On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:20:52 -0800, George Plimpton
wrote:

On 3/6/2012 9:47 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:14:57 -0800, George
wrote:

On 3/6/2012 7:55 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:34:08 -0500, Spehro Pefhany
wrote:

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:06:17 -0600, jim"sjedgingN0Sp"@m@mwt,net
wrote:



Stormin Mormon wrote:

Q: What is your view of the Reagan presidency?
Lib: That damn good for nothign cut taxes for the weathy while the rest of
the nation was out of work! Old people were eating dog food while the rich
took vacations in private jets.
Con: I thought the cut in capital gains tax was good. The economy picked up,
and government revenues increased.

David Stockman, Reagan's budget manager, strongly disagrees with you.
He now believes low capital gains tax is what has destroyed the
economy.

Stockman is not a liberal - he engineered the reagan tax cuts.

Stockman: Let the Bush tax cuts expire. Let the capital gains go back to
the same rate as ordinary income. (Capital gains are taxed at 15 percent,
while ordinary income is taxed at marginal rates up to 35 percent.)

Condon: Why?

Stockman: Why not? I mean, is return on capital any more virtuous than
some guy who's driving a bus all day and working hard and trying to
support his family? You know, with capital gains, they give you this
mythology. You're going to encourage a bunch of more jobs to appear. No,
most of capital gains goes to speculators in real estate and other assets
who basically lever up companies, lever up buildings, use the current
income to pay the interest and after a holding period then sell the
residual, the equity, and get it taxed at 15 percent. What's so brilliant
about that?

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_1...snt-buying-it/

Because capital is a flightly and delicate bird and we don't want to
scare it away. I can shift a few years' worth of wages around from
Thailand to Toronto to Toledo with a few clicks of the mouse- think of
the effort and cost to move myself to a full time job in another
country- not going to go through all that cost and hassle just to get
20 or 30% better conditions..


Capital wants to be in the control seat, and we let it, with blind
faith that it will always acrue its benefits to us. In the long run,
perhaps. In the short run, sometimes not.

Hilarious the way you want to personalize "capital" - kind of makes the
idea of corporations being "persons" more credible, doesn't it?

Capital, as cash or other assets, is real. Corporate persons are legal
fictions.

I didn't say that capital isn't real. What I ridiculed was your
personalization of them, as in "capital wants to be in the control
seat." It is the owners of capital who want to be in control of how the
capital is used, and they ought to be.

Corporations are real. Whether or not they are treated as legal persons
is another matter, but the reality of corporations as entities and
actors in the real world cannot be disputed.


Anyway, of *course* the owners of capital want to control where, when
and how it is used, and to accrue the economic benefits therefrom. Why
wouldn't they? Wouldn't you? *Don't* you?

Sure. In doing so I'm pursuing my own interests.

And whose interests ought you to pursue?


I presume a polymath like
you has been successful enough that you have some assets; don't you
expect to have sole authority to say how they're used, and if you hire
them out to others for productive activity, you expect to reap all the
rewards?

I expect to follow the laws. I expect those laws to provide for me to
reap most of the rewards. If they don't, they're bad laws.

If the law prevents you from relocating your capital to wherever you
think it would be most productively used, it's bad law.



Anyone who expects to reap *all* of the rewards either lives on a
desert island (see "libertarianism, myths of"), or is a fool.



Meantime, we live in fear of "scaring it away" and race to the bottom,
allowing $1.00/hour wage-rate countries to dictate the world wide
patterns of manufacturing and capital flows, with undertermined
effects.

Wait a minute! For close to forty years following the end of the second
world war, we heard from leftists like you...

I'm a centrist.

You're a leftist, and a fairly extreme leftist at that. You
consistently present left-wing views, and oppose virtually all others.


... that the first world,
especially the US, was "overconsuming" and devouring more than our "fair
share" of resources, while keeping the poverty-ravaged third world from
developing. Now they're developing, and you're ****ing and moaning
about *that*.

We didn't overconsume.

