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Welcome to 2030
This article was penned by a member of the Danish Parliament to promote discussion about just where we are headed.
To some, it’s a utopian goal … the desired endpoint of our current big tech, big government, Marxist cooperative. To others, it’s a totalitarian hell to be avoided at all costs. But it was published by the World Economic Forum, proponents of the “Great Reset.”
Is this where they really think we could end up? It seems amazingly economically naive for something put out by an economics organization. Free clean energy? Free telecommunications? Free … everything? Without some analog to the Philosopher’s Stone, scarcity will be with us always. And with it, nothing is free. Some method must exist to ration scarce goods. Prices, determined by the free choices of free people, seem to be the best way we know to do this. But it’s not the only way. All the others depend on varying degrees of authoritarian fiat. Surely the WEF knows this. So why pretend that there is a “free stuff” possible future? They certainly seem to know there is a downside to the “free stuff” future…
Once in a while, I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
The downside is very real. But the “free stuff” future is a physical impossibility. Yet they dangle it out there as if it were a real choice. It would seem to be an attempt to get the gullible to trade their liberty for a chimera that can’t be delivered. Fortunately for them, the ranks of the gullible are large and growing. Unfortunate for us.
Published in General
I don’t see a possible continuation of what capitalism has produced when Christianity is pushed out.
My point was that it could be that the “surplus army of the unemployed” might be just getting started.
But that will likely not be capitalism’s doing per se. Government? Maybe. AI? More likely.
Unless you figure that the success of capitalism is what makes much if not all of leftism – including/especially in government – seem feasible.
Our wage class was driven down to subsistence with an army of unemployed. It’s not the entirety of the labor class if you count salaried labor, but the stagnant wages with rising living wage is what’s driving the minimum wage racket.
Some of the effects have been dampened by welfare and credit creation because the monied classes like people buying the crap their China factories produce.
This was helped by some of Trump’s policies but apparently not enough to convince people not to vote for socialism.
Yes – the success of capitalism giving the illusion of a post scarcity world that makes utopian ideals seem possible.
Let’s just talk America first. Real wages – after inflation wages – have been remarkably consistent. And since Trump, actual increases in median real wages.
Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty has steadily decreased and those not living in extreme poverty has greatly increased since the dawn of capitalism.
But aren’t a lot of those people benefiting from capitalism that isn’t their own? Seems a rather shaky foundation, especially when we see how the “shutdowns” in the US are affecting the rest of the world.
I agree that he should be admired for his understanding of the downsides of capitalism. But I do blame him for advocating that we make things worse instead of better.
Could someone point me to a text by Marx analyzing the structure of capitalism that he or she finds admirable?
Everything I’ve read about his theories both before and after polylogism convincingly shows them to be rubbish. All efforts to retrieve his ideas from the trash bin after his death were complete failures.
I cannot point you to it. I heard it quoted in an audiobook I was reading, but I’ve heard such things quoted more than once.
I don’t intend to go and read it in full context. Whenever I’ve asked if there is some sort of abridged best-of-Marx reader, with or without commentary, somebody pops up to offer to catechize me in Marx, saying it’s a long slog and I have to start at the beginning. Sorry, not doing that.
Don’t apologize! I’ve never seen anyone who can defend any example of the populists’ and the leftist intellectuals’ claimed wisdom of Marx. One can only repeat the platitudes we were all brainwashed with by our economic mal-education if one has never read Marx’s writings, read the serious criticisms of them, and thought critically about them for himself, rather than just repeating the hollow phrases one has memorized.
Admirable? Not really. More like better understandings of the limitations.
Do you not think Capitalism has limitations? In so much as lending is a part of capitalism, that has severe limitations that, when not considered, leads to serious problems.
Or how about free trade, in as much as it is considered capitalism. It, too, comes with severe limitations. Chief among which moves production away from our own citizenry, relegating them to consumers only, raises inflation, and compromises national security.
Thank you for introducing me to Gary North, btw. Turns out most of my economic education came from the Bible already. I just didn’t realize it was legitimate economic theory.
You’re welcome.
The salient bit there is “benefiting from capitalism“. Yes.
They certainly aren’t beneficiaries of Marxism.
And the shutdowns in the US are government inflicting itself on capitalism … often a detrimental move.
If you are thinking of the financial crisis, much of the dodgy lending was done at the urging of and with the implicit backing of government.
Yes, the limitation is this: resources are limited. Having more of one thing means having less of something else.
Capitalism doesn’t remove that fundamental limitation, as Marx claimed that his anti-capitalist program could do. Capitalism only optimizes the creation of wealth. Socialism, the genius of Marx, can only prevent the creation of wealth that would occur in an economically free, just, and equal society (i.e., a capitalist one).
Trade is in interesting topic. David Ricardo demonstrated that free trade benefits everybody. The problem is that there is precious little of it in the real world. And Ricardo is silent on what should be done if the force of his logic isn’t enough to induce trade counterparties to adopt free trade policies. Governments around the world can’t seem to help themselves from trying to rig things in their favor. Or, like China, to weaken their opponents.
