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Under the purest versions of centralized planning, administrators decide what goods will be produced and what economic resources will be used to make them. Unemployment is, in effect, abolished by decree. And inflation is suppressed, with excess demand showing up as shortages rather than as rising prices.
But in practice, the performance of planned economies is mixed. Their inherent strength, the ability to mobilize resources for a few national goals, is familiar to anyone who remembers the way the American economy rallied to support the Allied armies in World War II. By organizing what amounts to a permanent war economy, Stalin was able to transform a backward land into a great military power with an impressively large industrial base. And by forcing Soviet citizens to invest a high percentage of income, planners could maintain very high growth rates through the 1960's. Drowning in Detail
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Production goals set in tons, for example, have led Soviet pipe manufacturers to use far more steel than necessary. Consumer prices held far below cost have led to colossal waste: it often pays farmers to sell their grain to the state, and then buy back the subsidized bread made from the grain, to use as animal feed.
Correcting such obvious misincentives is not easy. Planners, with thousands of interdependent production sectors to coordinate, drown in detail. Even the Soviet Congress, convened last week to debate momentous issues of policy, was reduced to quarreling over the poor quality of washing machines and the scarcity of school desks. Scale and complexity seem to magnify another weakness of planned economies - the lack of financial incentives for personal initiative. In Stalin's day it might have been sufficient to set quotas for numbers of tractors assembled or tons of coal dug, rewarding overachievers with New Years' vodka and punishing shirkers with holidays in the gulag.
These deaths of despair have been rising only among Americans whose relative earning and job prospects have deteriorated sharply in recent decades. Those with degrees have seen no such rise. Yet the authors find no correlation between rising death rates and either poverty or rising inequality. And why have mortality rates for older and less-educated black Americans — who have also experienced declining employment prospects and relative wages — continued to fall?
Denial - 9500- raise the question of whether You have to pay for it - - State it one way or another - but 9500 will not - would weaken the denial the socialists have of their religion.
TWK - good article by Pierson - Thank You sir.
What the socialists have in Turn - pictures of YSL ( code meme for "Diversity") - and we are supposed to be impressed.
Next - to deny socialism is "Racism" - will be a rallying cry for the Fascist DPST leaders!
"Senator Sanders and others claim that they are for something called “democratic socialism,” a popular and peaceful version of the doctrine, but that’s what Lenin, Mao, and Castro said until they seized power and immediately began to sing a different tune. Democracy and diversity are what they say when out of power; tyranny and authoritarianism are what they practice once in power. That is the tried-and-true technique of all socialist movements."
From TWK post of Pierson - Above in this thread.
Reminding the Fascist DPST's - 9500, etc, of history is a fruitles endeavor. Their socialist religion blinds and deafens them to anything but their narrative.
They cannot even remember that the Coronavirus epidemic/pandemic originated in Wuhan , China - because that threatens their "racist Trump" Viewpoint.
They are like lemmings marching to the Bernie pied piper right over the ledge to authoritarian totalitarianism. happily blind to consequences, Just desirous of the all encompassing safety cocoon provided by their mantra of "Socialism"!!!
9500 may now post a picture of YSL - as if any will be "impressed" However, if 9500 likes to swing that way - so far it is a free country, until a Bernie type adminsitration is elected - then the Government will dictate Who U Sleep With!!!
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism — America’s dying dream
The economy has hit US white working classes hard — but Anne Case and Angus Deaton go beyond the evidence
Ed Balls
March 11 2020
Print this page 17
An epidemic is sweeping the US, taking lives on an unprecedented scale and threatening the future of the world’s biggest economy. But this is not a new virus, dangerous and contagious yet likely to blow over with only a temporary hit to economic growth.
The epidemic documented in a timely and important new book by Anne Case and Angus Deaton has been savaging America for two decades. So far, many hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost to what the authors, two eminent economists, label the “deaths of despair” — death by suicide, accidental drug overdose or alcoholic liver disease.
Like all good economics, the argument in Deaths of Despair starts from an observation — rising suicide rates among working-class Americans in the first decades of the 21st century. The authors then use data to describe the problem before trying to diagnose, understand and prescribe.
As you might expect from a Nobel Prize winner (Deaton) and, in Case, one of America’s best empirical economists, the picture they paint is painstaking in its detail and vivid in its importance. The victims of this new epidemic, they demonstrate, are white, non-Hispanic middle-aged Americans without a degree-level education qualification — a group that overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump in 2016 and has stuck with him since. Over the past 25 years, deaths from suicide, drug and alcohol abuse among this group have tripled.
As a result, and after a century of falling mortality rates, the death rate for 45-54-year-old white Americans began to rise in 2000 and has continued to do so — while rates among Hispanic and black Americans, as well among Europe’s working populations, have continued to fall. If the downward trend of the 20th century had continued between 1999 and 2017, 600,000 more people would be alive today.
