Originally Posted by Justin '77

There were (and are) major cultural differences between them and us on that matter. Orlov is one place to look for a fairly good start on that hand.

Prior to, and to large extent during the Communist era (and still today, in large part), Russians have always been quite self-sufficient, food-wise. There are, and have always been, vanishingly few who would be pushed to the point of being able to form a starvation-mob. In fact, the only times when actual destitute hunger was widespread in that place were when it came as the result of a deliberate government policy (see, for ex, the holodomor. As per Solzhenitsyn's Rule, feel free to multiply by as many other regions and as many other nationalities as the Soviets felt needed bringing to heel).
What's more, the climate in Russia, while genuinely harsh in a lot of ways, is in most all places that people live suitable for agriculture. And Russian agriculture is very much about growing what is suited to the climate and the region, as opposed to our American model of massive projects to subsidize or otherwise prop up unsustainable agriculture in whatever arbitrary regions it got centralized.

If anything -- and here again, I can refer you back to Orlov -- the Russian example is one that should give us cause for concern, not comfort. We lack in America the very things that allowed Russians and Russian civil society to survive their hard times.

Thank you VERY much, Justin! Spasibo! I transferred it to a Word document and intend to put it on my Kindle today.

Pat

Originally Posted by Galen

In the case of the math of computational complexity and evolutionary systems it is very relevant because a market economy is very much an evolutionary system.

I am not going to agree with Eric that mathematics isn't appropriate or useful in economics. However, it's important to point out that any mathematical system is based on premises and required only to be self-consistent and logical. There is no requirement that its premises match observed reality. Economics, however, is a real-world science, not a system of pure mathematics, and so that requirement does obtain.

The economy could be itself considered a computational system with the purpose of maximizing material well-being, often called wealth, of its participants. Change wealth is often referred to by economists as profit or loss depending on if that change is positive or negative.

First sentence, correct. Second sentence, absolutely incorrect. "Maximizing wealth for the participants" implies a concept of macroeconomics: aggregate wealth of everyone. (By the way, that should be considered only part of the goal for a sound economy.) Profit, however, is the increase in wealth of one single participant, not of all participants together; it is a microeconomic concept.

When you call for wealth redistribution you are in effect setting the fitness function of an evolutionary system to either a constant or some arbitrary value.

First, as noted above calling "profit" the "fitness function of an evolutionary system" confuses macro with micro economics; also, it incorrectly treats humanity as a solitary instead of a social species. We do not progress individually through survival of the fittest individual; we progress collectively, and natural selection applies as much or more to groups and societies as it does to individuals. This is the core flaw of social Darwinism, the core tenet of which you have just stated.

Wealth in a modern economy is produced collectively, not individually. For example, in a factory producing cars, there are many people (car designers and engineers, plant managers, workers) who contribute to the production of cars, which are a form of wealth. Legally it may be treated as the owner of the plant "producing" all those cars, but that is a fiction. The reality is that it is a collective effort. Distribution of wealth among the people producing the cars is not a function of natural growth, or of what each person individually accomplishes, but of agreement or contract among all the participants -- so much goes to the engineers, plant managers, and workers, and the owner gets what's left, be it profit or loss. Redistribution of wealth takes its most effective form in the rewriting of such contracts so that the employees get a larger share. (Direct welfare payments constitute only a tiny tiny fraction of wealth redistribution in periods when that was undertaken.) This is no more "arbitrary" than the original agreement was.

Given enough intervention you will completely destroy the mechanism that allows evolution to function in the economy and so you are reduced to central planning.

Now you're getting seriously confused. Central planning has never been undertaken to replace "evolution." It has been undertaken to replace market decisions. This follows, not from intervention in general, but from a certain type of intervention, and the dominance of market-based decisions has not followed tangentially from some unrelated government intervention but rather directly and deliberately from central planning itself.

The only way to create an economy that grows and makes everyone materially better off is the same way it was done originally in the West.

Demonstrably incorrect, and there's that real-world touchstone that is so necessary in constructing mathematical systems and so lacking in Austrian economics, which completely ignores the need for an empirical foundation. What Mises, Hayek, etc. did was to begin with a desired conclusion (that government intervention hurts the economy, and in favor of laissez-faire) and construct a self-consistent logical theory leading to that conclusion, without ever bothering to check their theories by further observation. If they had, they would have discovered that it was wrong.

