The U.S. Goverment

[Potjeh]

Whoops, missed the bit about outsourcing to India. Jorb, would you honestly want to work for a 3rd world wage? Yes, a part of the reason that Swedish artists are expensive is the various taxes you guys have, but the main reason is that they simply make much more than Indian artists. I don't know specifics in India, but in Bosnia a programmer would be very lucky to make 700€ a month. And before you go on to say how it cancels out because the prices are lower in 3rd world, I'd like to say that groceries in Bosnia are 30-50% more expensive than in Germany, according to my brother who lives in Munich.

IMO it is inevitable for your standard of living to drop. Western world used to have a technological edge over 3rd world, which allowed it to charge high prices for it's goods. But now that edge is quickly melting away, and the wages and working conditions must equalize or all the jobs will be outsourced to China. And since Chinese government is doing it's best to keep their workers poor and they have a huge population, this means that people in the West are bound to have their standard of living reduced to Chinese levels. Unless, of course, we slaughter the holy calf of free trade and impose high tariffs on Chinese goods (which IMO would be a perfectly appropriate response to them keeping their currency low artificialy).

[jorb]

If you guys believe that India is somehow a back-water 3rd world country you need to update your world views to v.2012. India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world with a young and at least in parts highly educated work force, and with the corresponding rise in median real incomes and developing middle class that tend to go along with those things. It is a simple matter of time before India reaches the same levels of development as Western Europe, much like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea did before it. Trade is a phenomenon that EXCLUSIVELY takes place when there is perceived mutual benefit in it. The only effect that our labor laws have on anything is the flight of investments and job opportunities to other countries, obviously to our detriment and their benefit. I would much rather employ someone locally if we could only fucking afford it. This, by the by, is the reason why welfare states suffer from chronic mass unemployment in the double digit percentages, a phenomenon that was virtually non-existent in Europe before ~1900.

Again, I've been up way past my bedtime, but I'll be back in a few hours with another wall of text.

[burgingham]

India is also the biggest democracy in the world.

a phenomenon that was virtually non-existent in Europe before ~1900

The workers themselves changed that, because they had to work under inhuman conditions that were forced upon them. Better no work, than such work.

I have written several papers on India btw, might be the topic of my master thesis so I am well aware what state the country is in

[Tonkyhonk]

Remind me, again, all that classical music and all those great works of art which you presumably believe aim to describe the higher, nobler human ideals, when was it all created? In democracies? Mozart was active at the court of the supreme soviet of Austria?

It was created precisely in the age of Absolute Monarchies, at the courts of a thousand European Kings and Princes. That pop-culture you speak of so disparagingly is precisely characteristic of democratic societies. It aims only to please the lowest common denominator among men, which usually is simply the more animal needs. Aristocratic art aims to please the prince, and thus it is refined.

hmm

all that classical music and all those great works of art... why limits it to only in those "classical periods"?
later eras, like romanticism and impressionism are also aristocratic, isnt it?

"La Mer" by Debussy is famous for being influenced by "ukiyo-e" art. (of course, his time was already republic though...)
im sure you have heard of "japonisme", which was a bit of boom among "nobles" in europe in mid-late 19th century.
"ukiyo-e" the rich in aristocratic class appreciated and might have believed to be refined were actually our "pop culture" aimed to please the common denominator back then. ironically they were japanese "petit genre", that is to say, they were manga and commercial portraits of pop kabuki stars, and quite a few of those were porn.

or maybe japonisme and chinoiserie were rather regarded as hysterical movements just like witch hunting in salem?

If you guys believe that India is somehow a back-water 3rd world country you need to update your world views to v.2012. India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world with a young and at least in parts highly educated work force, and with the corresponding rise in median real incomes and developing middle class that tend to go along with those things. It is a simple matter of time before India reaches the same levels of development as Western Europe, much like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea did before it.

ive never been to india, but your version seems to have gotten a bit sugar-coated. their economic disparities seems to be still super-severe. yes, we've been through, others have been, i hope they will be too sometime, but it may take quite a while yet since they have millions of people that are still said to be starving and homeless, and their situation is a bit different from that of japan, south korea and taiwan. (as in, we all share one language and similar culture and religion, mainly one nation with rather small percentages of minorities, while india consists of many different cultures, languages, and religions, with the famous caste system. moreover, it is extremely huge, both land and population.)
i may be very wrong, its just my impression i got from one of the rich nepali girl i met and talked.

