At 13:24 06/10/2010 -0700, Harry wrote:
Ray,
While it may be Rent or Interest, a profit is usually Wages. Management
does a good job and is rewarded. They don't and they get nothing. Of
course the situation is complicated by modern accounting which pays more
attention to tax finagles than reality (or maybe it is reality), and by
neo-Classical economics which has come up with several kinds of profit.
There are only two sources of profit and these lie on the production side
of economics. You either make an existing thing more efficiently than
previously (that is, using land, energy or capital more efficiently by
innovation), or you invent a new product for which a demand appears.This is
why your troika (Land, Labour, Capital) is inadequate, but the four-factor
one (Land, Energy, Capital, Innovation) isn't.
Labour lies on the consumption side of economics. This is where Marx went
completely wrong in seeing profits as being squeezed from the wages of
workers on the production side of things. Unless you have feudal-labour, or
slave-labour, or conscripted-labour or child-labour (all perversions of our
previous 150,000 year-old human tradition of hunter-gathering), then
services involve the voluntary exchange of things between one person and
another (or the community or the state), or the use of things by one
(expert) person for the well-being of another. They all balance up sooner
or later -- person-to-person directly, or person-to-person via another
agency. Money is involved in the consumption side of things to keep
individual tabs within the total complexity of exchanges going on. (To
advert to another comment of yours [below] it is the printing of excess
money by one government after another [24 devaluations last week] which
causes economies to go haywire -- at the present time pretty well the whole
world economy.)
Keith
Communism does poorly. There may not be profits, but I am reminded of when
the Ukraine became independent, they were left with a dacha that had
belonged to a high party official. The Ukraine wanted to get rid of it
because the maintenance cost was $800,000 a year. The Fat Cats are
rewarded in any system.
Haven't a clue what you mean by the need for regulations to keep the flow
if information. One notes that is the controlled economies that restrict
information.
Maybe oursystem doesn't work, but neither do other systems including
whatever system you advocate.
One problem with comparisons is that often the ideal is compared with
reality. Thus, the ideal First Nation is compared with the reality of the
present.
Ideals should be compared with ideals. Reality with reality.
Harry
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 12:18 PM
To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture
The problem is a system that must generate progress through surplus
(profit). That redefines sustainability and stability into stagnation
and creates a situation that is at best chaotic with lots of Private
Enterprise viruses eating at the root of the tree of prosperity. Their
only comparison is to the failure of communismwhich was really a
Kingsystem with an elite advisory legislature. Their inadequate
version of our counsel system. Either way they are both western products
in a culture that admires aristocracy more than anything. Its your
system Ed.
Thats what those first Nations folks have had to deal with all of their
lives. But it doesnt really work without the church beating them over
the head for being evil. Untrammeled they are just dog eat dog and
inefficient.
Take for example, two things on the web. Dictionary. Com and
Babelfish. They used to be open use and had great reference. Good
etymological sources and reasonable translations for some
languages. But there was no profit in that and everyone jumped on the
copyright wagon and now we have an inferior free product and if you buy
Babylon or any of the other for profit products they gum up your system
because they operate like an invading army. They are also inferior
translations. I put a German or Italian art song text in and they cant
translate it. Im still driven back to my library and the hard
copy. For a brief moment there was a promise by capitalism has closed
the door and information, just like what happened with the telephone
system, is fragmented and disconnected. The rule for you white folks is
the opposed of We are all connected. Its we are all disconnected in
order to make a profit.
Because there are no regulations to keep the flow of information open, the
creative small sector slowly succumbs to the big for profit sector and
what we get are private governments of wealthy stockholders unchecked by
anyone. Even the Supreme Court has sold out. So its the system
Ed. Your system doesnt work Ed, Arthur, Chris, Harry, Spencer,
Tom, etc., etc, etc. Your system doesnt work. You need to think
harder and write. Or is the fact that Futurework has been quiet on my
computer mean Ive been banned or removed from the list?
REH
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 2:57 PM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture
Partly because some recent US Presidents had a strange faith in supply
side and trickle down economics, very rich Americans have become much
richer and poor Americans have become much poorer, while the middle class
has declined. Presidents Reagan and G.W. Bush believed that giving large
tax cuts to the very rich and to business would "trickle down" into
investment that would boost the economy and employment. It simply didn't
happen that way. The rich liked the extra money that the tax cuts gave
them and hung onto it.
It's difficult to assess where Obama is with regard to all of this. I
believe he intends to put an end to Bush's tax cuts for the rich before
long and make other adjustments to taxes and tax credits, but he's not in
a very strong position to do anything right now.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:[email protected]>Ray Harrell
To: <mailto:[email protected]>'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME
DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION'
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 12:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture
Of more interest to me is the frozen capital at the top and we refuse to
tax them to free some of it for work in the economy.
REH
From:
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 10:07 AM
To: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
Cc: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Not a very positive picture
From yesterday's Washington Post.
Ed
----------
As 44 million Americans live in poverty, a crisis grows
By
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/katrina+vanden+heuvel/>Katrina
vanden Heuvel
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
It's clear that the Great Recession battered those on the bottom most
heavily, adding 6 million people to the ranks of the officially poor,
defined as just $22,000 in annual income for a family of four. Forty-four
million Americans -- one in seven citizens -- are now
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/16/AR2010091602698.html>living
below the poverty line, more than at any time since the Census Bureau
began tracking poverty 51 years ago. Shamefully, that figure includes one
in five children,
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angela-glover-blackwell/poverty-in-black-white-an_b_721124.html>more
than one in four African Americans or Latinos, and over 51 percent of
female-headed families with children under 6.
These numbers are bad enough. But dig deeper -- as Georgetown University
law professor Peter Edelman has been doing for nearly 50 years in his
battle against poverty -- and the story told by these figures is even more
staggering.
Edelman points out that 19 million people are now living in "extreme
poverty," which is under 50 percent of the poverty line, or $11,000 for a
family of four. "That means over 43 percent of the poor are extremely
poor," said Edelman, who served as an aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.)
and in the Clinton administration before resigning in protest over welfare
reform that shredded the safety net. "That's over 6 percent of the
population, and that figure has just been climbing up and up."
Edelman says that the number of people living at less than two times the
poverty line ($44,000 for a family of four) is equally significant.
"Data shows that's really the line between whether or not you can pay your
bills," said Edelman. "That has reached 100,411,000 people. That's 33
percent of the country. That's the totality of the problem -- whether you
call it poverty or not."
For too long we have accepted the narrative -- promoted by well-funded
conservative think tanks -- that claims people who are struggling are to
blame for their troubles, and at the same time we don't have effective
anti-poverty policies. So tackling the problem is seen as wasteful.
"So many people think it's their own fault," said Edelman. "They don't see
the structural problem in our economy."
But with so many in poverty, that narrative has become harder to sustain
during the Great Recession, and so renewed work is being done to take on
poverty and its structural underpinnings.
[If you want to read more, go to:
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/28/AR2010092802356.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/28/AR2010092802356.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions
----------
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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