🚀 go-pugleaf

Mark Richards <markrichards8@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Bob LeChevalier wrote:
>> The US is a sovereign nation and could nationalize all of business, so
>> why do you suppose that it doesn't?
>>
>> Laws, maybe?
>
>The original reference was to European ownership of the mineral wealth of Zaire. If
>that's true, the Zaire government could take it over just like Mugabe is doing in
>Zimbabwe.
>
>But the Zaire government isn't. So two possibilities come to mind. Either Europeans
>don't really control the minerals or the Zairean government thinks it best to leave
>things alone.

Hardly the only possibilities.  It may not be within the government's
power.  The Europeans may have paid bribes.  The leaders of Zaire
could be puppets of the Europeans whose only chance of staying in
power is to do what the Europeans want him to do.

>> >And the Federal Reserve was created to prevent the boom-and-bust cycle, and
>> >we had the Depression 16 years later.
>>
>> And no Depressions since - 60 years without a depression is an immense
>> amount of time compared to what went on before.
>
>It was sold to the American people as a stabilizer.

And it has been.

>But instead of eliminating
>recessions, we have come to accept them as an ordinary part of the business cycle.

They are.  There is a reason we call it a business *cycle*.  But
before the federal reserve, depressions like the Great Depression
happened EVERY business cycle (the main reason that the Great
Depression was "great" was because it coincided with weakness in the
European economy that still had not recovered from WW I, leading to an
international depression which therefore took longer to climb out of).

19th century depressions: 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893

each one of which was fully as bad as the Great Depression, though
none lasted quite so long.

>Social programs sound great in theory but they're counterproductive in practice.
>Suppose there was no welfare. In your town a man needs $300 a week to feed his
>family. He can only find a job paying $200 a week. He should take that job, and his
>neighbors should contribute the other $100. So the theory is that if we create a
>governmental organization to collect donations from everyone, the money will be
>available as needed. But in reality, the man receives $300 whether he works or not,
>so he can't be expected to take the $200 a week job and esentially work for free.
>So what would have been a charitable gesture of $100 per week to help a man who was
>doing the best he could instead becomes a $300 per week subsidy to a man who
>doesn't try at all.

Your scenario misses a lot.  

If there really is a job available at $200 a week, then the fact that
he doesn't take it means that someone else will get it or the employer
will raise the pay or the employer will do without.

If the neighbors don't contribute $100, the man might starve.

I could go on. You seem to love to create hypotheticals that are
highly unrealistic, relying on the "market" to do things it doesn't in
fact regularly do, like come up with $100/wk supplements to a random
person's income.

lojbab