Calling all you Crackpot Capitalists

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Let me update what I previously said:
Banks are perfectly aware of additional obligations... but can't 100% predict the future (and neither can the person taking the loan).

Yes, we will take that as a given.
But if the statistical data available to banks, is analysed in such form as to indicate increasing levels of debt, or increasing reliance on debt, or decreasing savings, or decreasing pension contributions or whatever, do you think there is an onus on the financial sector to re-act accordingly or do you think they should ignore all and carry on regardless?

There is an onus on the person taking the loan to understand their future plans where possible and to ensure they don't get themselves into a financial pickle.

Of course there is, just like there is an onus on the lender not to get themselves into a financial pickle, right?
But like you said, neither can predict the future.
So if you default, it probably won't make much difference to the banks in the greater scheme of things. But if defaults were rising and reflected in the broader population, and the banks, had information to hand that indicated stress points in personal debt (see rte report about mortgages being paid off past retirement), do you think that the financial sector and the central bank take any responsibility for the system that allows this to manifest? Regardless if you think it's a concern or not.
 
There is absolutely an onus to react in some circumstances. Why should a bank care if the person they are lending to has a pension though?


Yes I do think the financial sector and central should address 'stress points' but only if they pose a problem to the sector. Why would they care if there are gaps in private pensions?
 
 
There is absolutely an onus to react in some circumstances. Why should a bank care if the person they are lending to has a pension though?

If a person is going to rely on their pension to re-pay a mortgage, why wouldn't they care if that person has a pension, and how much it's worth?
If your mortgage repayments are going to be €1,000 a month on retirement for 5yrs, your pension of € 900 a month isn't going to cut it, is it?

Yes I do think the financial sector and central should address 'stress points' but only if they pose a problem to the sector. Why would they care if there are gaps in private pensions?

Now take the above scenario and multiply by, say, ten thousand mortgage holders.
Do you think that Mr Hoffman of Friends First may be trying to signal something when he says

... problems may arise when the financial burden of a mortgage along with planning for retirement - two of the biggest financial assets that anyone can have - start to clash."
 
Professor of Economics, Dr Richard Wolff calls for honest debate about the (crackpot) capitalist system

https://youtu.be/zZtaJvzZev4
I'm not sure I would ever associate the words "honest debate" with the RT channel (formerly Russia Today). Yer man must be doing the rounds -- he was on BBC Newsnight the night before last, introduced as a Marxist. He got run out of town, even by the normally left-leaning Beeb.
 
It must be great sport for socialists and communists to have the odd dig at capitalism.

Luckily though we have real-world examples where the turning to the left has had devestating results for the man on the street. Such examples are North and South Korea - just look at those poor, emanciated sticks of people in North Korea and look at its thriving neighbour to the south. We all remember the photos in 1989 when people were climbing over the Berlin wall from East to West. Soon after a raft of countries split from the USSR and there were celebrations in the streets.
Just look at the near miracle of the chinese economy since it opened up to free trade and markets...millions lifted out of poverty into a growing middle class.

All of these examples however seem to pale into insignificance when compared to the fate of Venezuela and its neighbour, Columbia. Two interesting articles below:

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/venezuela-collapses-colombia-rises
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/a...ombia-and-socialist-venezuela/article/2635930

A few sentences from the World Affairs Journal above:

Venezuela held democratic elections and experienced considerable, if uneven, economic growth. Throughout Latin America, Soviet-backed insurgencies battled it out with military regimes sponsored by the United States, but Cuba’s attempt to foment communist revolution in Venezuela fizzled.

After the Berlin Wall fell....If one had to choose where to invest at the time, the smart money would have been on Venezuela. It had a small middle class and a great deal of poverty, but that was hardly unique in South and Central America. What set it apart was its vast oil reserves—more than any other country on earth—and its relative political stability.

The current United Socialist Party government led by Nicolás Maduro, and formerly Hugo Chávez, could have done amazing things for the country with that vast oil wealth. Instead, the party has done its damndest to import Fidel Castro’s Cuban model of socialism— Chávez called Castro his mentor—and turn Venezuela into a totalitarian anthill.

They never quite pulled it off, never quite managed to create a state powerful enough to smother every human being under its weight. Rather than molding Venezuelan society into a Stalinist Borg-hive, both—but Maduro especially—presided over a near-total collapse into anarchy, squalor and crime.

