Hi Keith,
After Enron how can we have any faith in these earnings reports?
Also re the decline of the American Empire: will they decline peacefully or might their arsenal of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons come into 'play'. True believers of 'free market' capitalism might not like any other religion becoming trump.
"Free Market capitalism" is an oxymoron, you know like "military intelligence" and suchlike.
There is a "free market" and there is "capitalism".
Capitalism is called in economics a "mixed economy". It should be called a mixed up economy.
In the US, the free market - what is left of it - works, which is why Europeans who come to California look at the low prices and their eyes bulge. I remember one visitor from Leeds in the UK going around K-Mart on her last day, filling a shopping cart to the gunwales with all kinds of things to take home.
So, the free market helps the customer and every single one of us is a customer.
Capitalism doesn't. Costco in Los Angeles, like other discounters across the US, sells price-fixed milk to it's customers. Then, it found that over the mountain in the San Joaquin Valley, the fixed price for milk was appreciably lower.
So, it sent trucks over the mountain, picked up loads of milk and brought it back to Los Angeles, where it was able to sell milk much cheaper to happy consumers.
Of course capitalism couldn't allow that, for capitalism is interested in producers not consumers.
Under threat of prosecution, Costco went back to higher priced local milk (the same milk of course).
This sums up the difference between capitalism that you favor - unless you prefer socialism which, in practice, is little different from capitalism - and the free market.
In free market California, last year the legislature passed only 3 laws a day. The previous year they passed almost 4 laws a day. It's true that if California were a separate country, it would be perhaps 5th or 6th in the world - but does it really need some 1,400 laws a year?
It does under capitalism. And all those laws don't work. But, I suppose they must be passed to keep the politicians in perks.
The free market is the absence of regulation of the market. The price control mechanism' negative feedback keeps returning prices to equilibrium. It does this impersonally, reacting only to the people's wishes.
Put 'regulations' in its place and you turn the decision making over to impersonal, altruistic, politicians.
Lot's of luck!
Harry
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Harry Pollard
Henry George School of LA
Box 655
Tujunga CA 91042
Tel: (818) 352-4141
Fax: (818) 353-2242
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