The industrial economy created "the way it was done originally in the West" underperformed the industrial economy created by applying government regulations to that economy by more than two to one. I'm measuring this in terms of annual growth in per capita GDP, which averaged just above 2% (real growth) from 1900 to 1940, above 4% from 1940 to 1980, and back to just above 2% for the years since then. Given that the amount of government interference in the economy was much greater in the middle period than in either the earlier or later one, when Austrian economics would have predicted the opposite, we must, if honest, conclude that the Austrian economic theory either reasons incorrectly or reasons correctly from false premises. The latter is in fact the case.

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

Apparently, James, I listen to Limbaugh and Hannity a lot more than you do.

I tune in Rush about once per quarter usually for less than 10 minutes. Hannity not at all.

James50

Originally Posted by James50

I tune in Rush about once per quarter usually for less than 10 minutes. Hannity not at all.

That explains things somewhat, James. I'm going to toss out a suggestion here. You may be thinking, "I'm a conservative, he calls himself a conservative, therefore he is like me." When if you were to listen to these folks (bear in mind that Limbaugh, Hannity, et al are the voice of the "conservative" movement and express many of the attitudes of the Tea Party) you might conclude that they are not really much like you at all.

And they're not. You're a conservative. They're nut jobs.

Originally Posted by Galen

In the case of the math of computational complexity and evolutionary systems it is very relevant because a market economy is very much an evolutionary system. The economy could be itself considered a computational system with the purpose of maximizing material well-being, often called wealth, of its participants. Change wealth is often referred to by economists as profit or loss depending on if that change is positive or negative. This in effect becomes the fitness functions which determines the success or failure of businesses and individuals. When you call for wealth redistribution you are in effect setting the fitness function of an evolutionary system to either a constant or some arbitrary value. This in effect stops the process of evolution and causes actors in the economy to begin act irrationally because you have taken both the incentive and the means to create wealth and to know if they actually did.

Given enough intervention you will completely destroy the mechanism that allows evolution to function in the economy and so you are reduced to central planning. In computer science terms the problem of optimizing the economy can be said to be undecidable even if complete and accurate information about the state of the economy is available which of course it isn't. In other words it is not possible to construct a Turing machine that can tell if your allocation strategy will achieve the desired results. The math of information theory tells me that perfect and complete knowledge of the state of the economy is not possible. Hayek figured this out about the time Claude Shannon discovered the beginnings of the math for information theory used to this day.

When Mises wrote the Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth in 1920 he touched on all of these subjects and a few more besides. I can look at his work ninety years later with the math of Alonzo Church, Alan Turning and so many others who have advanced the science of computation and see that he was absolutely correct. The mathematics of computational complexity and information flow guarantee that it is impossible to design an algorithm or strategy to run a system of subtle and nearly infinite complexity such as the US economy. Only an evolutionary system can even begin to solve a problem with a state space of nearly infinite size.

The only way to create an economy that grows and makes everyone materially better off is the same way it was done originally in the West. The free-market economic system of the classical liberals of so long ago is the only one that has the features of an evolutionary system needed to make it work since there is no other way to solve a problem of such scale. No other economic system can consistently create wealth over a period of centuries. This is why the more free a society is the more likely it is to be wealthy.

When you demand that economic inequality be reduced or eliminated you are demanding that the possibility of economic calculation be eliminated as well. I don't like the Darwinian aspects of it myself but any attempt to do away with them will make it impossible for the economy to function. The is the consequence of the math involving self-organizing computational systems of which the economy is one. In your own way you are just as guilty of denying the truth of evolution as any fundamentalist Christian ever was because you deny the need for failure to be weeded out of the system.

It would be nice if the usual suspects would take the time to read this paper and learn about these subjects before deciding that the math does not apply. Sadly the chances of that happening are about zero.

It is interesting to note that yet another government inspired attempt to choose winners and losers has fell on its face with the predictable large loss of taxpayer funds.

