Donate Bitcoin

Donate Paypal


PeakOil is You

PeakOil is You

THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Discussions about the economic and financial ramifications of PEAK OIL

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby onlooker » Thu 20 Sep 2018, 11:11:02

You hit it out of the ballpark with that one Ghung. But be careful to point out anything in which the Govt had a hand in, because rabid Capitalists are quick to say, "Look see, it is the Government's fault". Not taking a moment to reflect that the requisites of modern Capitalism require severe underfunding of the Govt and weakening of it. And also not taking into account how Capitalism has created an environment very difficult to allow ordinary folk to do anything other than work as wage slaves. That is why the middle class of America is a dying class. Where are they? Not in middle heartland America suffering from neglect and being adandoned by Corporations via Outsourcing. Not in the decaying cities of many states left no option but to become wards of the Federal Govt. Not in the suburbs where people are in over their heads with Debts and have to work and commute most of their hours awake to pay the bills. Where oh where is the Middle Class?
"We are mortal beings doomed to die
User avatar
onlooker
Fission
Fission
 
Posts: 10957
Joined: Sun 10 Nov 2013, 13:49:04
Location: NY, USA

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby GHung » Thu 20 Sep 2018, 11:58:50

Where oh where is the Middle Class? A question with complex answers which boil down to one small end of the economic spectrum, in KJ's Darwinian world, feeling it's important to take far more than they need, the other end essentially dysfunctional in terms of producing anything tangible (essentially dead weight from a purely practical perspective), both mining the vast middle class who are trying to keep up the appearance of being middle class. All of them consuming stuff and ignoring their waste streams.

I agree that it's at least a warped sense of priorities; no "spiritual" throttling of our culture's need for more, whether or not we can pay for it in terms of real-time true capital.

So we steal from the future.
Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit nothing but their Souls. - Anonymous Ghung Person
User avatar
GHung
Intermediate Crude
Intermediate Crude
 
Posts: 3093
Joined: Tue 08 Sep 2009, 16:06:11
Location: Moksha, Nearvana

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Thu 20 Sep 2018, 18:49:26

Oddly enough, i don't disagree with any of that, except one thing. It's not Capitalism that is the problem, nor would things be any different if we were all pinkos born and indoctrinated for life. There would still be 7.7+ Billion of us, and we would still be running short of the necessities. That problem is caused by apes doing what apes do.

The only difference is that in a Marxist world, no middle class exists, and everybody everywhere is equally miserable.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001

Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.

Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
KaiserJeep
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 6094
Joined: Tue 06 Aug 2013, 17:16:32
Location: Wisconsin's Dreamland

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby Yonnipun » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 05:38:29

https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2016/12/02/why-mao-is-still-a-hero-to-so-many-chinese/

After Mao, the malnutrition rate in China is 7%.
After Indian capitalism, the malnutrition rate in India is 51%.


Mao set a world record by doubling life expectancy in in the shortest period of time. Life expectancy was doubled from 32 in 1949 to 65 in 1980. A world record! Think how many lives Mao saved! Sure he killed some people, but he saved so many other lives. This is why so many people who lived under Mao revere him to this very day, though it is admitted that he made mistakes.
Yonnipun
Lignite
Lignite
 
Posts: 221
Joined: Sat 07 Apr 2018, 04:29:19

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 05:49:41

....so starving 65 million Chinese in outlying provinces with a planned famine to achieve a political goal is a "mistake"?

Would you like to apologize for Hitler and his Nazis now? His 17 million in the Holocaust seems pretty paltry beside Mao or Stalin or any other Marxist despot.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001

Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.

Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
KaiserJeep
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 6094
Joined: Tue 06 Aug 2013, 17:16:32
Location: Wisconsin's Dreamland

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby Yonnipun » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 05:55:41

LINK

No, they like them because they are Social Darwinists and they think they won the genetic lottery. Not only that, they think everyone who lost the lottery shouldn’t even get a chance to play. Or maybe even not get a chance to live. That’s what it’s all about. All HBD’ers hate socialism because it requires people to share. HBD’ers are unbelievably selfish. They don’t want to share with even one other human being. Their motto is as Adam Smith wrote, “Everything for me, and nothing for anything else.” Capitalist fanboys who love Smith fail to note that that philosophy was also one of the most evil philosophies that exists.