Last week the Washington Post called Venezuela a failed state. “The government has tried to control the economy to the point of killing it — all, of course, in the name of ‘socialism’…Venezuela has gotten something worse than death. It has gotten hell. Its stores are empty, its hospitals don't have essential medicines, and it can't afford to keep the lights on.”

The inflation rate is almost 500 percent this year and is expected to exceed 1,500 percent next year. A hamburger costs 170 dollars. Everything is in short supply. “Venezuela reaches the final stages of socialism,” David Boaz writes. “No toilet paper.” Even hotels are asking guests to bring their own, which is almost impossible unless they’re coming in from abroad.

Violent crime has spread throughout the country, even to rural areas. Police officers don’t even attempt to suppress or solve crime, partly because they’re too busy protecting the crooked and oppressive government from its furious subjects, but also because crime is as ubiquitous in Venezuela right now as the heat and humidity. Last week, a fed up mob doused a man with gasoline and burned him alive for mugging another man and stealing the equivalent of five dollars.



From the second article:

Ultimately, the dichotomy between Colombia and Venezuela speaks to one underlying truth. Trusting in the rule of law and free markets, Colombia is thriving. But in 2017, under rabbit-lunatic Maduro, the land with Earth's largest oil reserves is now a realm of beggars and brigands, where teachers and even doctors are forced into prostitution just to feed themselves.


I am saying capitalism is perfect, but when we see what actually happened and what is happening when we choose the opposite, it's a no-brainer, unless of course you do not have a brain!
 
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It must be great sport for socialists and communists to have the odd dig at capitalism.

The topic is about the capitalist system and the way it is currently organised and how it operates. Please try stay in topic.

From Theresa Mays speech;

"But problems were developing which would later become apparent during the financial crisis of 2007-08.

The Great Recession which followed that crisis brought some of the most challenging economic times our country has known."

It is clear to me that Theresa May, an advocate of free market capitalism, recognises now, that the system as It operates, or operated, led to serious problems. She goes on to list a number of measures taken that she concludes will ensure a fairer and more robust system to prevent the same thing ever happening again.
I'm not convinced. QE and other measures are sticking plasters. I agree with Professor Wolff that a constant repairing of parts is long-term unsustainable and that ultimately the system itself doesn't work as it is engineered.
 
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Of course when knocking something it is always reasonable to ask what the alternatives are and how these alternatives might be better. The alternative to capitalism, which has lifted millions out of poverty, is a socialist/communist utopia which has only ever resulted in tyranny, corruption and poverty for the man on the street. Luckily for us here in Ireland the people who advocate such a system are, rightly, in a tiny minority.
 
when knocking something it is always reasonable to ask what the alternatives are and how these alternatives might be better.

Absolutely, hence the call for an honest debate.

The alternative to capitalism, which has lifted millions out of poverty, is a socialist/communist utopia which has only ever resulted in tyranny, corruption and poverty for the man on the street.

Is that the only alternative? I suggest it is not.

Luckily for us here in Ireland the people who advocate such a system are, rightly, in a tiny minority.

True. But those of us advocating an alternative to the current capitalist system of plunder and profit by way of environmental destruction are growing in number.
A true democratic socialist republic to enshrine the rights of each individual in equal measure affording the freedoms to trade, engage, assemble and prosper without fear or favour, in an ethically and environmentally sustainable way, is one other alternative.

I have some ideas of my own of how that can be achieved, such as maximum income. On this site, that concept doesn't receive any support. Fair enough, but the point is that ideas need to be forthcoming and examined.
To simply disregard alternative viewpoints, as you consistently do, and automatically revert to your default position that the system you live in now is favourable to other systems (e.g NK, USSR), even though nobody is advocating those systems, shows a shallowness in actual thinking.

Here is what Theresa May says about free market capitalism, to which I broadly agree with as I am sure you do too?

"When countries make the transition from closed, restricted, centrally-planned economies to open, free market policies, the same things happen.

Life expectancy increases, and infant mortality falls.


Absolute poverty shrinks, and disposable income grows.

Access to education is widened, and rates of illiteracy plummet.


Anticipation in cultural life is extended, and more people have the chance to contribute.

It is in open, free market economies that technological breakthroughs are made which transform, improve and save lives.

It is in open, free market economies that personal freedoms and liberties find their surest protection.

A free market economy, operating under the right rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created."