[Potjeh]

I'm sure that Bombay is pretty modern, but a large part of the population lives in abject poverty. Or so do the NatGeo documentaries and people living in India tell me. Those throngs of poor create lots of pressure on the labour market, lowering incomes across the board. The same effect is in place in Bosnia thanks to our ~40% unemployment (despite our unemployment benefits being 15€/month!), so you have people like doctors or lawyers making ~1000€/month.

As for fastest-growing, it's a meaningless buzz-word. It's only natural for undeveloped countries to grow faster than developed ones because there is more room for growth.

As for art, who says that great art isn't still being made? It only looks like it was more common in the past because a decade two centuries ago seems a lot shorter than a decade this century. I'm sure there was tons of pop-culture crud in Mozart's days. If you care to look them up, you can dig up loads of atrocious operettas. Conversely, I'd say that the likes of Dylan, Hitchcock or Dali were great artists. I'm not using anyone more recent simply because there isn't enough historical perspective to judge their merits.

IMO your whole world-view seems rooted in nostalgia for something that never was.

[longblacksocks]

There is still plenty of innovative and interesting art in this age. It may be masked by huge amounts of crap (as Potjeh said, there was loads of rubbish in history but that has been forgotten) but if you go looking you can find it. Of course a lot of it may not fit a narrow categorisation of 'art' that some people have but that is the beauty of the subjectiveness of what we call 'art'.

[burgingham]

I couldn't agree more. This age may have the worst mainstream art, but the new media also offer a great variety of (indie) art in each genre to develop that can probably not be matched by any other age simply because of the availability of on the one hand the tools to make that art as well as on the other hand the tools to perceive said art easily.

That however seems to be an entirely different topic and we already have crossed economic, sociologic, political and philosophic borders here. Not sure if including yet another topic helps, but it is one that interests me a lot too

Also, I think (and that is where I start to disagree with him) Adorno would not accept most of what we would call educational art (or similar attributes) as such. As I mentioned briefly for him art has to challenge all of our intellectual capacities such as the so called "New Music" with its atonal patterns etc. He might even consider Mozart and similar artists to be nothing but dumbing down...at least I am fairly certain he said that about some of the "easier" classical artists, but don't quote me on that one.

[Tonkyhonk]

well, what i wanted to say was that criticizing pop culture because it is pop or not is just absurd.
i really dont know who adorno was, but i seriously cannot believe some philosopher would put that in his theory.
sure, some pop culture manipulated by media exist, but we all know they dont last.

[jorb]

The general trend of your arguments seems to be

*) Acceptance of my general characteristic of the mass -- which is quite the creature unto itself, distinct from any individual within it -- as either wholly or partially lacking in spiritual qualities necessary to be entrusted with reigns of power.
*) The claim that the above mentioned problem can be easily solved through general public education, indeed;

I'd say that the quickest way to tyranny is making education prohibitively expensive which is a trend we're seeing with university fees recently, or even worse abolishing public education completely which IIRC is something you support.

That is why I eventually always come back to education as the one and only tool to achieve fair, free and equal conditions for everyone within society.

But this merely strikes me as utopian assertions. The mobs of great cities have been characterized by every great thinker I can think of as irrational, ignorant and slaves to low passions, and the past ~150 years of general public education has seemingly done exactly nothing to alleviate this, as the London and Athens Riots of this past summer and fall should suffice to illustrate. Now you may believe that some new-found ideology of yours -- critical theory or whatever it may be -- will fundamentally alter this condition, but do you have anything other than firm -- and I'm sure genuine -- belief that this is so to back up that claim? If not then embarking on some utopian quest to politicize and educate the masses in this one-size-fits-all model of thinking only for the purpose of making the world safe for a particular ideology that you happen to like strikes me as deeply irresponsible. What if you are wrong? This is precisely what the revolutionaries of 1789, 1917 or indeed 1933 claimed, and what I so fundamentally object to. What will you do with the people who aren't interested in your theories, and who do not want to be educated? The intolerant and implicit cry for complete conformity of values, ideas and modes of thought which this argument fundamentally calls for is at the very core of totalitarian thought. Any totalitarian you can think of -- from Robespierre to Mao -- was a warm friend of public education. Thomas Jefferson wasn't.

The ignorance of the lower classes, so deplored by Lecky, is in the more "progressive" democracies one of half-education rather than "illiteracy" -- which is what renders it so dangerous. It has been pointed out that "more education" usually means a lowered education, and an intelligent analyst of the prehistory of nazism has insisted that Hitler's creed could have hardly appealed to a nation which was not highly literate. Arnold J. Toynbee has emphasized the intellectual tyranny of "universal education" which stifles all thought, an opinion voiced earlier by Sir Henry Maine. There can be little doubt that compulsory education was an extremely important step towards the totalitarian state -- a step whose significance was by no means universally recognized.