There is so much conjecture here it is hard to know where to begin so just a couple points -

- The inability of mathematical models to perform at a level to give precise foundation to a govt "tuning machine" ALSO does not give you the foundation to support your conjectures that govt does not have a major role to play in fostering a viable economic system.

- A free market economy has never existed and does not exist today - there are always rules and constraints imposed by society. Even in the Libertarian dream world of Somalia, a war lord makes the rules and he only does so as long as his followers (his society) supports him. Those arguing that a free market currently exist are those who favor and benefit from the status quo of existing rules and constraints; those arguing for a more free market are those who see that a change in the existing rules and constraints would greatly benefit themselves.

- A Darwinian model only appears to work as long as it bounded by the unrealistic assumption that "losers" do not have, and will not take, other means to change the existing rules and constraints of the current "free market" either by political action or by violent action. A Darwinian model might begin to enter the realm of respectability if it would take into account group survival considerations of altruism and benefical reciprocity as well as fundamental macro-economic understanding of such things as aggregate demand that without lead to the enormous fallacies of composition that you are displaying.

- as I have noted here on another post -
http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/s...865#post390865
your "yet another government inspired to choose winners and losers has fell on its face with the predictable large loss of taxpayer funds" is completely fraudulent.

First, its not even a case of the "jury is still out" for in fact, we are a long way from any determination that a jury will actually be needed. Second, even if proven to be a misguided failure, the 1/2 billion loan was part of a multi-hundred billion Stimulus - pretty hard to find an error rate under 1% in the private sector risk-taking ventures. Third, we are in a heated competition with China on renewable energy technologies; they began their government-subsidized dumping of their chips on the markets in just the last two years - it would have been difficult to not only predict that back in 2009 when the govt loan was made to Solyndra but also to defer to the Chinese dominance (or, are you suggesting that govt-subsidized manufacturing is superior in your Darwinian approach, and we should just give up when faced with such govt-sponsored onslaught? That would seem to undermine your entire point. ).

Fourth, and let me single this out for its importance, as noted before, the loan was part of a much larger govt effort to stimulate the economy - to date, there has been no demonstrable cost to that entire package. Our taxes have not been raised (because taxes are not needed for the fed govt to spend), there is no sustainable generalize increase in prices (i.e. inflation) associated with the stimulus, and interest rates are at historic lows. No demonstrable cost means that the Return on Investment (ROI) of the entire package is infinite with or without the Solyndra loan being found to be misguided.

Fifth, given that an infinite ROI is something that one would find hard to find in the private sector, isn't the type of risk-taking to advance technology and maintain global competitiveness, as attempted with the Solyndra investment, exactly what the govt should be doing? I would guess you view the entire history of the US space program as a waste of tax payers money as well.

Also, you may notice on the linked post that I've brought up the fed's investment in the auto makers - you know where the govt has made a substantial profit and saved millions of jobs - would you care to put that into perspective with your relatively puny and still no-jury-yet complaint of Solyndra?

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

That explains things somewhat, James. I'm going to toss out a suggestion here. You may be thinking, "I'm a conservative, he calls himself a conservative, therefore he is like me." When if you were to listen to these folks (bear in mind that Limbaugh, Hannity, et al are the voice of the "conservative" movement and express many of the attitudes of the Tea Party) you might conclude that they are not really much like you at all.

And they're not. You're a conservative. They're nut jobs.

I guess that is a compliment. Thanks.

I find the polemicists of both sides rather tiring if not boring. My impression is that Rush is the most entertaining with his big ego schtick and Hannity (who was an Atlanta radio personality before he went to Fox) is more emotional if not nasty. They are perhaps a little "hotter" in media terms than the MSNBC evening lineup but a cool polemicist is still a polemicist. I really don't have the time.

James50

Originally Posted by James50

I guess that is a compliment. Thanks.

It was. In my view, conservatives and progressives are both important voices in the dialogue. Loss of either one would result in societal collapse. Without progressives, we would be unable to adapt effectively to changes in circumstances. Without conservatives, we would be too inclined to experiment with untested ideas that don't pass the common-sense test. Being a conservative voice is not my personal role, but I recognize the value and importance of having it be the role of others.

Actually, if all the conservatives were to disappear, I might become one out of necessity. However, that's not going to happen.

