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Originally posted by SignyM:
So, do we work on taking the marbles out of Freddie's hands? Changing the rules of the game so Freddie doesn't get to keep those extra marbles?

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Then they take their accumulated money and buy more land. Or more machines. Or better automation. And they make more money, and still being of an expansionist frame of mind they eventually take over the vast majority of production, and if they have invested in automation- which seems like a reasonable business decision- they will have once again created a small coterie of owners and a vast majority of people on the outside looking in.

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... we are still left with the irreducible problem of “investment for profit”. Or maybe the problem is “profit for investment”. Or perhaps the REAL problem is simply “investment”.

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I don't see how this is a problem. Because, if we're not talking any 11th marbles, the majority of people who have traded labor or land or whatever they've sold to the expansionist SHOULD have gotten something worth JUST AS MUCH back.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
And BTW, I am all for labor-saving devices! But there is one caveat to automation: If you tie the distribution of money to work, and then you automate everything there will be a lot of people with no way to earn money!

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:

I still favor the idea of edible currency with an expiration date.

-F

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Mansions and Yachts are good. That's people earning money and spending it on small business which employs people. That's a functional economy. That's not our problem. Our problem is nonsense. It's printing off 16 trillion for yourself at the discount window with fractional reserve lending. That's the problem.

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Europe has been an economic disaster for decades because of it, which is why Europe is not a place you think of a world economic power in spite of their dominance in so much of world industry, technology and information.

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BTW, you can't rule of Fannie and Freddie from the European disaster because dollars were freely exchangable for Euros, and in fact, the fiscal malfeasance tied to them was probably about 1/2 of the overall excess currency creation,

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Originally posted by SignyM:
It is the fact that automation concentrates the flow of money into the hands of those who own the equipment.

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I suspect you will suggest government policy as the only solution to the gravity problem. It is the only working model of anti-gravity, as it were.

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My solution has always been new technology. If government doesn't get in the way of ANYONE coming up with new technology, then anyone can be the new center of gravity, if you will. Evolution is the anti-gravity. The old fade away, and the new take over.

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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CTS: My solution has always been new technology. If government doesn't get in the way of ANYONE coming up with new technology, then anyone can be the new center of gravity, if you will. Evolution is the anti-gravity. The old fade away, and the new take over.

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And yet here we are... many technological revolutions later... and 10% of the world wants the latest iPhone, while 50% just want more food. Not seeing how technological revolutions have really solved this problem.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:
My husband says the marble analogy is a bit flawed.

We are assuming that marbles means money, which means material resources.

He says, in reality, marbles means money, which means time. Hours and months and years in people's lives.

He says the 11th marble DOES exist. It is the future time of the debtor. When you pay interest, you are paying the time you already have PLUS the time you don't have yet. You are, in effect, selling portions of your future life into slavery.

The 11th marble, he says, is slavery.

I found that very interesting.

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Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons (1853-1942, labor activist and anarcho-communist)

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Originally posted by SignyM:
In 19th century America, there were a lot of very poor people. Days of robber barons, remember? Not a great time to be a native American, or a farmer or factory worker. And a lot of very serious economic depressions. Again, not seeing much of a solution there.

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Indeed, any time you promise to do anything for anybody in the future, you would be a slave under that interpretation....While I like the Time is Money analogy, I don't think the Time is Slavery analogy works very well.

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There were a lot LESS poor people than before.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Got any data to back that up? Because the era that you refer to includes slavery, the Civil War, a lot of dead and displaced Indians, the railyway boom (which BTW was mostly a bubble, like the housing bubble today), robber barons, the Irish potato famine leading to a lot of destitute immigrants, and several really nasty depressions.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Got any data to back that up?

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https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

In the two centuries following 1800, the world's average per capita income increased over 10-fold, while the world's population increased over 6-fold.[2] In the words of Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas, Jr., "For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth ... Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before".

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http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandtheStandardo
fLiving.html

The ideological underpinnings of the debate eventually faded, probably because, as T. S. Ashton pointed out in 1948, the industrial revolution meant the difference between the grinding poverty that had characterized most of human history and the affluence of the modern industrialized nations. No economist today seriously disputes the fact that the industrial revolution began the transformation that has led to extraordinarily high (compared with the rest of human history) living standards for ordinary people throughout the market industrial economies.

The standard-of-living debate today is not about whether the industrial revolution made people better off, but about when. The pessimists claim no marked improvement in standards of living until the 1840s or 1850s. Most optimists, by contrast, believe that living standards were rising by the 1810s or 1820s, or even earlier.... (snip)

What does “standard of living” mean? Economic historians would like it to mean happiness. But the impossibility of measuring happiness forces them to equate the standard of living with monetary measures such as real wages or real income. “Real income” is usually defined as money income adjusted for the cost of living, but not for effects of things such as health, longevity, unemployment, pollution, the condition of women and children, urban crowding, and the amount of leisure time. Although some new indexes attempt to capture the various dimensions of well-being, for most practical purposes real income per person remains the most telling indicator.