What is going on? Poor economic outcomes must be part of the answer. These deaths of despair have been rising only among Americans whose relative earning and job prospects have deteriorated sharply in recent decades. Those with degrees have seen no such rise. Yet the authors find no correlation between rising death rates and either poverty or rising inequality. And why have mortality rates for older and less-educated black Americans — who have also experienced declining employment prospects and relative wages — continued to fall?
Case and Deaton heap blame on the US healthcare system and, in particular, the decision to liberalise the prescription of opioid-based painkillers in the 1990s. It was “the carelessness of doctors, without a flawed approval process at the FDA, or without the pursuit of profits by the industry at whatever human cost” that led to the return of mass opioid addiction to America for the first time since the aftermath of the civil war. Universal health insurance and better regulation to control costs and drug availability is the answer — although, as usual, these US economists are doubtful about directly importing the public provision of the UK’s National Health Service.
But why has white America been hit so hard? At this point, the authors rely less on data and evidence, more on conjecture and sociological speculation. First, they pin the blame for this growing pain and unhappiness — or “carnage” as Trump famously labelled it — not on rising material deprivation but on the decline in trade union membership, churchgoing and marriage rates, with rising numbers of children growing up with single parents.
They argue that black working Americans experienced a similar decline in relative economic prospects and community cohesion in the 1980s — “decades later, less educated whites, long protected by white privilege, were next in line”. And they assert that the well being of the previously privileged white community has been additionally undermined by the loss of social status relative to their black fellow citizens: “more than half of white working class Americans believe that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities”. My own experience of working and travelling in the US suggests this is all far too narrow and simplistic. There is far more to current alienation than Trumpian racial envy. And while the strength of the earlier part of Deaths of Despair lies in its statistics and evidence, it is here, where analysis is replaced by speculation, that the book is less satisfactory.
Large parts of the US economy, they claim, ‘have been captured to serve the wealthy with the consent and connivance of government’
The final policy section feels muddled — the authors slip into corporation, bank and politico-bashing with rather a Trumpian tone but little analysis or policy to back it up. Large parts of the US economy, they claim, “have been captured to serve the wealthy with the consent and connivance of government”; and that “the sheriff of Nottingham has taken up residence in Washington DC and the good cops have left town. Robin Hood is nowhere to be seen.”
Yet the authors are also at pains to stress that capitalism remains the answer and that inequality is a byproduct of economic incentives — “the problem is not that we live in an unequal society but that we live in an unfair society”.
As a result, the gap between their rhetoric and policy prescriptions feels achingly wide. They reject an increase in progressive taxation or a more generous “band-aid” welfare state. They predict that a rebirth of trade unionism or comprehensive reform of corporations is “unlikely”. Education reform is given little weight and public infrastructure investment doesn’t get a mention.
The result is disappointing. Not only do their calls for a “modest” rise in the minimum wage and weaker patent protection seem insufficient, none of the policy discussion even tries to address the cultural arguments about community cohesion and pride upon which the authors pin so much earlier in the book.
Yet while I ended the book feeling worried that economics still doesn’t seem to have answers to the economic and cultural dislocation faced by so many working people in the US and across Europe too, I did feel cheered that we in Britain still at least have an NHS that should be the envy of any sane American.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton, RRP£20, 312 pages Ed Balls, a former UK cabinet minister, is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School
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[QUOTE=oeb11;1061988647
Reminding the Fascist DPST's - 9500, etc, of history is a fruitles endeavor. Their socialist religion blinds and deafens them to anything but their narrative.
They cannot even remember that the Coronavirus epidemic/pandemic originated in Wuhan , China - because that threatens their "racist Trump" Viewpoint.
[/QUOTE]
truth is not. repeat not, a leftist value
truth is a hindrance to the leftist world view
they think all will be well when their movement conquers, so by any means necessary
the disregard for truth is seen in almost everything they do
lack of truth is the practice of communist china, where truth is twisted by state organs, even the origination of the virus has been lied about and is now from the American military
calling trump a racist, to attacking him for ending travel from china, to accusing him of being a racist for that travel ban, to attacking him for not acting on travel bans soon enough, to attacking him for instituting a travel ban from Europe, haven't heard yet if that's racist
Rush mentioned this so I copied it off the internet
MIT biologist and the man who claims to have invented email, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, does research almost every day into the immune system. He says the fear-mongering by the Deep State will go down in history as one of the biggest frauds to manipulate economies, suppress dissent, & push MANDATED Medicine!”
As an MIT PhD in Biological Engineering who studies & does research nearly every day on the Immune System, the #coronavirus fear mongering by the Deep State will go down in history as one of the biggest fraud to manipulate economies, suppress dissent, & push MANDATED Medicine! https://t.co/Q5VeOqzWEp
— Dr.SHIVA Ayyadurai, MIT PhD. Inventor of Email (@va_shiva) March 9, 2020
He linked to a tweet by President Trump which reads, The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant. Surgeon General, “The risk is low to the average American.”
