Aerothorn on 25/9/2011 at 22:19
And Cain won, increasing his chances of winning the nomination to 0%. Straw polls are pretty close to meaningless.
Scots Taffer on 26/9/2011 at 04:13
(
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14972015) Interesting views on the question: has capitalism failed?
Choice quotes:
Quote:
It is important to understand that fundamental principles of capitalism - that human beings are rational and markets behave rationally, and that markets will assign prices - are flawed.
Quote:
A fundamental issue that the world will have to recognise, and which Western capitalism has conveniently ignored, is that the goods and services which companies and economies seem to thrive on are based on under-pricing resources and externalising costs.
That game is over and we need a fundamental restructuring - essentially about how people will live, and we need to move beyond simple notions about growth to more sophisticated, nuanced discussions about human progress.
Quote:
Untrammelled speculation in commodities and financial derivatives brought the financial world to the brink of collapse just three years ago. It needs to be replaced by a longer, slower sense of capital.
Quote:
We will have to rethink our model, our values, we will have to acquire old-fashioned virtues, because capitalism is not going to go any time fast.
Rug Burn Junky on 26/9/2011 at 12:37
I can add more later, but there's not much I disagree with in any of those statements, other than the first and the fourth requiring ridiculous amounts of context.
Rational markets aren't fundamental to capitalism per se, only to laissez-faire. It's the underpinning to Fama's efficient markets hypothesis, which is just a modern statement of Adam Smith's invisible hand, repackaged as dogma.
It's long been self evident that this isn't always the case - market failures can and do exist, and there is no such thing as the perfectly rational market participant. But once these failures are recognized, one can safeguard to a degree - use market mechanisms where possible, increase the information available to participants, and regulate at the extreme ends to try to prevent things from really going off the rails - our equity markets post New-Deal are a good example. The problem becomes the ideologues who refuse to accept that the failure is anything other than "interference." That's when you get things like our health-care fight, because health insurance doesn't respond to market pressures the same way, and one side can't see through their rigid paradigm to accept this fact.
Again, more later.
Painman on 26/9/2011 at 17:07
You don't really need to add more later; I reckon that most TTLGers who are already inclined to vote, have this in mind. I have always felt that Government's best possible role is to protect us from each other.
That's sort of the antithesis of most contemporary Republican positions - but there it is, and i've been alive long enough to know it, and call it "reality-based".
Here in the great Commonwealth of MA, it looks like I'll get to vote for the "antithesis" candidate for Senate, not once, but twice. Once in the Sep 2012 primary, and again in November: Elizabeth Warren. :D
Aerothorn on 27/9/2011 at 17:11
He's wrong, of course; it IS reflective of who we are. But such overt cynicism doesn't really work with Obama's platform :)
CCCToad on 27/9/2011 at 17:24
Quote Posted by Painman
That's sort of the antithesis of most contemporary Republican positions - but there it is, and i've been alive long enough to know it, and call it "reality-based".
Unfortunately true, and I think anyone who is genuinly conservative ( as opposed to Republican) longs for the days when that WAS the Republican position.
CCCToad on 29/9/2011 at 01:36
as Luminating as this discussion has been, it seems that any further argument about perry and his Imperius manner shall do little more than leave us Stupified and Confunded. Since we are unable to Avra Cadabra Perry away, the only suggestion that I can make is that we consign this thread to Oblivion.