There is evidence for free markets. Yeah. Evidence that they don’t work. Look what the Chicago Boys did to Chile. Look how free market capitalism blew up the whole US economy in 2008 and took most of the world economy down with it. Love how capitalism starves to death 14 million people a year, mostly in South Asia.

There’s evidence that Communism saves lives. Stalin broke the world record for increasing life expectancy, doubling it from 1927-1953. Mao then broke Stalin’s record, doubling life expectancy in an even shorter time, 1949-1980. Where’s the evidence that free markets are good for public health or the health of any individual. How do free markets work if they don’t even give people enough food to live on? How do they work if they aren’t even able to provide shelter for all people? How do they work if they can’t even provide people with health care? Obviously in a lot of ways, free markets don’t even work at all.
Last edited by Tanada on Sat 22 Sep 2018, 10:43:30, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: fixed broken URL
Yonnipun
Lignite
Lignite
 
Posts: 221
Joined: Sat 07 Apr 2018, 04:29:19

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby Yonnipun » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 06:30:02

LINK

Radical neoliberal free market capitalism doesn’t “work better” than socialism, at least not in my book anyway. I believe in survival. Radical capitalism doesn’t allow people to survive. I am against that. What it boils down to is that I will always support a system that allows people to survive (socialism) against a system that doesn’t (radical free market socialism). So to me security > wealth. You’re free to differ.


Many varieties of socialism have been 100% proven to be better for workers than radical free market capitalism. I also believe in a strong safety net. Your argument is that zero safety net works better than a strong safety net. Well, as one who supports a strong safety net, I just don’t agree with that.

My definition of socialism includes social democracy.

We have basically centuries of evidence that radical free market capitalism is catastrophic to working people. We can go all the way back to the 1800’s and even further back to the fencing off of the Commons in England if you like.

The debate is settled. It’s over. Radical free market capitalism is a disaster. If you ask me, it doesn’t work. I drive around my town and see countless homeless people wandering the streets every day in one of the richest countries on Earth. Now to me that is not a system that is “working better,” sorry. Don’t buy it.
Last edited by Tanada on Sat 22 Sep 2018, 10:44:10, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: fixed broken URL
Yonnipun
Lignite
Lignite
 
Posts: 221
Joined: Sat 07 Apr 2018, 04:29:19

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby Yonnipun » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 06:52:45

LINK
The power of capitalist propaganda is immense. According to the ruling class media, the only system that starves anyone anymore is Communism.

One hears this platitude over and over – Communism = starvation. It is true that 600,000 have starved to death in North Korea since the 1990’s. However, 14 million starve to death every year in the world – mostly in South Asia but also 1 million in Latin America – almost all under capitalist regimes. Not one word of this from the ruling class mouthpieces.

This has been going since at least 1986 (when the figure was calculated) with no end in sight.


I
n Vietnam, the malnutrition rate of 18% is about 1/2 the Thai rate of 36%, one positive aspect of Vietnamese socialism. When one thinks of Thailand, one never suspects that 1/3 of the population doesn’t get enough food to eat. All one thinks of are tourists, skyscrapers, traffic jams, girly bars, beaches and elephants.


In Pakistan, 62% of all children are already stunted in growth by the tender age of five. But the media tells us that stunting only occurs in North Korea. After all, it is only Communism that starves the people.


let us focus our attention on the capitalist showcase of Niger, in northern Africa, where the human-hunting industry, the most profitable enterprise capitalism has ever developed, yet festers.

Here capitalism has blessed this blighted and unstable land with the worst human development indicators on Earth, where 40% of children are chronically undernourished (And that is in a bountiful harvest!), where the literacy rate is a Medieval 17%, life expectancy is a tragic 44.7 years, the infant mortality rate is an outrageous 151.8 per 1000, and Niger is bested by only one other country when it comes to killing little kids under age 5.