General public education -- which is something quite different from high levels of general education, which are of course to be found in any civilized society -- is, indeed, primarily speaking found in totalitarian societies. Systems under which all aspects of life are thoroughly politicized and under which the state is the final arbiter of all things human -- I think primarily of fascism, communism and democracy -- and in which the state makes concerted efforts to drill and regiment its citizens. A system of general public education rests on the implicit assumption that children are the property of the state -- rather than, as in traditional societies, charges of their immediate families -- and it there serves, among other things, the important function of indoctrination in the official state ideology. Whatever you may think of public education I find it very hard to deny that the institution fills the -- often explicit -- function of socializing and regimenting the citizenry.

Even if it is not the case that a system of general public education is in itself a *sufficient* condition for totalitarianism, it nevertheless appears very much to be a *necessary* condition for the same. The totalitarian state is impossible to envision without a system of general public education, whereas a free society is very easy to envision without it. Indeed, most European societies up until very recently did not have such systems of general education, and free societies they were. This, then, not to even begin to discuss the detrimental effects that general public education has had on the content of such education, with its dilution of the curriculum and its dumbing down of the subjects being taught. The progressive extension of the mandatory school years -- in Sweden now more or less de facto a 12 year commitment -- follows naturally from the fact that the least gifted students in any given class always set the quality bar of the education that takes place in such classes. With hollow-eyed students, lack of general discipline and the complete boredom that any reasonably gifted student is bound to experience in such an environment. Not to mention the sad state of our university educations, where the ever increasing uptake of students consistently prolongs the average time a student spends at school, increasing drop-out rates, increased prevalence and constant introduction of nonsensical psyence classes at the expense of the trivium and the quadrivium. The triumph of public education has come full circle when wise overlords declare -- having produced ten thousand new gender studies graduates -- that the general level of public education now has been raised. In fact it has retrograded severely, to the point where most university graduates today cannot solve a simple trigonometry problem, read even rudimentary latin or greek (In fact speak no other foreign languages apart from English), give a simple account of western history from Rome to Revolution or even know the names and order of the planets in the solar system, a situation which would have been -- rightly so -- deemed a complete and utter failure and a damning of the entire system a mere hundred years or so ago.

There exists in any given population a large amount of people who are simply not suited for higher education. In fact, if "higher education" is extended to all it by definition ceases to be a *higher* education. I shall thus repeat myself: The only way to foster equality is by taking talent and ability away from those who possess it and attempt to transfer it to those who don't. You cannot by state edict give people a higher propensity for learning than what they actually possess.

Notice what this does *not* imply. It does not imply that I do not consider knowledge to be a beautiful thing. It does not imply that I do not believe that all human beings need knowledge and education to some extent or other -- much like they need food, another industry that shouldn't be socialized either. The only thing it means is that I insist that you don't force your version of education upon someone else. You are free to compete in the marketplace of ideas just as everyone else is, but your ideas deserve absolutely no special recognition just because you happen to like them or believe them to be particularly good. I think most people believe that about their ideas to the extent that they have them.

Do you dispute that Greece is bankrupt because it has been running a welfare state ponzi scheme for the past few decades?

This is not a flaw of the welfare state, but the one of a corrupt government. Corrupted by the economic sector btw.

What do you even mean? Corrupt how? Greece is broke because it has been running spendthrift pension and social security systems, much like the United States. How is this even a problem of corruption? Even assuming it is a problem of corruption, are private individuals -- for some reason incentivized to bribe public officials -- to be blamed because public officials then accept the bribes? It's your fault, son, that daddy drinks? What if public officials didn't have the power to enact completely arbitrary legislation about precisely anything? The incentive to bribe them exists only because they regulate and make laws they should not be making! If public officials didn't have such powers to begin with there would *obviously* exist *absolutely zero* incentive to bribe them in the first place! Obviously so! Blaming people for breaking the rules when the rules are oh-so-sploitable is simply stupid. If we took the same attitude to rules in Haven you'd laugh at us.

You do understand that we outsource the graphics making for Salem to India because it is ridiculously expensive to hire people in this country, right?