I find the polemicists of both sides rather tiring if not boring.

May I suggest that you also disagree with both much of the time?

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

It was. In my view, conservatives and progressives are both important voices in the dialogue. Loss of either one would result in societal collapse. Without progressives, we would be unable to adapt effectively to changes in circumstances. Without conservatives, we would be too inclined to experiment with untested ideas that don't pass the common-sense test. Being a conservative voice is not my personal role, but I recognize the value and importance of having it be the role of others.

I think part of the problem is that the pop culture media tend to equate "conservative" with "Republican" or "right wing." Yet as the GOP moves strongly to its right wing, much the stuff they push is anything *but* "conservative" in the traditional sense. True classical conservatives don't generally approve of upsetting the apple cart, or of blowing everything up (figuratively) and pressing the reset button -- and that's what the Tea Party is trying to do. And somehow, in the media mess, "conservative" is suddenly equated with the Tea Party much as the word "liberal" has been demonized and transformed into becoming a synonym for "socialist" even though that's NOT what the word implies.

Let's not forget that paleocons (or "classical conservatives") like Barry Goldwater were once considered "right wing," and in today's political climate he'd be much closer to the center as the country moved to the right.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

May I suggest that you also disagree with both much of the time?

Not far from the truth.

James50

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

The news today is that Obama willnot focus on a big jobs program tomorrow night. He will propose. . . .tax cuts!!!!

"When the people have to choose between a Republican and a Republican, they'll take the Republican every time."

Harry S. Truman

As if with our deficit we can afford more tax cuts. Geez. I guess he's trying to get something past the congress. That's all they really care about.

Originally Posted by James50

What is uncharted? When the democrats had the whip hand in 2008, do you think they gave a hoot or listened to anything the Republicans did or said? The democrats felt they were elected to do certain things and they set about doing them.

If that was true, then all this would already be set in very Progressive stone. They had the Presidncy and both houses of Congress long enough to get anything through they wished. What happened? Not much. Even the things they passed had a very Republican shen to them. The Stimulus? Primarily tax cuts and subsidies. I didn't see any New New Deal programs. After all, the Democrats are still a party of diversity. They have their Blue Dogs and their opportunists. Not the GOP, though, They are as close to monlithic as any party has been since the pre-ACW era.

To be honest about it, the fact that you can't see this is a bit stunning.

Originally Posted by James50 ...

Now the republicans are doing the same thing. Its politics. My suggestion to the left (and to the right) is to quit talking about the other side as if they were little fascists. I am sick of it. The republicans want smaller government and lower taxes. In 2010, the electorate agreed with them. What do you expect them to do?

James50

They have demagogued everything since Obama was elected. This long precedes the 2010 election. How many appointments has Obama been able to get approved in comparison to those submitted by GWB? For that matter, forget about the post-2010 period and answer based on the post-2008 versus the post-2000 periods, when the losers should have been chastised. Bush got his entire team. Obama still has many open posts that can't be filled ... even by the most highly qualified.

On this you are clearly wrong.

http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot....-resolves.html

This picture pretty much resolves the Keynes vs. Austrian debate

....I think the chart below goes a long way toward resolving that debate. It plots annual changes in U.S. real GDP going back to 1860. Take a look at how many deep recessions and depressions the country experienced in the 19th century. Pretty much, every 10 years, a depression! And the swings in GDP were huge!

Compare that to the mid 20th century and especially 1971 forward. What a contrast! Very few recessions and no depressions. And even the recessions have been much milder, current one being an exception.

Remember that the U.S. was on a gold standard until 1933 (domestically) and completely off the gold standard and on a system of floating FX non-convertibility from 1971 on. Rather than get worse, things stabilized immensely.

All the recent troubles can be traced back to Clinton's surpluses, which essentially was the equivalent of putting us on a gold standard. The rebound out of the recent "Lesser Depression" was due to massive deficit spending. Did I hear someone say Keynes??

Yea, let's cut the deficit, balance the budget and get back on the gold standard... and see if we can beat those historic dudes with bigger depressions! Ye-haw!

Originally Posted by playwrite

Ye-haw!

I like this guy.

