Plutocrats be all bummin' and stuff

[smitty1e]

World's Elite Visit Davos in Doubt

"The capitalist myth is lovely and youthful. It kicked off the industrial revolution, but maybe we need a new one," says Richard Olivier, son of the late British actor Sir Laurence Olivier. Mr. Olivier, who owns a company that gives seminars, will give a dinner talk on business leadership at Davos, based on

Comments

[stinerman]

Your post reminded me of a particularly good article (and articles) at Cato Unbound.

I think it does a very good job of untangling the confusion people have when they talk about "our free market system":

Consider the conservative virtue-term “privatization,” which has two distinct, indeed opposed, meanings. On the one hand, it can mean returning some service or industry from the monopolistic government sector to the competitive private sector-getting government out of it; this would be the libertarian meaning. On the other hand, it can mean “contracting out,” i.e., granting to some private firm a monopoly privilege in the provision some service previously provided by government directly. There is nothing free-market about privatization in this latter sense, since the monopoly power is merely transferred from one set of hands to another; this is corporatism, or pro-business intervention, not laissez-faire. (To be sure, there may be competition in the bidding for such monopoly contracts, but competition to establish a legal monopoly

I disagree

[smitty1e]

Government contracting out does not at all necessarily mean "granting to some private firm a monopoly privilege in the provision some service previously provided by government directly".
Such things as "Sole Source Contracts" do exist, but are relatively rare.
My company is currently discovering that our government customer has been doing some stuff that is exactly what you would do if It Was Your Money, but could be seen as kinda cut-throat from another perpective.

manipulation, not distortion

[providence4u]

Marx was right because he was wrong; communism is not about the means of production, it is about the means of exchange. Theoretically Communism could only work once the Proletarian revolution had eliminated money, appropriating it from the "bad" rich and redistributing it to the "good" poor was merely the first step. With the gold standard having been abandoned in 1973, money has been virtual a generation before the term gained currency; a push of a very different red button would fix all this in a nanosecond, or make it much, much worse.

Democrats and Republicans also get it all wrong because nobody believes in pure laissez-faire; and we haven't had it in this country really forever. Robert Fulton won the fame in 1807 for inventing the steamboat (which he didn't), but then lost the war for markets and wealth to Vanderbilt, after being granted a monopoly on NY state waters. Not only did the US Supreme Court find against NY and Fulton, but Vanderbilt had already won the war, precipitating the lawsuit by Fulton, by building better

Re: manipulation, not distortion

[smitty1e]

I don't think there is any comparison between Marx's thought and Obamas.
Marx preached the Kingdom of Heaven without God.
Obama is a rorschach test. What do you want to feel about Obama's oblique statements?