What is killing the children of Niger, or for that matter, kids across the Sahel? None other than the free market. Recently, free market fundamentalists convinced the government to deregulate the grain market, leading to major fluctuations in grain prices. When prices are high, they are so high that families could not even afford to buy food for their kids.

Worse, money that should have gone to education and health care, such as it exists, goes for food. The wonders of the invisible hand of starvation! Incredibly, while the people starved, Niger exported food according to capitalist market “logic”. One is reminded of Czarist Russia, which exported wheat every year while the peasants went hungry.

Going the free market route was one of the dumbest things Niger ever did. It increased poverty, hunger and starvation. Yet the media tells us that this free market project is the only thing that works, and everything else is “failed”. I think if the successful project were starving me, I might give one of those “failures” a shot.
Last edited by Tanada on Sat 22 Sep 2018, 10:44:48, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: fixed broken URL
Yonnipun
Lignite
Lignite
 
Posts: 221
Joined: Sat 07 Apr 2018, 04:29:19

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby onlooker » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 07:10:54

I would add the icing on the cake. Capitalism has given free reign to all the excesses and urges of mankind such as greed, selfishness, vanity, sloth/indolence among others. It has the invisible hand of money and wealth to usurp control of every major human institution including the governing structures of this planet.

What it is about is setting up an economic system virtually worldwide that incorporates the urges and impulses cited above. This has led as it was bound to, to an extremely unjust/unequal worldwide social structure. Even worse it is strongly implicated in humanities propensity for growth both in numbers and economic throughput. This above all is leading us to total ruin as we are dismantling the support beams for the web of life on this planet
"We are mortal beings doomed to die
User avatar
onlooker
Fission
Fission
 
Posts: 10957
Joined: Sun 10 Nov 2013, 13:49:04
Location: NY, USA

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 08:05:35

Again, I must point out that the only form of economy with a record of lasting success is the Capitalist system. To claim that it is broken, while endorsing Marxism/Socialism/Communism, is silly. The dreams of Marx and Engels have an unbroken record of failure.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001

Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.

Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
KaiserJeep
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 6094
Joined: Tue 06 Aug 2013, 17:16:32
Location: Wisconsin's Dreamland

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby GHung » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 09:16:03

KaiserJeep wrote:Again, I must point out that the only form of economy with a record of lasting success is the Capitalist system. To claim that it is broken, while endorsing Marxism/Socialism/Communism, is silly. The dreams of Marx and Engels have an unbroken record of failure.


Depends on your definition of lasting success, I guess.

Some folks here throw the words "capitalism" and "socialism" around as if they are well-defined fixed concepts. This is either a lack of understanding or laziness; maybe a bit of both. Some here have a "Darwinian" view of what capitalism is (should be) as if laissez-faire, raw capitalism would work in today's world, and insist that pure socialism (where everything is owned and controlled by the State and everyone works for the State) is the only alternative.

Many in the US claim that what they want is a return to capitalism, but what they are really espousing is the Neo-liberal capitalism we've supposedly enjoyed for so long, which is quickly devolving into fascism. None of these systems are lasting, as those who would benefit from the "nanny state", while contributing little, grow in number while those who would exploit so-called prosperity to the maximum extent gain control of the nanny state via bought-and-paid-for government and subversion of laws. They have even succeeded in convincing many that our constitutional system of laws is in fact a "Deep State" bent on destroying them. The other truth is that those with the greatest ability to foment change have the least incentive to do so. They expect to hold what they have, and will sell their souls to do that.

Underlying all of this is decline of empire and the inevitable resource constraints and environmental degradation that are both the causes and effects of increasing population running head-long into the death of the growth-based surplus economy. Such has it always been.

What's funny and sad is that so many think that if we can blame others for our collectively being victims of our own collective successes, that it can be fixed. Magical thinking is hard-coded in humans, it seems. Me? I work at things that may offer a chance for me and mine to weather the coming storms, on a very local and community level. No point in adding to the insanity.