That's the good stuff. The underlined however points to the bad stuff.
As much as societies have prospered and developed under capitalism, it comes with a massive cost. In case you aren't aware, there is a train of thought, scientifically supported, that suggests that the capitalist system as currently modelled is responsible for an adverse change in the planet's climate with potentially disastrous consequences.
There is also another train of thought, with good reasoning in my opinion, that this system is sustained on the might of the US military industrial complex and its use of force around the world. Projecting the greatest tyrannical empire in the history of humankind.
And if that is not bad enough, it is all for a capitalist systems as currently modelled that is prone to collapse again and again. The 2007/8 financial collapse being the obvious case in point, but also the Weimar republic of Germany with its subsequent disastrous consequences. And of course the great Depression in the US from 1929, a failed capitalist market system by itself.

I refer to Mays speech again, talking about solutions;

"It consists of an open market place, in which everyone is free to participate, regulated under the rule of law, with personal freedoms, equality and human rights democratically guaranteed, and an accountable government, progressively taxing the economic activity which the market generates, to fund high-quality public services which are freely available to all citizens, according to need.

That is unquestionably the best, and indeed the only sustainable, means of increasing the living standards of everyone in a country.

And we should never forget that raising the living standards and protecting the jobs of ordinary working people is the central aim of all economic policy."


When hospital waiting lists, housing lists, mortgage defaults are increasing, when suicide rates are all time high, when house prices and rents are out of reach for ordinary working people, then the system is broken and it is unsustainable.
When public finances are reliant on increasing debt, when personal debt is to be carried into retirement, when pension schemes are simply not going to deliver, do you think that fits with what May has touched on? I certainly don't.

Finally, if the last part of Mays speech that I quoted came from Jeremy Corbyn instead, would anyone be surprised? Or would they just take the automatic default position and continue to babble on about NKorea and USSR?
 
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When hospital waiting lists, housing lists, mortgage defaults are increasing, when suicide rates are all time high, when house prices and rents are out of reach for ordinary working people, then the system is broken and it is unsustainable.
Those issues are mainly the result of government and State incompetence and cronyism and have nothing to do with a capitalist system.

That's just hyperbolic nonsense. The USA abuses it's power and is economically imperialistic but, and this is the bit that matters, no country in history has ever been as powerful and abused it's power less.

Nobody poluted like socialist countries. The correlation between pollution and governmental system is that countries where the people control the government pollute less and the countries where the government control the people pollute more.
 
That's what a democratic republic does. The socialism but is incompatible with the freedom to trade and prosper.

I have some ideas of my own of how that can be achieved, such as maximum income. On this site, that concept doesn't receive any support. Fair enough, but the point is that ideas need to be forthcoming and examined.
See that's the problem with socialists; the way in which wealth is being generated has changed (away from labour and onto capital and intellectual property) so we need to change our taxation system globally to make it fit for purpose. You guys just want to keep the system we have but go nuts on the well off for ideological reasons. That's not a solution, it's just petty begrudgery of those who have more than you with no consideration of why they have more or the consequences of taking it from them.
 
Socialism is a scam anyway. Take a look at how self-declared socialists admit to investing in Bitcoin, the antithesis of regulation that they so crave. As we all know Bitcoin is directly linked to all sorts of crimes, some of which are too difficult to even mention. But that's OK I guess as there might be a few bob to be made. So much for standing with those at the bottom suffering. Is it any wonder than the "Champagne Socialist" moniker is so true?
 
Those issues are mainly the result of government and State incompetence and cronyism and have nothing to do with a capitalist system.

Government and State incompetence and cronyism for sure, ideological wedded to the concept of free market capitalist system.
As you mentioned before the 'free market' is simply a notion. It is unattainable yet governments and their cheerleaders persistently push this notion to drive through policies of plunder.
I think Theresa May goes so way to acknowledging this in her speech without explicitly saying so. The only problem I suspect, is that that speech was geared to stop the public continually moving to Labour.

The USA abuses it's power and is economically imperialistic but, and this is the bit that matters, no country in history has ever been as powerful and abused it's power less.

That is quite a statement. Where do we start? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba?

Nobody poluted like socialist countries. The correlation between pollution and governmental system is that countries where the people control the government pollute less and the countries where the government control the people pollute more.