Originally Posted by Galen

It is one of the possible alternatives for the future and one of its primary virtues is that it tends to minimize coercion which tends to be a good thing in almost all circumstances. All of the other possibilities are much worse since they are either authoritarian in nature, will fail to grow the economy or worse both and I don't see any good coming from that. So far as I am able to discern it is unreasonable to expect the current ongoing attempt at a mixed economy will survive the fourth turning.

The underlying theorem used by every Austrian is Says Law. Unfortunately, Says Law was promulgated in 1802, before the industrial revolution. The assumption that the limiting factor in the economy is the supply side, and hence the side that needs to be accommodated, is shear poppycock.

Does anyone ... can anyone still believe that we are constrained because our ability to produce is too limited?

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

If that was true, then all this would already be set in very Progressive stone. They had the Presidncy and both houses of Congress long enough to get anything through they wished. What happened? Not much.

1. ACA
2. Dodd-Frank
3. Stimulus

These were major pieces of legislation passed with little or in the case of ACA with no Republican votes at all. That the democrats could not pass what you define as progressive is not the republicans fault. They had 60 votes for pete's sake. They could not agree. The Republicans especially in the house were just complainers.

James50

Originally Posted by James50

If I said that, I did not mean to. The importance of Scott Brown's election is that it came at the cusp of the legislative process. His stated election platform was to stop the ACA. He was elected and, instead of reconsidering, the House bulled ahead through parliamentary maneuvers and passed the bill. At the time, pundits said the process would not matter, but the law has never recovered in public esteem. The recent waivers are another sign of its fundamental political weakness. This was a strategic mistake on the part of house democrats and was a contributing factor to their dramatic repudiation in 2010.

James50

As much as I hate the ACA we got, it finally completed the long overdue work of Teddy Roosevelt. 100 years is long enough to get something every other advanced society has already had for decades.

Originally Posted by Galen

In the case of the math of computational complexity and evolutionary systems it is very relevant because a market economy is very much an evolutionary system. The economy could be itself considered a computational system with the purpose of maximizing material well-being, often called wealth, of its participants. Change wealth is often referred to by economists as profit or loss depending on if that change is positive or negative. This in effect becomes the fitness functions which determines the success or failure of businesses and individuals. When you call for wealth redistribution you are in effect setting the fitness function of an evolutionary system to either a constant or some arbitrary value. This in effect stops the process of evolution and causes actors in the economy to begin act irrationally because you have taken both the incentive and the means to create wealth and to know if they actually did.

Another reason exists for the failure of algorithms to allow people to calculate any economic 'optimum' -- people are just too complicated to fit such models. They have psychological quirks, moral values, and self-interest. At the extreme, self-interest of a laborer is very different from that of a membership of the elites of ownership and management. Elites of ownership and management are often so isolated from working-class reality through their upbringing and through the deliberate social isolation among the classes that the values of the elites of ownership and management are that the laborers toil until they drop, but not until they have had the children to replace them in the workforce. 70-hour workweeks and 40-year lifespans for industrial workers, farm workers, and miners is fine with elites of ownership and management while of course the elites get to live the Good Life in which they can make such work as they do as satisfying as possible and the rest of their lives as plush as possible.

The class struggle that the Austrian School denies is real. The most sustainable social orders are those in which the social classes are not so well defined -- as America was a few years ago but no longer is. People become aware of the worst sort of hypocrisy possible -- elites who show no virtues but proles are punished severely for any vice.

Given enough intervention you will completely destroy the mechanism that allows evolution to function in the economy and so you are reduced to central planning. In computer science terms the problem of optimizing the economy can be said to be undecidable even if complete and accurate information about the state of the economy is available which of course it isn't. In other words it is not possible to construct a Turing machine that can tell if your allocation strategy will achieve the desired results. The math of information theory tells me that perfect and complete knowledge of the state of the economy is not possible. Hayek figured this out about the time Claude Shannon discovered the beginnings of the math for information theory used to this day.

Evolution? The elites of ownership and management act in their political choices as if they want the economic order to evolve into a pure plutocracy with sharp divides of authority and indulgence on the one side and pain and deprivation on the other -- and then freeze!