Image
Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit nothing but their Souls. - Anonymous Ghung Person
User avatar
GHung
Intermediate Crude
Intermediate Crude
 
Posts: 3093
Joined: Tue 08 Sep 2009, 16:06:11
Location: Moksha, Nearvana

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 11:47:39

All of that is quite theoretical, as nobody can reliably forecast the future. PRESENTLY Capitalism rules and supports 7.7+Billion humans. That is the very epitomy of success. Any Marxist regime would be in profound collapse with much environmental damage.

Which of course is yet another prediction of a future not yet real. However, my prediction is based on a consistent history of a couple of millenia of success with Capitalism, and the miserable eventual failure of all attempts at Marxism in dozens of variations.

Really - just think about it. Can you point to ANY Marxist system more than 50 years old?
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001

Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.

Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
KaiserJeep
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 6094
Joined: Tue 06 Aug 2013, 17:16:32
Location: Wisconsin's Dreamland

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby GHung » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 12:22:29

KaiserJeep wrote:All of that is quite theoretical, as nobody can reliably forecast the future. PRESENTLY Capitalism rules and supports 7.7+Billion humans. That is the very epitomy of success. Any Marxist regime would be in profound collapse with much environmental damage.

Which of course is yet another prediction of a future not yet real. However, my prediction is based on a consistent history of a couple of millenia of success with Capitalism, and the miserable eventual failure of all attempts at Marxism in dozens of variations.

Really - just think about it. Can you point to ANY Marxist system more than 50 years old?


Again, another binary response. Every system known to history has failed in one way or another, so projecting that into the future is not a stretch. Treating "capitalism" as a fixed concept is simplistic, to say the least.

You seem to be stuck in your binary Subnode loop, KJ.
Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit nothing but their Souls. - Anonymous Ghung Person
User avatar
GHung
Intermediate Crude
Intermediate Crude
 
Posts: 3093
Joined: Tue 08 Sep 2009, 16:06:11
Location: Moksha, Nearvana

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 20:51:18

All of us in the PO Forum are among the most fortunate of men. We exist in a world of plenty. More food than we can eat, more liquor and other intoxicants than we can consume, a warm soft comfortable place to sleep, virtual companions on the internet, work if we choose it, and medical care, and retirement income. I could go on and on, but you understand my point.

YOU didn't do that, centuries of Capitalism did that. Yet you must complain. You are drowning in marshmallows, and you refuse to even open your mouth and chew. You insist that you must have doom, doom, and more doom.

Capitalism did not put 7.7+ Billion Kudzu Apes on this ball of dirt and water. Mother Nature shaped us through evolution to be the most successful species ever. Now some of you insist upon perceiving flaws in our successful domination of our environment.

Well, "Capitalism" is jusr a label for how apes behave. Now go find a mirror and gaze into it at the Capitalist.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001

Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.

Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
KaiserJeep
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 6094
Joined: Tue 06 Aug 2013, 17:16:32
Location: Wisconsin's Dreamland

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby mmasters » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 21:05:56

I love it when people complain about capitalism yet they have an iPhone. That was created with capitalism.
User avatar
mmasters
Intermediate Crude
Intermediate Crude
 
Posts: 2272
Joined: Sun 16 Apr 2006, 03:00:00
Location: Mid-Atlantic

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby GHung » Sat 22 Sep 2018, 21:11:29

mmasters wrote:I love it when people complain about capitalism yet they have an iPhone. That was created with capitalism.


I don't have an iPhone, don't "complain" about capitalism, and China makes more smartphones than anybody (exports more than 4 times the #2 country).
Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit nothing but their Souls. - Anonymous Ghung Person
User avatar
GHung
Intermediate Crude
Intermediate Crude
 
Posts: 3093
Joined: Tue 08 Sep 2009, 16:06:11
Location: Moksha, Nearvana

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 23 Sep 2018, 03:03:37

GHung wrote:
mmasters wrote:I love it when people complain about capitalism yet they have an iPhone. That was created with capitalism.


