E10 Rifle wrote:

QUOTE:
Good to know that, in desperate times, capitalism's cheerleaders are reverting back to full-on Eighties style "Get Back to Russia" mode. (see also Kenneth Clarke's 'Trabant' jibe nonsense on QT)

Cos we all fucking love North Korea here. Each and every one of us.

Indeed.

I've taken to saying "If you think unregulated capitalism's so bloody great, go and live in Russia."

Doesn't get a lot of laughs.

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Cuba has a higher standard of living than any comparable third-world Caribbean nation, despite the handicap of a trade blockade from its biggest neighbour, with higher literacy levels and better access to free medicine than the USA. You couldn't have chosen a worse example.

that must be the reason why yankees are using their wooden rafts to reach Cuba.

Grass is always greener.

Interview them six months later when they're homeless in Miami, or washing geriatrics' arses on minimum wage.

fair enough but really all of them? they can always come back, can they?

To me it's pretty simple.

The economy, and society in general, perhaps, is like a big game. Like all games - hockey, motoracing, chess, football - it has to have rules. The rules are there to create incentives and disincentives for the players to behave in certain ways. Sometimes the rules create unintended incentives or disincentives, so we need to study them and adjust accordingly.

What the rules "ought" to be depends on what sort of behavior we, collectively, decide we want to reward and what sort of behavior we want to discourage.

But there are almost always trade offs.


The "problem" with Cuba and North Korea isn't that they're socialist, but that they're dictatorships.

LM - it doesn't make much sense to say the west developed faster than china because of capitalism. for one thing, they had capitalism in china before they had communism.

also it is not really accurate to say that the 1930s are the only exception to a general liberalising of international trade over the last 200 years. throughout the late 19th century britain was pretty much the only great power that favoured free trade. the US had been protectionist since the lincoln presidency, and bismarck placed heavy tariffs on imports when the german economy stagnated in the 1870s.

given that there is now such an overwhelming consensus against barriers to trade i think it's unlikely that we will see a return to 1930s style protectionism. i agree however that the prospect of a long period of economic decline is dangerous. just because we are unlikely to repeat the particular mistake of protectionism doesn't mean we are not liable to make terrible new mistakes.

Anyway, Cuba and North Korea both have little to do with the subject of the thread, which is about the current crisis of international capitalism and the finacial markets and the desirable or otherwise response to it. This "they'll put you in a uniform and make you drive a Trabant" stuff is a silly diversion really.

Spearmint Rhino wrote:

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I've taken to saying "If you think unregulated capitalism's so bloody great, go and live in Russia."

Doesn't get a lot of laughs.

Got one here.

And here

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1000 years ago China was technologically way ahead of the west.

Yet somehow the west got much richer.

The West's economy grew vastly more than China's.

The reasons are obvious.

The West became very rich thanks to unfair trade practices that didn't exclude: protectionism, colonisation, controlled genocide, raping and pillaging. That kind of thing.

If you want to file that under capitalism then fine.

I would say we are very lucky with that crisis, it was probably the only way we were going to reduce our CO2 emissions and push us into being more parsimonious with our ressources....

Bryantop wrote:

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The West became very rich thanks to unfair trade practices that didn't exclude: protectionism, colonisation, controlled genocide, raping and pillaging. That kind of thing.

No, I don't think that flies. Not that the West didn't do that stuff, but I don't think it explains, or was necessary to, the West's prosperity, which had more to do with the devlopment of industrial technology.

Lord Mauleverer wrote:

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Before you lefties get too carried away with capitalism-bashing, even schadenfreude over the current travails of cross-border capitalists, mull over this.

The last great financial crisis of 1929 and the great depression which followed from it and lasted for most of the 1930s led to WW2. You don't really have to struggle to mount a pretty strong case about the war-inducing nature of the following combination:

- increased poverty making individuals more desperate and hence more likely to support extreme political parties;

- economic isolation and reduced cross-border economic links reducing nation states' perception of their own economic interest in the maintainence of peace.

The 1930s were, pretty much uniquely in the last 200 years, a period of reduction in economic liberalisation: national isolation, tariffs, hostility to free trade and falls in cross-border investment. Even WW1 didn't have as much impact on the massive 19th century globalisation of capitalism as the 1930s depression did.

In the modern era of nuclear weapons, scarcity of vital resources such as oil and metal ores, the risk of war and the likely carnage caused by war are massively higher. So the importance of the sense of mutual dependence of nations' economies caused by cross-border investment, in reducing e.g. the extent of recent Russia-West or China-West tensions to way below what they would otherwise have been, is all the greater.

Far from knocking capitalism, you really really ought to be praying for it with every fibre of your being. Because if it fails, nuclear holocaust won't be far behind.

So what you're saying is; don't vote for David Cameron

Wyatt Earp wrote:

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Bryantop wrote:

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The West became very rich thanks to unfair trade practices that didn't exclude: protectionism, colonisation, controlled genocide, raping and pillaging. That kind of thing.

No, I don't think that flies. Not that the West didn't do that stuff, but I don't think it explains, or was necessary to, the West's prosperity, which had more to do with the devlopment of industrial technology.

Hold on, the largest economic power in the West for the last 60 years has been the United States. The United States is a result of white Europeans sailing across the sea and clearing the lands of native inhabitants, and then later importing slave labour to do dirty work for free.

Then we have the European nations themselves, who became incredibly rich in the 19th century by taking resources from far away lands through extortion and colonisation. This colonisation allowed the likes of Shell, BP, Total, and other cornerstones of modern European industry to get a foothold in oil fields in far away countries. And they're still there today, pumping out the black gold and propping up corrupt governments that let them do it.

Yes, Europeans developed industry. But when you don't have to think about where your next meal is coming from, or fight off invaders, then you can spend more time tinkering about with steam engines and the like.

Sorry to dig this one up, but compare England and Ireland in the 19th century. Similar population densities, similar environment, weather, etc. One became rich and industrialised, the other poor, starved and reduced to near nothing. Was it the ingenuity of English inventors that saved them from potato famines? Or was it the ability to just take food from other countries, by any means possible?

I think you've misunderstood WE's point, Bryan. There have been a number of countries that employed equally obnoxious policis as the British did, but despite this, still didn't industrialise until much later than the Brits. Spain is a good exmaple of this, despite its heavyhanded involvement in much of Latin America the it was still pretty much 3rd world conditions in the majority of the nation until around the second world war.

It's too facile to conflate the obnoxious policies of past nations, UK, US or otherwise with their subsequent economic success. The reality of UK industrialisation is something that evolved over a number of years and was dependent on domestic conditions more so than it was external.