Note well that mathematical models do not prove economics. They must fit economic reality if they are to have validity. The Big Boys do econometrics; the outsiders do ideology.

When Mises wrote the Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth in 1920 he touched on all of these subjects and a few more besides. I can look at his work ninety years later with the math of Alonzo Church, Alan Turning and so many others who have advanced the science of computation and see that he was absolutely correct. The mathematics of computational complexity and information flow guarantee that it is impossible to design an algorithm or strategy to run a system of subtle and nearly infinite complexity such as the US economy. Only an evolutionary system can even begin to solve a problem with a state space of nearly infinite size.

Does anyone deny that the Soviet Union in its earliest stage was an abject failure? It was so blatant a failure that Vladimir Lenin instituted his New Economic Policy that began to re-establish market-based incentives in the place of the crude and failed War Communism. Mises criticized an economic system that had already failed and that only a madman (Stalin) would seek to restore, only more completely and harshly. But how does a "mathematical" critique of War Communism apply to an economic philosophy (social democracy) that still allows producer choice and consumer choice, the two necessary restraints upon economic madness? Does anyone need a mathematical model to show that War Communism was a failure? Doctor Zhivago suffices.

The only way to create an economy that grows and makes everyone materially better off is the same way it was done originally in the West. The free-market economic system of the classical liberals of so long ago is the only one that has the features of an evolutionary system needed to make it work since there is no other way to solve a problem of such scale. No other economic system can consistently create wealth over a period of centuries. This is why the more free a society is the more likely it is to be wealthy.

Originally and at what time and place? Geographic reality itself dictates what sort of economic activity is possible. The thin, stony, infertile soils and severe climate of most of of New England ensured that farming would never be a way in which to get rich but that intelligent people would have to find other ways to sate their economic desires; the American colonies of the subtropical region that begins around Chesapeake Bay and ends in the Everglades, with soft soil and the capacity to deliver three or four crops in two years fostered large-scale farming well-suited to Tara-like plantations with a manor house and plenty of slaves. Need I tell you what happened about 150 years ago over such a divide?

Have you even contemplated why western Europe went toward the 'socialistic' welfare state that you so despise? Plutocrats had supported the fascists and Nazis who promised to keep cartels strong and labor powerless. Fascism and Nazism, both the other ideal systems for sociopaths (Stalinism is the other), offered the ruling classes the "freedom" to demand hard labor at starvation rations and to set monopoly prices. Perhaps because fascism and the destructive war that it fostered had created conditions similar to those that existed in Russia in 1917, British and American liberators insisted upon something more decent and sustainable than the pre-fascist economic and political norms. They broke the cartels, gave workers the right to strike, and pushed social reforms.

Libertarian ideologues fail to recognize the possibility of conflicts of freedom sometimes identifiable as the class struggle. Democracy must trump economic growth; without democracy, economic growth tends to become extremely lopsided -- as on a Tara-like plantation at the worst.

When you demand that economic inequality be reduced or eliminated you are demanding that the possibility of economic calculation be eliminated as well. I don't like the Darwinian aspects of it myself but any attempt to do away with them will make it impossible for the economy to function. The is the consequence of the math involving self-organizing computational systems of which the economy is one. In your own way you are just as guilty of denying the truth of evolution as any fundamentalist Christian ever was because you deny the need for failure to be weeded out of the system.

In most of the West, few people must remain the now-irrelevant homo oeconomicus driven only by gross need if a worker and insatiable lusts if part of the elite. But is economic calculation such a good thing? Apparently not. Our economy depends upon people defying such calculations. If you don't believe that, then look at the content of advertising that encourages people to get fat on fast food and beer, waste their disposable income in gambling casinos and amusement parks, and buy soul-rotting mass culture. The old way ensured ruin without any fun; the new way... at least offers some fun.

It would be nice if the usual suspects would take the time to read this paper and learn about these subjects before deciding that the math does not apply. Sadly the chances of that happening are about zero.

Not necessary. Irrelevant model applicable to the wrong scenario.

Originally Posted by The Rani

Option B would be the presence of a gang mentality.