I don't have an iPhone, don't "complain" about capitalism, and China makes more smartphones than anybody (exports more than 4 times the #2 country).


But YOU do insist upon your Doom. Fascism is most generally described as using the powers of government to change the behaviors of others. It is a coercive evil, and the Liberal Fascism preached on college campuses, by ignorant academics who never labored or owned/operated a business, is the most pervasive. The modern Democratic Party is full of Fascists, who would change the way we speak and think and believe.

Capitalism, practised by generations of US citizens, is why we have more and do more and give more than any other country on Earth. It is why we have more to lose, and why there is a long line of refugees trying to cross our borders and help themselves to what we have. The unique US flavor of Capitalism does not have growth as a requirement, it also works just as well in a shrinking economy such as the Great Depresion, when much of this country's infrastructure was concieved and built.

Capitalism cannot however, survive those who insist that government right every ill that exists in the world. The very real wealth that accompanies the unique US flavor of Capitalism must be retained by and spent by US citizens for their own benefit if the end of cheap Fossil Fuels is to be survived with US culture essentually intact. We will save ourselves if we are allowed to, but we may have to hang a few Congress Critters first, those who will attempt dramatc and foolish and ultimately futile gestures in the name of saving us from ourselves before then.

So keep on doing what you are doing, and teach your kids to do the same. I am enjoying a fresh reminder of what underlies Capitalism this week, with my 3-year-old twin grandkids, who start most sentances with "I wan't", and are champion negotiators to the cause of fulfilling those needs.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001

Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.

Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
KaiserJeep
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 6094
Joined: Tue 06 Aug 2013, 17:16:32
Location: Wisconsin's Dreamland

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Sun 23 Sep 2018, 03:59:49

GHung wrote:
mmasters wrote:I love it when people complain about capitalism yet they have an iPhone. That was created with capitalism.


I don't have an iPhone, don't "complain" about capitalism, and China makes more smartphones than anybody (exports more than 4 times the #2 country).

Earth to Ghung: And China is largely a capitalistic system. And under recent decades of economic reform toward capitalism, China's economy has boomed over time. So your point is?
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
User avatar
Outcast_Searcher
COB
COB
 
Posts: 10142
Joined: Sat 27 Jun 2009, 21:26:42
Location: Central KY

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby Yonnipun » Sun 23 Sep 2018, 04:26:49

https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2018/09/14/a-look-at-the-chinese-model-of-communism-market-socialism/

Incidentally, China still has 5-year plans and the whole economy is planned. The business sector has to go along with the plan, and if you do not go along with it, they can confiscate your business. A party committee sits on the board of all large corporations. The government owns every inch of land in China. The state invests an incredible amount in the economy and also overseas where it makes vast investments. This is because some Chinese government companies are very profitable. A number of Chinese government companies are on the list of largest companies in the world.


Capitalists in the US openly complain that they cannot compete with Communist Chinese government corporations, crying that they get subsidies so it’s not fair. So here we have US corporations openly admitting that they can’t compete with Chinese government Communist state-owned companies.


45% of the economy is state owned and it is very profitable. Much of the state sector is owned by small municipalities and this works very well. Further, cities compete against each other. For instance, City A’s steel mill will compete against City B’s steel mill and both will compete against a private sector steel mill, if there is one. Successful enterprises bring in a lot of money to the city, which they use to upgrade the city, which results in more workers moving there, which grows the economy more with more workers and more demand.


here are also still a number of pure Maoist villages in China that are run completely on a Maoist line. Everything is done as it was right out of the Mao era. I understand that they do very well and there is a huge waiting list to move to those villages.



Also party officials lobby the state to try to solve any urgent problem in the area. The government is always running around the country spending lots of money on public works or on fixing various environmental problems and issues. A lot of the dissertations coming out the universities are on how to deal with this or that societal problem or issue. So instead of leaving it up to the private sector to fix the problems in society and create public works, the government does all of that.


