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vtsnowedin wrote:
Well many of those "average" people are living in socialist countries controlled by dictators. That is the main cause of their poverty.
I prefer to focus on things here in the USA and leave the rest of the world to solve their own problems, or not.

Many of these countries are not socialist but mixed economies, like the U.S. The main cause of their poverty involve the rise of financial oligarchs.

Your last point is illogical because the U.S. itself is dependent on the rest of the world to sustain its debt-driven spending. Hence, incredible levels of funds needed to support a military-industrial complex to keep the petrodollar propped up, and that in turn needed to keep the consumer spending economy and neoliberalist policies going, part of which involves purchasing goods and services from elsewhere.

vtsnowedin wrote: I'm not an isolationist but the USA certainly could go it alone if we chose to.

Definitely, but that will mean the decline of capitalism and ironically a return to a subsistence economy. And given the very nature of peak oil and limits to growth, that will likely not be a matter of choice for everyone.

vtsnowedin wrote: While cheap energy has been the norm for about a century I don't think it is the base of Globalism. As energy gets scarcer and higher in price the ability to move goods from a high energy area of the globe to an area with less energy resources will provide those that can move the resources with profit opportunities.

Actually, that is the base of globalization, and globalization is the source of profit opportunities.

ralfy wrote:

vtsnowedin wrote: I'm not an isolationist but the USA certainly could go it alone if we chose to.

Definitely, but that will mean the decline of capitalism and ironically a return to a subsistence economy. And given the very nature of peak oil and limits to growth, that will likely not be a matter of choice for everyone.

Quite the opposite. With 330 million people and vast natural resources the American economy can do quite well by itself and capitalism would be the engine that provides plenty for everyone not just subsistence.
But of course the experiment will never happen as we crave our coffee imported from Brazil and our cocaine from Columbia.

The carrying capacity of the USA is significantly below 330 million. Hard to say what, perhaps 100 million ish. Canada is a bit better.

But that is a feature of Capitalisim (and humans) it is driven to overshoot. Capitalism exist is in the recent past, it has no forward looking feature. No planning, at least not beyond the next quarter.

You would think at this point all of us on this site would agree that our population has overshoot its environmental carrying capacity on most places on this planet

Obviously that is not true onlooker because the population is still growing, albeit because humans can employ fossil fuel slaves to support that human population. Carrying capacity has no true meaning if you can manipulate the world and its resources to support more population. We aren't cows.

Precisely. I mean natural carrying capacity. How many technological rabbits can we pull out of our hat. Not enough I fear

Cog wrote:Obviously that is not true onlooker because the population is still growing, albeit because humans can employ fossil fuel slaves to support that human population. Carrying capacity has no true meaning if you can manipulate the world and its resources to support more population. We aren't cows.

Right. Cows stop eating when they run out of pasture.

Cog wrote:Obviously that is not true onlooker because the population is still growing, albeit because humans can employ fossil fuel slaves to support that human population. Carrying capacity has no true meaning if you can manipulate the world and its resources to support more population. We aren't cows.

Two points
There are limits to the manipulation. And, yes we very much are cows.

Tiresome arguments. Capitalism ONLY works in an environment of expanding resources. And we have manipulated things to release some otherwise pent up resources. Had we been forward looking and limited Earths population to say 500 millions we could have raised all those souls out of poverty and devised methods to feed them without depleting the souls and oceans. We didn’t; we used the extra resources to create more souls.

Cows, in our common parlance, are domesticated heard animals almost entirely existent upon humanities ability to feed and house them. Cows have no vision of the future. All that is true of humanity.

Newfie wrote:Tiresome arguments. Capitalism ONLY works in an environment of expanding resources. And we have manipulated things to release some otherwise pent up resources. Had we been forward looking and limited Earths population to say 500 millions we could have raised all those souls out of poverty and devised methods to feed them without depleting the souls and oceans. We didn’t; we used the extra resources to create more souls.

Cows, in our common parlance, are domesticated heard animals almost entirely existent upon humanities ability to feed and house them. Cows have no vision of the future. All that is true of humanity.

That is demonstrably false. People on this thread constantly conflate Conspicuous Consumerism with Capitalism. They are not and never have been the same thing.

Capitalism is at its root simple and basic commerce. You do not need growth to exchange goods and services with your fellow humans, you just need to want to exchange and be willing to negotiate the means of exchange. Cash makes it easier than barter, but either system is simple Capitalism. What most of the hateful rhetoric is directed at is conspicuous consumerism, trying to keep up with the Jonse's instead of stopping when you have enough. If your iPhone 7 works well why do you need an 8 or 9 or 10? Just because Billy down at work got one? What kind of a messed up belief system is that, based solely on envy what your fellow man has instead of what you actually need?

Even conspicuous consumerism can work in a world of stable resources instead of growth, but to do that requires that someone else has less for you to have more. People tend to frown on that unless they are in the getting more at others expense portion, and the more they get the more people have to be on the losing end to balance things.

