Politics
Out of context: Reply #9243
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- TheBlueOne0
The government is now and always was and always will be part of any market.
Why you guys, in your clueless "gubermint hate" fail to see this I don't understand.
At the bare minimum it is government that provides enforcement of contracts. In fact, the "free market" is made up of corporate entities that exist at the largesse of government recognition. Government approves the players and lays out the rules of any given market.
It's like a bunch of fish claiming that "we don't need water! The less water, the better!" It's maddening that you can't even see the very underlying structure.
If there was no government in the market and say, I don't know, someone reneges on an agreement, where are you going to go fro redress against the other party? Who will you get to enforce the contract?
Now without a government, that usually means the guy with the biggest guns or the most friends (see Somalia, Afghanistan, etc..). With a government made up of oligarchs, economic elites or strongmen, the citizens have no recourse or say (see China, South Korea, etc...)
Blaming politicians for being crooked is like blaming wheels for being round. ALL players in the system try to game it for their benefit. The goal is to try and limit ALL players from doing that. By calling for government to "get out" of the market merely opens the door to corruption/system gaming from other sources - other sources that lie out of the purview and influence of John Q. Public. You can vote out the politicians. Can you go tell the CEO of Exxon what to do? I'm all for limiting corruption in government, and for limiting the amount of influence government has at picking favorites and ginning up the playing field in ways that doesn't benefit the common good. But this blind belief that "government is the problem" is a simple minded misunderstanding of how shit works.
But, no, you do go on and make your ALL CAPS points like "GOVERNMENT POLITICIANS ARE OUT OF FUCKING CONTROL, LYING, THIEVES!!!" because that's real fucking useful.
And you said, "China had better reinvest their capital into infrastructure, because China is a fucking SHIT-PIT." Well, they ARE doing that, because parts of it are a "shit pit"..primarily because they are suffering the effects of rapid industrialization brought about because it is a more appealing market (read profitable) for international corporations to make profit in, who have externalized costs that couldn't be externalized in the US of A. China is a shit pit primarily because government regulations insured that corporations couldn't turn the US into a comparable SHIT PIT. Please see most of the 19th century, when industries weren't regulated and part so of the US were comparable "SHIT PITS", along with say Northern England, etc. But you can't see that, nor do you see any apparent value in that, because you see it as some sort of zero sum game.
Secondly, infrastructure investment can be done at a profit margin in China with a reasonable return on investment, so investment capital WILL go there.
You know Will, I wonder how you run your own company as you don't seem to understand the basics of profit margins and costs of doing business.
Sure, I've read Marx (thought the guy is pretty dead on being descriptive, a total train wreck at saying anything predictive) but you just have to be a student of how capital markets work to understand the fundamental problems in both the US and the global system - and how those problems are systemic as much as they are rooted in various localized pockets of corruption (high finance corruption in the US, crony capitalistic corruption in China).
The "free market" stuff is just pure ideology. Markets are great and the best system we've devised as a species to redistribute wealth and products at medium to large scales, but to assume there is some Platonic "perfect and free market" that exists and we must attain is simply madness. Pursuit of it has led us to where we are, and the failure to recognize that to cling to a life raft of imaginary certainty in the current sea of fear and uncertainty is the sign of a dead philosophy of the past.