board77

Dave_LF wrote:

ToshoftheWuffingas wrote:

It sticks in their craw that a social welfare state works.

And does it without God or guns.

Great Scott, Dave. You have that half wrong.

Jesus is a Socialist, and he lives in Stockholm now under the name of Jens Godsen.

So there.

Cenedril_Gildinaur wrote:

Rich countries that adopt socialist policies (and that includes the current USA where socialism is erroneously defined as "always more than we have" ) can maintain the gloriously high standard of living for a while as they eat their seed stock.

Scandinavian countries are the current example of "see it does work" as they eat their seed stock. Other countries used to be that example, but for some reason stopped being such a great example once they ran out of stored wealth to consume.

Another pronouncement from on high, I see.

Um, what seed stock, exactly? And which nations did it and failed? Give us, say, oh, I don't know, ONE example? A real one, from the real world?

And, hey, you're the guy that advocates SELLING your seed stock, so what's up with that?

At the rate things are going, if I dare to say "the sky is blue" or "water is wet" people will accuse me of making pronouncements from on high.

Sweden is actually poorer than people think.

And no, I don't advocate selling the seed stock. I advocate a 21st century economic system, fit for the 21st century, unlike antiquated Keynesianism or even more antiquated Socialism.

CG
have you converted to something new and different? For many years now what you have been preaching is a free market system that hearkens back to the days of Adam Smith.

Then you supplemented that with Von Mises and the Austrian 'school' and that dates back to the 1920's and 30's. And Von Mises based some of his theories on the British Currency School Principle which was generally out of favor by the 1850's and considered out of date then.

But its good that you have changed from all that old out of date idealogy to something 2st century? Maybe a leopard can change its spots.

What do you have that is new, different, innovative, modern, and 21st century?

vison wrote:

Um, what seed stock, exactly? And which nations did it and failed? Give us, say, oh, I don't know, ONE example? A real one, from the real world?

Jared Diamond has some mildly interesting discussions of failing nations in his book Collapse. I don't think he mentioned seed stock, but I don't remember much about the book.

IIRC, Jared Diamond's thesis was civilizations collapse when they've done excess damage to their environment. Doesn't matter what happens to the seeds - they never get to grow into plants because the soil's gone bad. He builds a very strong case too. Devastatingly strong. With examples ranging from Easter Island to Haiti.

Riverthalos wrote:

IIRC, Jared Diamond's thesis was civilizations collapse when they've done excess damage to their environment. Doesn't matter what happens to the seeds - they never get to grow into plants because the soil's gone bad. He builds a very strong case too. Devastatingly strong. With examples ranging from Easter Island to Haiti.

That was an amazing book. I see a future author writing an addendum, featuring the USA, amongst others.

I didn't have it in mind, though. Those societies did not fail because they were "socialist".

C_G meant "socialist", as far as I could figure out what he meant. This is never easy.

As for the "free trade" thing: I am an advocate of free trade between equal partners. I don't mean equal in "size", but in fundamentals. Poor farmers in India or Africa do not own their own land, that's the first thing that makes them different from us. Poor farmers in India or Africa do not, therefore, get to choose what the landowner wants planted.

I know several Indian farmers who live exceedingly well here in Canada on the proceeds of what to me seem to be very small farms in the Punjab. I mean as little as 10 or 20 acres. Their tenants do not live in Abbotsford in split-level modern homes and drive Escalades.

There are hundreds of thousands, likely many millions, of poor rural people who go hungry because the land that should be feeding them is planted to cash crops.

Large, stable systems are rarely brought down by any one thing. Rome certainly wasn't. If this truly leads to the end of US preeminence, it won't have been any one thing for us either. There's a reason commentators refer to "the converging catastrophes of the 21st century". We hit the limit of oil production, we overextended our military, we screwed up financially in about a million different ways, climate change appears to be messing up agriculture and handing us extra natural disasters and is only likely to get worse, the soil is pretty messed up to begin with thanks to the way we've been doing agriculture, we outsourced functions essential to our survival, we let our educational systems decay, we let wealth because something you win instead of something you earn, we lost our attention spans, we embraced religious fanaticism and wishful thinking, and in dozens of other ways, decided we preferred easy, false answers to difficult, true ones.

No nation is entirely free of these things. A healthy one can take a few in stride. But all of them at once?...

Very well stated Dave.

Seed Stock, in a larger economic system, is an analogy to saving for and investing in the future. It derives from farming terminology wherein a farmer puts aside a portion of his harvest as next year's planting. If a farmer does not do that, he has nothing to plant next year and starves. Some of the wheat is ground into flour, and some of it is saved to plant. Some of the carrots are picked, and some are allowed to go to seed. Some of the cows and chickens are slaughtered to provide food this winter, but others are kept alive even though it means you have to feed them so that they can provide food for next year.