Seriously, the call was for an honest debate. Next you will be telling me that China is one of the world's biggest polluters because the communist government controls the people, and then tell me that China is great example of a country abandoning socialism and adopting capitalism.
Next you will be telling me that the increase in carbon emissions into the environment over last 50yrs has more to do with state controlled command economies rather than increasing economic activity associated with open markets. Theresa May points acknowledges this in her speech, don't you agree?
Here is a link to the list of countries and there associated carbon emissions

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis..._dioxide_emissions_world_map_deobfuscated.png



the way in which wealth is being generated has changed (away from labour and onto capital and intellectual property) so we need to change our taxation system globally to make it fit for purpose.

What would you propose?
 
Government and State incompetence and cronyism for sure, ideological wedded to the concept of free market capitalist system.
Do you really think that Ireland, with the most "progressive" income taxation system in the developed world and 20% of the population living on welfare, is "ideological wedded to the concept of free market capitalist system"?

That is quite a statement. Where do we start? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba?
So you think that the USA should have invaded mainland Japan and cost a vast multiple of Japanese lives? Maybe you think they should have stayed out of the Second World War altogether? You think they should not have been part of the UN force which stopped a Chinese Communist takeover of Korea, with all of the country under the great ruler they have in the North? Vietham was France's mess which the USA got dragged into and screwed up. I agree on Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan. Cuba is a despicable and oppressive country.
You should have mentioned Nicaragua or the colonial war they fought against Spain to take over the Philippines or the wars they fought by proxy in Africa (particularly in the Congo) or the fact that Saudi Arabia, just about the most repressive country on earth, only exists due to American sponsorship.

China is actually a great example; they are making a massive shift to Green and they are doing so because of pressure from their people who have more of a voice than ever due to their economic power.

Next you will be telling me that the increase in carbon emissions into the environment over last 50yrs has more to do with state controlled command economies rather than increasing economic activity associated with open markets.
Were you ever in Eastern Europe before or shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall? I was in Romania then and again a few years ago. The change is remarkable.

What would you propose?
Financial transaction taxes, patent royalty taxes, that sort of thing. They could only be brought in as part of an international agreement though.
Maybe just get trans-national corporations to pay the taxes they are meant to pay now.
Taxing the hell out of individuals or utter nonsense like maximum incomes it utterly wrong headed though.
 
Do you really think that Ireland, with the most "progressive" income taxation system in the developed world and 20% of the population living on welfare, is "ideological wedded to the concept of free market capitalist system"?

No I don't. It is not a free market system, it is cronyism and it is under the control of the banking system and its cheerleaders in government and the top of industry.
Those in control of this system, are the cheerleaders purporting to support a free market system.
It is not a free market system, you know it isn't, I know it isn't, we both know that a free market system is unattainable.

So you think that the USA should have invaded mainland Japan and cost a vast multiple of Japanese lives?

You have me there. Atomic bombs on populated cities avoided all that!
You are missing the point, it is not about the US, if it wasn't the US with all this power, some other nation would strive for military control. Regardless the who is the superpower, the US, the Soviets, the Chinese, the Nazi's etc all would use their military might to inflict tyranny on others who they see as threatening their dominance.
This occurs because of the economic system that engineered as it currently is, will ensure that the motives to profit will be accompanied by plunder.

Financial transaction taxes, patent royalty taxes, that sort of thing.

Yes I agree.

Maybe just get trans-national corporations to pay the taxes they are meant to pay now.

Agree.

Taxing the hell out of individuals or utter nonsense like maximum incomes it utterly wrong headed though.

Maximum income as I proposed would only affect 1 in 80,000 people so by no measure could it be construed as taxing the he'll out of anyone.
Nevertheless I have already acknowledged that it would have zero support on this site so no point in exploring it further here.
The point is across a broad spectrum of academics and politicians from right to left, there is acknowledgement that the capitalist system as It is currently engineered is not sustainable.
 

Just to add to this point, when knocking one ideology it is only right to look at the alternative. Anyone with even half a brain would agree that the opposite to capitalism is a melting pot of socialism/communism. We could be here all day evaluating various socialists views on which type of socialism they would like, but to see what actually happens / happened when states declare themselves we can turn to various lists such as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states

Take a look at that list and ask yourself if you would even visit any of these countries never mind live there! The exception of course is China which has seen a near miraculous transformation since it opened up to free trade.

In addition, lists such as those below show the world's wealthiest countries. I note a distinct lack of absense from the red countries in the list above!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-richest-countries-in-the-world.html
http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-r...17-3/#29-finland-gdp-per-capita-41812-34114-2
https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/richest-countries-in-the-world?page=12


So yes, capitalism is not perfect and has its faults, but hey, it's a 1,000,000 times better than the alternative!
 
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