Comeon Suj. Summer is snotty and argumentative. This is not news, and the fact that many see it is not an example of gang mentality ... which you know all too well.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

The underlying theorem used by every Austrian is Says Law. Unfortunately, Says Law was promulgated in 1802, before the industrial revolution. The assumption that the limiting factor in the economy is the supply side, and hence the side that needs to be accommodated, is shear poppycock.

Does anyone ... can anyone still believe that we are constrained because our ability to produce is too limited?

The Peak Oil Doomer crowd does.

Who knows? They might be right.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Originally Posted by James50

What is uncharted? When the democrats had the whip hand in 2008, do you think they gave a hoot or listened to anything the Republicans did or said? The democrats felt they were elected to do certain things and they set about doing them.

If that was true, then all this would already be set in very Progressive stone. They had the Presidncy and both houses of Congress long enough to get anything through they wished. What happened? Not much. Even the things they passed had a very Republican shen to them. The Stimulus? Primarily tax cuts and subsidies. I didn't see any New New Deal programs. After all, the Democrats are still a party of diversity. They have their Blue Dogs and their opportunists. Not the GOP, though, They are as close to monlithic as any party has been since the pre-ACW era.

To be honest about it, the fact that you can't see this is a bit stunning.

Originally Posted by James50

Now the republicans are doing the same thing. Its politics. My suggestion to the left (and to the right) is to quit talking about the other side as if they were little fascists. I am sick of it. The republicans want smaller government and lower taxes. In 2010, the electorate agreed with them. What do you expect them to do?

James50

They have demagogued everything since Obama was elected. This long precedes the 2010 election. How many appointments has Obama been able to get approved in comparison to those submitted by GWB? For that matter, forget about the post-2010 period and answer based on the post-2008 versus the post-2000 periods, when the losers should have been chastised. Bush got his entire team. Obama still has many open posts that can't be filled ... even by the most highly qualified.

On this you are clearly wrong.

The point you seem to be missing is that both sides are combative. Who cares if you can pin the ribbon on one side for being less good at it.

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

The Peak Oil Doomer crowd does.

Who knows? They might be right.

I'll believe that one when it gets too expensive to ship cheap trinkets in from overseas thus regenerating a low end industrial base for America.

Until then I'm going to continue to operate as if 19th century economics are best left in the 19th century. :

Originally Posted by princeofcats67

Galen,

Please excuse me for injecting some comments.

Thanks for the post. Going-forward, I'll give Math some more consideration and make some extra attempts at understanding the possible similarities.

I was wondering if I might ask some questions in the future.

I have read translations of Buddhist material and have come away with the impression that I was reading a scientific paper.

Certainly you may ask questions since it is better than the usual unthinking clueless responses by Eric the Obtuse, master of completely missing the obvious.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Comeon Suj. Summer is snotty and argumentative. This is not news, and the fact that many see it is not an example of gang mentality ... which you know all too well.

Yeah, but with me as part of the "gang," she has some difficulty acknowledging knowing it. Old story.

Originally Posted by James50

Not far from the truth.

All right, then let me suggest the logical conclusion. You disagree both with progressives and with those who are calling themselves "conservatives" these days. Your beliefs and attitudes generally fit the dictionary definition of "conservative": a defender of tradition and someone distrustful of radical change (of any kind). Since you are a conservative, and you disagree with those who are calling themselves "conservatives" these days, is it not a logical conclusion that they are NOT conservatives?

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

The Peak Oil Doomer crowd does.

Who knows? They might be right.

They are right -- until the marketplace directs people to biofuels and solar energy for the lack of the alternative of cheap oil. Maybe if global warming is real and Texas runs out of oil as it becomes the "Texahara Desert" it would be perfect for solar panels interspersed between the strange abandoned buildings of Dallas, Fort Worth, Lubbock, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. Add Oklahoma and Kansas, and parts of Arkansas and Louisiana as well after new Grapes of Wrath scenarios follow the transformation of a place on the fringe of the temperate zone into hot desert.


As for getting stuff cheaply from across the ocean -- sailing ships did that, if slowly. The same technology that could bring slaves across the Atlantic could, if necessary, bring electronic goodies across the Pacific. Those sailing ships would probably use solar power to supply the energy for operating the navigational equipment, cooking the meals of the crew, and power the video games and cell phones of the crew... not to mention the weather radar.