While someone can eat well by consuming the seed stock, it is very short sighted to do so.

In a more complex economy, it refers to practices that discourage innovation and investment, because that is how the economy grows. The United States, with an absurdly low savings rate and going deep into debt, is considered by economists who use the term to be an example of a country "eating its seed stock". There are many ways a country can discourage saving and investment.

If you have a large seed stock, you can get away with eating your seed stock for years before you run out. If you start with a wealthy country, you can go for decades before the discouraging of saving and investment catches up with you.

from CG

Quote:

I advocate a 21st century economic system, fit for the 21st century, unlike antiquated Keynesianism or even more antiquated Socialism.

So when is the big announcement. Will you make it here or in a special thread just for the debut of your new idealogy?

For many years now what you have been preaching is a free market system that hearkens back to the days of Adam Smith. That is from the 1700's.

Then you supplemented that with Von Mises and the Austrian 'school' and that dates back to the 1920's and 30's. But even those dates are rather misleading as Von Mises based some of his theories on the British Currency School Principle which was generally out of favor by the 1850's and considered out of date then.

But its good that you have changed from all that old out of date idealogy muddled together from the 1700's, 1800's and early 1900's to something 2st century?
I am very happy to hear this turn of events from you CG. Very happy.


So what do you have that is new, different, innovative, modern, and 21st century?

Dave_LF wrote:

Large, stable systems are rarely brought down by any one thing. Rome certainly wasn't. If this truly leads to the end of US preeminence, it won't have been any one thing for us either. There's a reason commentators refer to "the converging catastrophes of the 21st century". We hit the limit of oil production, we overextended our military, we screwed up financially in about a million different ways, climate change appears to be messing up agriculture and handing us extra natural disasters and is only likely to get worse, the soil is pretty messed up to begin with thanks to the way we've been doing agriculture, we outsourced functions essential to our survival, we let our educational systems decay, we let wealth because something you win instead of something you earn, we lost our attention spans, we embraced religious fanaticism and wishful thinking, and in dozens of other ways, decided we preferred easy, false answers to difficult, true ones.

No nation is entirely free of these things. A healthy one can take a few in stride. But all of them at once?...

Precisely. Well put.

I am always leery of comparing the American Empire to the Roman Empire, but there are, nonetheless, striking similarities in the decline stage: the overextension of the military and the enormous expense of maintaining client states; the "bread and circuses" issue (what the hell else can you call Britney Spears?); some dependence on foreign foods at the expense of home agriculture; contributing massively to ecological destruction (the Romans cut down every tree within reach of the city, and did this everywhere they went), etc.

But, it's all the Baby Boomers' fault. Kill all the Boomers and your troubles are over.

Much has been made in this thread about persons who are claimed to have "predicted" the current economic mess as far back as 2006.

Check this out:

http://americannewsproject.com/node/135" target="_blank" target="_blank" target="_blank

Senator Byron Dorgan D-ND warning the nation that if the Financial Modernization Act of 1999 were to be passed that it would spell disaster for consumers in America. This Act was only made possible by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which went back to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The proponents of free markets led by Republican committee chairmen like Phil Gramm successfully repealed most of Glass Steagal the same year. President Clinton, in one of the truly bonehead decisions of his administration, signed it into law.

On March 18th, I provided in this very thread, the study which said that the repeal of Glass -Steagall was the number one factor that led to the current financial debacle.

Quote:

"Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America," a report released by Essential Information and the Consumer Education Foundation details a dozen crucial deregulatory moves over the last decade -- each a direct response to heavy lobbying from Wall Street and the broader financial sector, as the report details. Combined, these deregulatory moves helped pave the way for the current financial meltdown.

Here are 12 deregulatory steps to financial meltdown:

1. The repeal of Glass-Steagall
The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 formally repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and related rules, which prohibited banks from offering investment, commercial banking, and insurance services. In 1998, Citibank and Travelers Group merged on the expectation that Glass-Steagall would be repealed. Then they set out, successfully, to make it so. The subsequent result was the infusion of the investment bank speculative culture into the world of commercial banking. The 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall helped create the conditions in which banks invested monies from checking and savings accounts into creative financial instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, investment gambles that led many of the banks to ruin and rocked the financial markets in 2008.

Thankfully, Senator Dorgan is still a member of the Senate and is still attempting to wage the good fight there. If you listen to the video, he said that ten years from then (1999) we would come to regret the action of the Congress and it would be obvious that such laws were bad ones.