According to estimates by economist N. F. R. Crafts, British income per person (in 1970 U.S. dollars) rose from about $400 in 1760 to $430 in 1800, to $500 in 1830, and then jumped to $800 in 1860. (For many centuries before the industrial revolution, in contrast, periods of falling income offset periods of rising income.) Crafts’s estimates indicate slow growth lasting from 1760 to 1830 followed by higher growth beginning sometime between 1830 and 1860. For this doubling of real income per person between 1760 and 1860 not to have made the lowest-income people better off, the share of income going to the lowest 65 percent of the population would have had to fall by half for them to be worse off after all that growth. It did not. In 1760, the lowest 65 percent received about 29 percent of total income in Britain; in 1860, their share was down only four percentage points to 25 percent. So the lowest 65 percent were substantially better off, with an increase in average real income of more than 70 percent.

Most economic historians agree that the distribution of income became more unequal between 1790 and 1840. Moreover, if we add the effects of unemployment, poor harvests, war, pollution, urban crowding, and other social ills, the modest rise in average income could well have been accompanied by a fall in the standard of living of the working classes...(snip)...In other words, the net effect of the industrial revolution was strongly positive but was largely offset by the negative effects of rapid population growth.

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https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past
_GDP_%28PPP%29

1870 GDP
western Europe: 367,466
America: 98,374

1913 GDP
western Europe: 902,210
America: 517,383

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https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revol
ution

The period from 1870 to 1890 saw the greatest increase in economic growth in such a short period as ever in history. Living standards improved significantly in the newly industrialized countries as the prices of goods fell dramatically due to the increases in productivity. This caused unemployment and great upheavals in commerce and industry, with many laborers being displaced by machines and many factories, ships and other forms of fixed capital becoming obsolete in a very short time span.[21]

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Crop failures no longer resulted in starvation in areas served by railroads and inland waterways.[21]

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The tremendous growth in productivity, transportation networks, industrial production and agricultural output lowered the prices of almost all goods. This led to many business failures and periods that were called depressions that occurred as the world economy actually grew.

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The wide-ranging social impact of both revolutions included the remaking of the working class as new technologies appeared; the creation of a larger, increasingly professional, middle class; the decline of child labor; and the dramatic growth of a consumer-based, material culture.

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http://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entry
ID=402

The state’s changing economy led to significant upheaval for the society and culture of Arkansans. Expanding economic activities produced new employment opportunities and began shifting the basic character of work in the state. In 1880, only seventeen percent of all workers in the state worked at jobs other than farming. Agriculture clearly dominated the labor market. By 1900, non-farm workers made up almost thirty percent of all workers. The move established a trend that continued unabated in the next century. The new jobs had an immediate impact on workers’ lifestyles. Wages got better. Even the average job in the timber industry, which offered the lowest wages of any of the new industries, provided an income three to four times what the typical farmer could expect. In terms of earning power, railroad workers were the elite of the new labor force, at least in part because many had joined unions such as the Knights of Labor in the 1870s and then the Americana Federation of Labor in the 1880s and 1890s. The new jobs gave workers new prosperity and a share of the material wealth being produced by the national economy.

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http://www.shmoop.com/gilded-age/

It was, as Dickens might have said, the best of times and the worst of times.

But even that Dickensian understanding of the Gilded Age isn't quite right. It's not enough to say that the Gilded Age was a time of high highs and low lows; the highs and lows were actually often deeply intertwined parts of the exact same developments. In other words, the highs often were the lows, and vice versa. In the Gilded Age, every dark cloud had its silver lining… and every silver lining had its dark cloud. For more than a hundred years, critics have been ripping the business strategies that allowed big industrialists to build powerful monopolies—but those much-maligned monopolies brought desperately needed order to America's immature economic system. Many have also long resented the immense fortunes of personal wealth that a handful of big businessmen were able to acquire—but that wealth paid for a huge surge in philanthropy, building hundreds of libraries, schools, museums, and other public facilities still enjoyed by the American people even today. Reformers decried the way urban politicians turned corruption into a way of life—but those same crooked politicians also provided vital services to working-class and immigrant neighborhoods.

The Gilded Age was a dynamic age of incredible economic opportunity, just as it was a harsh era of incredible economic exploitation. Any version of this tale that includes only the exploitation but not the dynamism—or vice versa—is missing half the story.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:

It's so stupid we DESERVE our impending doom.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
As far as I can see, that doesn't make capitalism good or necessary, it just makes it wasteful and unsustainable.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
CTS, I think what you are saying is that new technology creates new centers of gravity, and that while money is flowing from one center of gravity to another, at least it is flowing. Right?

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First of all, the USA was not the "source" of new technology. ...Mostly England and France.

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In other words, the introduction of new technology concentrated wealth more than ever.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Well DT, I noticed you brought no evidence to back up your story about how EU is a basket case because of "socialist spending" so I decided to look it up.

The nations with the most socialist spending (the Nordic nations and Germany) are doing quite well. Several of the nations which needed bailouts (Iceland, Spain, and Ireland) were running their governmental budgets in the black, and had in fact been using the surplus to pay DOWN their debt since about 1997, significantly decreasing their public debt burden from about 70% GDP to about 20-30% GDP in that time. They didn't run into trouble UNTIL the debt crisis, when they emptied their treasuries to shore up PRIVATE banks. The UK was running about even ,,, not either in debt or generating a surplus, and their public debt load was more or less stable from about 1997 to 2007.

So your argument is not at all supported by evidence. The primary cause for the financial crisis was the financial sector creating too much funny money. Again.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
But, uhm, as was pointed out above, it wasn't Americans who came up with the new technologies. So the Gilded Age doesn't meet your criteria either.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
So, why have capitalism?

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