One does have to wonder what the truth is. It is seriously negatively impacting capitalism. It’s a bad virus but we can’t shut down the entire world every time there is a pandemic. Congress just closed to visitors, the NBA closed down after a player contracted the virus, travel from Europe, China, and Iran is banned, schools are closing, the Stock Market is crashing although it’s partly due to the oil war, and there is more. All this will seriously harm the capitalist economies.
Having lived through Swine flu, H1N1 and the constant threat of cases of flu (I had Swine flu and have a compromised immune system), I have never seen such an extreme reaction. We can’t do this every flu season. The President has been put under tremendous pressure. The press needs to ease up.
They argue that black working Americans experienced a similar decline in relative economic prospects and community cohesion in the 1980s — “decades later, less educated whites, long protected by white privilege, were next in line”. And they assert that the well being of the previously privileged white community has been additionally undermined by the loss of social status relative to their black fellow citizens: “more than half of white working class Americans believe that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities”. My own experience of working and travelling in the US suggests this is all far too narrow and simplistic. There is far more to current alienation than Trumpian racial envy. And while the strength of the earlier part of Deaths of Despair lies in its statistics and evidence, it is here, where analysis is replaced by speculation, that the book is less satisfactory.
It depends on who it is. If it's a Liberal it's a blessing. Fuck you and the Marxist horse you rode in on.
Direct and to the point. I like it, Lev. Now here's my verbose retort. Actually, it's not mine. But I couldn't have said it better myself. To you, John Roberts, and all you conservative cunts.
Quote:
The Chief Justice of the United States
One First Street, N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20543
March 11, 2020
Dear Chief Justice Roberts:
I hereby resign my membership in the Supreme Court Bar.
This was not an easy decision. I have been a member of the Supreme Court Bar since 1972, far longer than you have, and appeared before the Court, both in person and on briefs, on several occasions as Deputy and First Deputy Attorney General of Hawaii before being appointed as a Hawaii District Court judge in 1986. I have a high regard for the work of the Federal Judiciary and taught the Federal Courts course at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law for a decade in the 1980s and 1990s. This due regard spanned the tenures of Chief Justices Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist before your appointment and confirmation in 2005. I have not always agreed with the Court’s decisions, but until recently I have generally seen them as products of mainstream legal reasoning, whether liberal or conservative. The legal conservatism I have respected– that of, for example, Justice Lewis Powell, Alexander Bickel or Paul Bator– at a minimum enshrined the idea of stare decisis and eschewed the idea of radical change in legal doctrine for political ends.
I can no longer say that with any confidence. You are doing far more— and far worse– than “calling balls and strikes.” You are allowing the Court to become an “errand boy” for an administration that has little respect for the rule of law.
The Court, under your leadership and with your votes, has wantonly flouted established precedent. Your “conservative” majority has cynically undermined basic freedoms by hypocritically weaponizing others. The ideas of free speech and religious liberty have been transmogrified to allow officially sanctioned bigotry and discrimination, as well as to elevate the grossest forms of political bribery beyond the ability of the federal government or states to rationally regulate it. More than a score of decisions during your tenure have overturned established precedents—some more than forty years old– and you voted with the majority in most. There is nothing “conservative” about this trend. This is radical “legal activism” at its worst.
Without trying to write a law review article, I believe that the Court majority, under your leadership, has become little more than a result-oriented extension of the right wing of the Republican Party, as vetted by the Federalist Society. Yes, politics has always been a factor in the Court’s history, but not to today’s extent. Even routine rules of statutory construction get subverted or ignored to achieve transparently political goals. The rationales of “textualism” and “originalism” are mere fig leaves masking right wing political goals; sheer casuistry.
Your public pronouncements suggest that you seem concerned about the legitimacy of the Court in today’s polarized environment. We all should be. Yet your actions, despite a few bromides about objectivity, say otherwise.
It is clear to me that your Court is willfully hurtling back to the cruel days of Lochner and even Plessy. The only constitutional freedoms ultimately recognized may soon be limited to those useful to wealthy, Republican, White, straight, Christian, and armed males— and the corporations they control. This is wrong. Period. This is not America.
I predict that your legacy will ultimately be as diminished as that of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who presided over both Plessy and Lochner. It still could become that of his revered fellow Justice John Harlan the elder, an honest conservative, but I doubt that it will. Feel free to prove me wrong.
The Supreme Court of the United States is respected when it wields authority and not mere power. As has often been said, you are infallible because you are final, but not the other way around.
I no longer have respect for you or your majority, and I have little hope for change. I can’t vote you out of office because you have life tenure, but I can withdraw whatever insignificant support my Bar membership might seem to provide.
