale:
Sweden
Brazil
South Africa
China
Saudi Arabia
Nigeria
Russia
Canada
have fun.
On thermodynamics you wrote,
"it is reasonable to extend that sort of reasoning to other kinds of observations..
I do not agree; it's 'empirical-ness' does not mean it can be arbitrarily applied to socio-political issues. Those are a function of the human mind's capacity to reason, or for un-reason. Neither has anything to do with the deterministic law of thermodynamics.
I HAVE read Jefferson. He did not believe in "free education through college for those who needed and could use it."
(see, "The Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson" by Noble E. Jr Cunningham)
No one else is responsible for the the child of another. Others may choose to be charitable, but the instant you force another to support that child you have acknowledged that coercive treatment of another man for YOUR particular beliefs is a legitimate socio-political approach. That gives me the same right... "I have a gun. Give me your f'ing wallet, cause I say so, loser!".
Can you grasp that that is the culture you are advocating... as did Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc. It was all about the using the resources of those how worked to lift up those who did not or could not. All of a sudden, the number of "could nots" increased exponentially, and the aggression to those who could escalated until mass murder was justified. As a Jew you should damn well understand that... why do think the Jews were persecuted? It was not JUST because of religion, but because their religion permitted them to be quietly productive in THIS world, to handle money and to make a profit... that evil, evil thing, a profit! Jews always go for a profit, right! Well that is the ultimate source of the enormous bigotry against Jews... profit is selfish.
Deep down, you know I am right.
"So, in your mind, Bill Gates could buy the rights o9t sic] all the water in Seattle and charge what he could get???"
Of course, if you were SELLING those rights, you would make damn sure you got enough money for them. And/Or, you might introduce some contractual standard by which his fees for the water are set to a certain standard.
Of course, as is true of all monopolies in a free nation —as opposed to mixed-socialist/fascist nation like America— if he over-charged someone would find other ways to obtain water. Already, I envision rainwater catchment systems, trucked in water, train carried water, nuclear drive sea-water evaporators. So much for the monopoly you anti-freedom people always bring up as somehow indicating that the free market cannot work.
Also, in your mind, Barack Obama should never have gotten an education?
You have already been given enough information from me to think that one through for yourself. The statement is simply a verbal attack. Mostly it displays your refusal to think. You know perfectly well that private schools would replace public schools within days of any minor dismantling of the public indoctrination system.
Oh, and in your mind, we should never have cured polio?
Their are only four-letter words suited to that puerile and execrable level of discussion. Not to mention the fact that it is an utter betrayal of an otherwise mature exchange of ideas, that you have reduced to the gutter.
Canada wins easily.
But that is your job. It is not my job to think for you. But that is what you really want isn't it? That is what you are really afraid of. If YOU cannot make it, you want to be able to FORCE someone else to ensure you make it. You don't care if they get ripped off, for your sake. You, in all your superficial caring for the poor and unfortunate, are really just a con artist, hoping to enslave whomever you see as "fortunate" to yourself. How base, how low, how hypocritical.
You have some serious self-evaluation to do. It seems you can take pictures but cannot rationally 'picture' ideas.
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