But none of that is capitalism. That’s inter governmental judo. And America is bad at it. We are hamstrung by one political party that sees a muscular US negotiating position as colonialism or imperialism and the other that has a knee jerk “free trade“ mantra that fails to recognize that the benefits of free trade only come about when BOTH counterparties trade freely. There is no benefit to one country trading freely while its trade partners don’t trade freely with them. That’s just giving away the store as we have found to our detriment. Trump has been the first President in a long time to try to adopt a muscular US trade policy as a lever to move our counterparties toward free trade.
No. I’m thinking about the fractional reserve banking, the doling out of risk-free (government backed) debt through credit cards, high risk loans, and student loans that have enslaved the vast majority of the country to a very limited minority under very long and enduring terms.
The federal debt is its own problem.
When a still partially capitalist country is defeated and enslaved by an anti-capitalist country, it becomes a non-capitalist country and it is impoverished by that, since only capitalism optimizes the well-being of the masses of common people.
It is not impoverished by capitalism. It is impoverished by Marxism, the nonsensical system of thought which we have been indoctrinated by our decadent educational and media institutions into considering “admirable” or insightful about “limitations” or the inherent flaws in the “structure” of capitalism.
America is a capitalist country that is at war, in a very real sense, with a Marxist country, China. It seems that on Ricochet, proponents of Marxism are attributing to me a mad theory that America would benefit by protecting the rights of its citizens, including the right to trade with others freely, with such monomaniacal frenzy that it would cost us losing the war with the theory that they themselves defend: the wise criticisms of capitalism by Marx..
You call socialism “capitalism” and then attack capitalism for the failures of socialism. It is socialism that has failed, not capitalism.
Your point of view was already almost universal even in the time of Mises, when it had already been discredited.
A whole lot of things have been made to cost a whole lot less than they used to by technology, like publications or music.
Question for consideration. Is it the technology per se, or the fact that much of the technology was acquired by theft or espionage and is produced by what amounts to slave labor in China and hence artificially inexpensive? What would happen to price if there was an actual free market on the supply side?
Example. The classic story of the wind turbine firm from Massachusetts. The Chinese pilfered their technology. The US government declined to help. When the State of Massachusetts asked for bids for a wing farm, the Chinese firm that stole the tech underbid everybody and won the contract.
Slave labor and the violations of Chinese commitments to obey IP law are two different factors. I think you may be conflating them.
In a simple “evenly-rotating economy” analysis (which must be the starting point even though it must not be the final one) when the Chinese interventionists force their common people to accept below market wages, they are simply subsidizing the standard of living of Americans.
The effect of the IP treaty violations requires more theory than I have learned so far. I have only these first thoughts:
My short answer: Massachusetts was foolish to put more “weight” on the lowest price, and effectively ignoring other issues. And I expect they’ll end up paying – literally – for that mistake over time, if they haven’t already.
Not conflating anything. In many cases the technological know-how has been stolen and then the products of that know-how produced with what is, in effect, slave labor. They are distinct factors but frequently are present together. They reinforce each other.
Your line of argument intrigues me. The argument seems to be that, as long as Americans can buy stuff at low prices, even if those low prices are artificial and cause maldistribution of resources (market prices are supposed to signal the best use for resources) then that’s all well and good. So even though it’s the product of slave labor and theft, that’s fine. Give us cheap stuff and we’ll turn a blind eye as to how you got it. Seems to be the position of every stolen-goods fence in the world rather than an economic theory.
You’re right. They are distinct factors. That is true independently of whether they appear together frequently or not, and whether or not they reinforce each other. Air friction on a rising struck baseball and gravity always reinforce each other and always appear together, but they are completely independent.
If you re-read my comment, you will see that I never addressed the question of whether something was well and good or not. That would be a normative statement and has nothing to do with economics, which is the only thing I wrote about. (One common misconception about economics is that it allows the making of judgements about what is good and what is not. I think you have fallen into that misunderstanding. Economics no more makes value judgements than physics does.)
You are correct that prices distorted by interventionist policies result in maldistribution of resources, which reduces real income in general. You falsely infer from that that those distortions are harmful to all players. Enslavement of ordinary Chinese is economically harmful to Chinese, and in the short term to American capitalists whose investments are unexpectedly reduced in value, and workers who unexpectedly are without jobs in the near term. But on the whole they benefit Americans, and the longer the term, the greater the benefits as the productive structure adapts to the new conditions.
If you are looking for a harm done to Americans by Communist China’s distortions of markets, here is a legitimate one. By continually making large, unexpected interventions in their labor and capital allocations, the Communists could create havoc and thus business uncertainty and reduced good investments in America.
If that theory of economics doesn’t consider that unrealistically-low-cost imports from China result in Americans not having jobs to buy those imports with, it’s fatally flawed.
Already the various orgs concerned about the world’s poorest people – think Bengladeish and areas in Africa – have stated a half million to one million people have died from starvation due to a negative trickle down effects of the COVID catastrophe over hype reactions.
It is also claimed that 50 to 100 million casualties of hunger may be the full count as the COVID catastrophe continues to unfold.
Of course, maybe that it the whole point? Gates was heavily involved in being the point man for Monsanto in India, carefully roping various Indian parliament members into allowing Monsanto to practice some rather unethical matters, and the efforts of those two forces combined brought about the suicides of 200,000 Indian farmers.