Again not a problem of the welfare state, but a problem deriving from the beast that is this globalized power capitalism. A problem of exploiting the less educated or fortunate. What we need to do is create equaliy in a sense of making their lives better and not ours worse. We have the technology, we have the knowledge, we have the power. The ones hoarding it are just too greedy to ever get it rolling. Current forms of development aid are only replicating existing inequalities, but that just as a side note.

lol. I'll remember to apologize for exploiting them the next time I pay the large-ass bills they send us. I'll also remember to apologize to Hetzner (our German server provider) the next time I pay their bill. And to Paradox for exploiting them the next time I send our bill to them. Or maybe they should apologize to me? Again, trade only happens when there is perceived mutual benefit involved and is always entirely voluntary, that is precisely what distinguishes trade from theft, and if there were no such distinction no one would ever trade anything with anyone. It's so elementary that I don't think it should even have to be pointed out.

The tendency of the creation of monopolies PLUS the non-existance of a force to regulate that.

I've discussed this claim with Potjeh before and I maintain that it doesn't hold any sort of water what so ever. Last time we discussed this Potjeh abdicated the task of even defining what a "natural monopoly" is, claiming that he was no expert in the subject, but assured me of their existence -- failing to give any concrete example of one, historical or present -- whatever they are. He appears to remain convinced in the existence of these fabled beasts of the free market, yet what a "natural monopoly" would even consist of remains as illusive as ever.

I carry 70% of the banana market and 30% of the apple market. Do I presently hold a coercive monopoly on the fruit market?

I carry 64% of the banana market in Town A, 100% of the pineapple market in town B and 34% of the pineapple market in Town C, for a total of 57% of the pineapple purchases in Region R, which includes cities A and B but not C. I furthermore operate the only grocery store in Town D, also a part of region R. Do I presently hold a coercive monopoly in Region R?

I sell a unique product in the form of a computer game that I made. Do I presently hold a coercive sway over this particular market? Does, say, Wizards of the Coast hold a coercive monopoly on Magic the Gathering cards?

Such questions have no rational answers. It only depends on how you define "monopoly", and that can only be an arbitrary question of simple aesthetics. Most actual free-market scenarios are far more complex than my intentionally absurd examples can even convey.

Goldman-Sachs is a vampire because it exercises an undue influence on the American public *THROUGH THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM* which is, in case it wasn't obvious, a pseudo-governmental agency. Big business everywhere is fundamentally in bed with big government, and it uses the power of government to regulate their respective industries so as to keep competition out, as regulation always raises the bar of market entry, which is why you will always see the heads of large corporations screaming about how their industries should be regulated by government to "curtail destructive competition" or whatever other retarded excuse is being used.

The "partnership of government and business" is a new term for an old, old condition. We often fail to realize that the point of much of Big Government is precisely to set up such "partnerships," for the benefit of both government and business, or rather, of certain business firms and groups that happen to be in political favor.

We all know, for example, that "mercantilism," the economic system of Western Europe from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, was a system of Big Government, of high taxes, large bureaucracy, and massive controls of trade and industry. But what we tend to ignore is that the point of many of these controls was to tax and restrict consumers and most merchants and manufacturers in order to grant monopolies, cartels, and subsides to favored groups.

[...]

The northeastern Republican establishment is still cartelizing, controlling, regulating, handing out contracts to business favorites, and bailing out beloved crooks and losers. It is still playing the old "partnership" game--and still, of course, at our expense.

http://mises.org/econsense/ch51.asp

Here is again a short but well-researched article that may help you understand why there is no such thing as monopoly without force of arms, and that monopolies are extremely difficult to maintain even with force of arms.

I don't want to come off as screaming and yelling too much here -- or appearing arrogant and snide, for that matter -- because your (and thereby I mean both of you) skepticism of big business is fundamentally a very sound instinct, but I am afraid that you have fatally misidentified the problem at hand.

As for literature: Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt (pdf). It's the simplest and probably best introduction to economics there is. If you do take the time to read it I would be very interested to hear what you have to say about it.

[jorb]

Unless, of course, we slaughter the holy calf of free trade and impose high tariffs on Chinese goods

Fuck yes. Please let me pay more for the goods I want to buy from China, I'm sure it'll make me richer. :V

(which IMO would be a perfectly appropriate response to them keeping their currency low artificialy).

> implying a fiat currency isn't always of completely artificial value. Supply is obviously always completely at the discretion of the guys controlling the printing press. When Mitt Romney et consortes cry and moan about how China somehow isn't playing "fair" I'm inclined to both laugh and facepalm at the same time.