So in a growing economy everyone can get more at the same time and in a stable resource economy some can get more at the expense of those who lose. Unfortunately Marx and Engles did not understand the distinction and for 150 years their readers have been convinced that even in a growing economy the poor have to get poorer for the middle and upper class to grow wealthier.

The great boon of fossil fuels was that everything could grow at once, the poor in North America are vastly wealthier than the wealthiest Monarchy of the last thousand years before fossil fuels.

Growth on a finite world has finite limits. Once those limits are reached if conspicuous consumerism continues than the equation will once again balance by taking from the powerless to give to the powerful. That was reality before fossil fuel powered growth and will be the reality in the future, but it is not the reality today while energy remains abundant.

Tanada

You will note I frequently write “Capitalism/consumerism.” I didn’t here simply because people frequently “conflate” one with the other. I’ve tired of attempting the distinction.

As to the rest, I agree.

P,

Let us not too far drawn into semantics.

Tanada is using Capitalisim in its most basic definition

You are describing how it has expressed itself in a human world.

I argue that we have deviated from Capitalisim so far as o make it almost unrecognizable today (as happened to Communisim). What we have today is Consumerisim. One only needs to look at our health care costs to see that nothing there is driving the system towards effiency a la capatialisim. What IS happening is we are generating “jobs” which fuel “growth”.

I don’t care if we call it “my aunt sally”, what is occurring is pretty stupid and unsustainable.

Newfie wrote:P,

Let us not too far drawn into semantics.

Tanada is using Capitalisim in its most basic definition

You are describing how it has expressed itself in a human world.

I argue that we have deviated from Capitalisim so far as o make it almost unrecognizable today (as happened to Communisim). What we have today is Consumerisim. One only needs to look at our health care costs to see that nothing there is driving the system towards effiency a la capatialisim. What IS happening is we are generating “jobs” which fuel “growth”.

I don’t care if we call it “my aunt sally”, what is occurring is pretty stupid and unsustainable.

+1

As soon as Agriculture was invented it allowed for the accumulation of wealth/food that then made desirable the creation of currency to represent that wealth. It also allowed for the division of labor, creation of cities etc. In turn this wealth needed to be stored and accounted for hence Banks. Then of course debt issuance makes alot of sense in a world of commerce and money. Fair assessment ?

A great even more basic dissection P, of all this. By the way, hope my grammar is improving , so boring haha. Even back in elementary school, I found it tedious

onlooker wrote:As soon as Agriculture was invented it allowed for the accumulation of wealth/food that then made desirable the creation of currency to represent that wealth. It also allowed for the division of labor, creation of cities etc. In turn this wealth needed to be stored and accounted for hence Banks. Then of course debt issuance makes alot of sense in a world of commerce and money. Fair assessment ?

Agriculture created an easy target for extortion and intimidation and gave rise to a ruling class. Farmers are tied to their land and can be threatened with the burning of crops. This gave birth to protection rackets. All governments originated as mafia thugs.

So, turning forward, what do we do with this understanding? How do we use this to project into the future what it holds and how we should adapt?

Personally.

Some here, ducking behind their religion they call "Capitalism", are poor students of history, and are determined to repeat it, governmental regulation be damned.

By October, 1929, the government had made itself irrelevant almost by habit; business was left to its own devices. Managers appreciated this but did not grasp the consequences: they were marching purposefully into a pit of their own making, there to remain until the rise of a more ‘innovative’, ‘entrepreneurial’ government in Hitler’s Germany … and the world’s necessary response to it.

..............................

Today, the government purposefully aims to do the same thing, to become irrelevant, to shrink itself until it can be drowned in a bathtub; to give free rein to gamblers without heed, to do so in order to answer obsolete ideological concerns. How can this end well? Speculation by nature escapes all bounds, taking on a life of its own. In the late ’20s there was a speculation frenzy in stocks and real estate. Now it’s bonds, stocks, real estate, art … the ‘everything bubble’. The consequences are not grasped: the fact of out-of-control speculation indicates the economy of physical goods and services is kaput: there is no more ‘real economy’: it’s gambling or nothing.
..............................................

Q: How would you describe the economy?

A: It is a system that allows a select few to borrow immense fortunes. The rest of us; you, me, everyone else, repay the debts.

Q: That’s it?

A: That’s it.

http://www.economic-undertow.com/author/steveludlum/

Useless meanderings for the most part. Some of you have finally come around to the realization that Capitalism is a label for normal primate behaviors. Now go one step further and look to the savagery to come when energy gets expensive and all at once every other resource is in short supply.

The outlook is grim. Look at the way baboon troops compete over food resources and eat the losers. There is one answer for all of our problems, but most of you would rather ridicule it than think "outside the box".

The box is the planet we inhabit. Outside the box are virtually unlimited amounts of energy, materials, and living space. Enough for trillions of humans, and without any requirement to change our selves from the primates we are.

No, Marx and Engels were not idiots. They were however as abysmally ignorant of the true nature of mankind as was every other ninteenth century writer, and as a consequence their entire works are virtually useless.

So go ahead, if you wish, again heap scorn on the best hope of mankind to survive the ecology he destroyed.