Then what was the meaning of the long-running stream of morally critical
pronouncements about the US having only 6% of world population but
consuming 40% of resources? I haven't seen one of those in years, but
the 6/40 label is burned into my consciousness, it was repeated so
often. I did a search on those percentages plus "resources", and
immediately got one:
http://www.uen.org/Lessonplan/preview.cgi?LPid=1271

As citizens of the United States of America (U.S.A.) we constitute
about 6% of the world's population. If the students in this
classroom represented the world population then two people (have 2
students stand) would represent the population of the United
States. Imagine these two people consuming 40%, or a little under
half, of all the resources produced by everyone in the class. For
example, these two would eat close to half of all combined lunches
of the class.

It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it. And, if not ridiculous, it
certainly sounds unfair. Well, it is true! The United States
constitutes about 6% of the world's population and consumes about
40% of the world's resources. Resources include fuel,
manufacturing materials, fabrics, food, and many other
commodities. (Illustrate these facts by drawing pie charts on the
board - one for population and one for world resources.)

It was the sort of bull**** left-wing indoctrination the NEA spewing for
decades, and it even reached *Utah*, of all places.

The clear implication was that our consumption was at the expense of the
development of the third world, and that we should consume less so they
could develop and consume more. That's exactly what happened, and now
the same threads of leftist "thought" are ****ing and moaning about it.


We just had a free hand and little competition,
so we behaved like monopolists everywhere and always. It's not
something you're likely to control.

As for development, it hasn't occurred as the conservatives,
particularly the conservative economists like Milton Friedman,
expected it to. It's been much faster that Milt could have imagined.

I don't think Friedman would be at all surprised as the speed with which
countries that have moved away from command economies and toward markets
have developed, assisted by free-functioning global capital markets.


And the forces that he expected to work as a compensation, such as the
devaluing of the dollar that he assured us would be the balancing
factor that would allow us to absorb the changes with no net pain,

Friedman would have said no such thing. A devaluation of a nation's
currency quite obviously hurts that nation's consumers in increasing the
prices of imports and creating upward pressure on domestic prices as well.

Now I'm sure that you're a bull****ter. You didn't read Friedman. When
I get some time tonight or tomorrow, I'll show you the quotes.




making our products cheaper in other countries and their products too
expensive in ours, didn't have the intended effect and didn't proceed
in the frictionless way he hypothesized.

Sure it has! Relatively speaking, American manufacturing is flourishing
compared with five or six years ago. In any case, even a devalued
dollar isn't going to do much to reverse the fact that American culture
simply isn't attuned to directing people into manufacturing careers -
everyone wants to be on Dancing with the Stars or a Hollywood producer.
In addition, even a weak currency can't undo the effects of
heavy-handed "environmental" regulation that makes it much harder to
build and operate factories.



The result is qualitatively different from the model that he, and
Murray Rothbard, and the Austrians, proposed. They thought that we
would wind up with larger markets and a steadily growing economy, with
no systemic hitches in employment.

They didn't anticipate the Sierra Club.


Is there just no satisfying you leftists on *anything*, not-so-fast eddie?

You'll have to ask a leftist.

I did: you.


That's not to say that we need to block capital flows or limit trade.

Ha ha ha ha ha! That's exactly what you leftists propose!

See, that's why I'm not a leftist. I'm very much in favor of free
trade and free markets. I just worry about it more than you do when I
see, for example, 1200 workers at White Consolidated in my town all
lose their jobs at once as the company moves its air-conditioning
manufacturing to China. I wonder if it's really necessary. I wonder
where the replacement jobs are going to come from, since consumption
took a hit and other local employers are not sprouting up to absorb
the excess workers. This is not "creative destruction." It's just
destruction.

You did it in opposing NAFTA

I supported NAFTA. I still do.

, you did it when you just flat-out rioted against the
WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999, and it is the only thing you possibly
could be proposing now.

I never rioted, nor did I support it.



In terms of experience-based policy, it remains an open question. But
it IS to say that we've forfeited a large part of our
self-determination because we're afraid of what capital will do. There
is a lot of disagreement about how much "policy" to impose on these
huge economic questions, and what policies are good or bad. But fear
seems like an unlikely virtue and an unlikely answer.


Your pinko skirts are showing again, not-so-fast eddie.

Your blindness and the weird noises in your head have blanked out the
facts again, Plumper. The degree to which you live in your imagination
does not bode well for your judgments.