There are 1,000 protests every day in China. Yes there is corruption and government abuse of this or that, but if protests last long enough, the party usually gets alarmed and tries to do something about the problem because they don’t want serious unrest. This is party that does everything it can to serve the people and try to remain popular with the people by giving them as much as they want and doing as much for them as
possible.


It’s illegal to be homeless in China. If you end up homeless in China, they will try to put you in a homeless shelter or if they cannot do that, they will send you back to your village because most homeless are rural migrants who moved to the city.


The state spends an unbelievable amount of money on public works all over the country all the time. Many projects that in the US have “conclusively proven” to be too costly to be implemented have been done in China in spades. And China’s per capita income in less than 10% of ours.


The economic model of China is called Market Socialism and a lot of modern day Leftists and even Communists support it and agree that this is the way forward for the left and Communist movement. Like all words, the word Communism has no inherent meaning. It means whatever people who use it say it means. So the definition of Communism can clearly change with the times as Communists update their definitions of what the word means.

China cannot be called capitalist in any way. Their model is far more socialist than anything in any European social democracy. It also goes far beyond the US in the New Deal and of course beyond beyond the social liberalism and its more left analogue in Canada, not to mention beyond social democracy in Australia or New Zealand.


Interestingly, Japan is not a capitalist country. They don’t have neoliberalism. That country does not operate on the capitalist mode of development. Instead the resemblance is, I hate to say, to Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany also did not have a capitalist mode of development. I’m not sure what you call it, but it’s not capitalism. For instance, in Japan, the commanding heights of the economy, including almost all of the banks, is owned by the state.

The state still plans the economy. They plan the economy together with the business community and the state allocates a lot of funds and loans to areas of the economy it wishes to develop. There is probably a similar model in South Korea, which also is not capitalist and instead operates on a series of monopolies that are owned currently by large corporations and the government. The South Korean economy is also planned, and the plan is worked out by the government and the business sector working together.
Yonnipun
Lignite
Lignite
 
Posts: 221
Joined: Sat 07 Apr 2018, 04:29:19

Re: THE Capitalism Thread Pt. 4

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 23 Sep 2018, 06:31:35

You need to study History. In the 1960s, Mao Tse-Tung starved approximately 65 million people in outlying Chinese provinces in a deliberate and planned famine that he used to consolidate his political power in the country as a whole. It is the largest act of genocide in the modern world, and makes the Nazis with their paltry 17 million in WW2 look like pikers by comparison.

As a practicing EE in Silicon Valley I had to deal with Chinese contract manufacturers, often we could not even get US manufacturers to respond to our RFPs. It was a miserable experience for me, appalling product quality and endless problems. By the time you had worked your way through one issue, two more equally serious had occurred.

As an example, we had to comply with a European standard called ROHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) which essentially meant that you had to use the least dangerous material to build products with. The Chinese could not consistently produce screws that were Chrome plated to specifications. The screws they submitted for testing used Chromium plating made via safe Cr(III) (Trivalent) solutions. But random samplings of finished products showed screws plated using Cr(VI) (Hexavalent) Chromium solutions. Hexavalent Chromium is a dangerous carcinogen that became infamous in the Erin Brockovich scandal. I had to recall finished computers and replace the screws! To say nothing of more complex quality issues with products such as disk drives and integrated circuits.

Are you familiar with the way that Chinese manufacturers are monopolizing the solar photovoltaic marketplace? They produce 6" and 8" monocrystalline silicon wafers on wafer-fab machinery that they got here in Silicon Valley back in the 1990's, when US manufacturers upgraded to 10" and 12" diameter wafers to produce cheaper and bigger micro-processors. They got those wafer-fab machines through a US Government grant for "developing nations", after making a $13M donation to the Clinton Library! Now that they can produce cheap solar PV through US generosity, they are dumping the Chinese solar panels in the US and Europe below cost, putting everybody else out of business.

China has nothing to admire, given a second look.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001

Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.

Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
KaiserJeep
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 6094
Joined: Tue 06 Aug 2013, 17:16:32
Location: Wisconsin's Dreamland

PreviousNext

Return to Economics & Finance

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 35 guests

cron