Scientism

[pbrower2a]

(07-10-2019, 12:19 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(07-09-2019, 10:23 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: I've never argued that there should be no government in the mix.  Government is needed to adjudicate contracts, for example.

The tendency to oligopoly is, however, a result of putting the government in the mix.  Government regulation provides an avenue for business success other than free market competition - namely, lobbying for regulation that will help particular companies, usually the incumbents, against competitors.

Since government inevitably sides with existing companies due to lobbying, some countervailing efforts to prevent existing companies from getting too big is necessary.

What about externialities like pollution, hogging up all the water, and natural monopolies?  I reckon the Gilded Age would be an example of free market nirvana, would it not?.  Then of course is a big fat problem, namely multinationals. Since these monsters have no actual country, who is gonna protect us from their predations? How on earth would contracts fix all these problems?

It's all power, and the bureaucratic corporations clearly believe in market economics until they can find something 'better'  for themselves -- maybe fascist brutality as an enforcement of their will.

Quote:So , would anyone like to live next to a rank stinky feedlot or hog farm?  I've past them a few times on the road and they reek for miles and miles.

 
If you work in a rank, stinky feedlot you probably live nearby. If you live in a hog-raising area, you will smell pigs.

Quote:As for fixing some government overstretch.  Any law that is corporate welfare must be repealed. This includes subsidies either for the company or it's customers. Yup goodby for Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, The FED which is corporate welfare for banksters, student loan guarantees, and for a cherry on top.  The US should cease and desist patrolling sea lanes unless those who benefit pay for it. I'd also withdraw from the Mideast because all the costs there are for oil unless Big Oil pays for it, etc. and etc.  

Such broke down in the meltdown of 1929-1933 and came close to breaking down in 2008 and 2009. People used to have to renegotiate mortgages every year, and that depended upon people having bank savings accounts as the basis of lending. The bureaucratic-capitalist way of doing things depends upon the FED.  Maybe it will take another really-nasty depression to bring down the corporate behemoths whose owners and executives can wax fat while insulating themselves from mass suffering that they enforce. The FED will no longer be able to finance speculative activities of any kind, including borrowing for questionable education. You know what is questionable education -- the rip-off schools that charge Harvard-like tuition for vocational education suspect in value. That seemed to die under Obama, but Trump and the GOP seek its revival.

...if Big Oil pays for patrolling the sea lanes, then such will come out of heavy taxes on petroleum. Ultimately it will be the people who use the oil who pay. We end up subsidizing long commutes so that people can avoid having to live in urban densities such as those in East and South Asia.

So what is the alternative to the bureaucratic capitalism that has the inequality of Gilded plutocracy melded with a Soviet-style nomenklatura, arguably the worst of both worlds? It will be back to small business -- local in geographic scope and attentive to customers. I live where there are lots of Old Order Amish: businesses are small, but there are no bureaucracies. The Amish world has few white-collar jobs. Hmmm.

Quote:So I think we agree with tossing lobbyists and cut the uncle sugar for entities who certainly don't deserve it.

Government by lobbyist is a novel form of dictatorship. This must go if we are to have what Abraham Lincoln called a "new Birth of Freedom".

Quote:Since both political parties have serious issues with agendas that have no future, perhaps a new party is needed.  Let's call it the no sugar for big business party.

Destroy the economic basis for a corrupt or sold-out politician, and that politician becomes irrelevant.

Quote:Then we'll have some dough left over for good shit like infrastructure, *resiliency implementation, single payer healthcare, and the usual safety net this and thats.

Yes. Make sure that government operates to facilitate prosperity and give aid to people who truly need it. We will need to address poverty instead of to cultivate it as a means of giving super-rich types more control over us. What many forget about the Great Depression is that it was a great time for starting a business, if little else. Rents became incredibly cheap. Inventories were for sale at fire-sale prices without the fire. People who started businesses could find plenty of people available for employment, and by employing one person in a small business one got the extended family as reliable customers intent on keeping their relative employed. People who recently had been looking for highly-liquid, short-term, high-yield investments that they didn't have to work to foster now found themselves being stuck with low-yield enterprises that might pay off handsomely in fifteen to twenty years but that would require intense activity (including cultivation of customers in hard times) in operations that one could not run from. That is practically a reversion to the cottage industry.

Quote:*Mr. Market hates this because this forces redundancy, localization, and stockpiles. This also means ending globalization, but if we don't , you know that the new mother nature is gonna whack us good for being true believers in assorted ideologies to nowhere.

The Trump ideology does lead somewhere -- wars for profit followed by civil unrest. The highway to Hell has a destination even if that destination is one that no wise person seeks.