Parasites Increasing Life Support Measures to the Host

disco

Wed Jul 30 11:51:47 -0700 2008

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Parasites Brain Increasing Life Support Measures to the Host.

Fixed the headline for you ;-)

Parasites Increasing Life Support Measures to the Host

rubycodez

Wed Jul 30 12:04:29 -0700 2008

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I prefer to think of the Federal Reserve System as holding gun to the brain of its slave, see my comment under slavery resolution article

 

slavery is alive and well

Parasites Increasing Life Support Measures to the Host

Bhima

Thu Jul 31 11:20:05 -0700 2008

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Not to in anyway suggest that the current social structure in America is fair to the working poor...

However, until scores of decades have passed where it is routine that many millions those working poor, who have defaulted on their debts, however unethical the terms of lending may be, or for whom other false and trumped up charges have been levied against, are being rounded up and being shipped like freight to forced labour camps, where they routinely die from exposure, over work, malnutrition, poisoning, and torture, as blacks routinely were up until the 1930s, it is unjust and belittling the historical and factual treatment of blacks in the United States of America to make the comparison of chattel slavery and other forms of forced labor of American blacks common in the South East United States for over 150 years, to the wage slavery foisted off on the uneducated poor in America today.

Parasites Increasing Life Support Measures to the Host

Uncle Entity

Wed Jul 30 12:13:53 -0700 2008

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``The U.S. is pulling out all the stops here to make sure we don't have a terrible downturn or a collapse in the financial system before the upcoming elections,'' said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics in Boston.

Fixed the article body for you...

Parasites Increasing Life Support Measures to the Host

Zortyl

Wed Jul 30 16:06:34 -0700 2008

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The whole system may be very broken indeed, here in the US.  Certainly.

Anyone who works anywhere near finance seems inordinately powerful.  We don't have a investment-transportation system, roads for finance, we have a system of dead-end-making trolls and narrow bridges.  A line of trolls are waiting want to make more narrow bridges.  Usually one-way bridges.

However it is the Federal government budget priorities that have caused the biggest leak.  It is a vast amount of non-investment, non-planned and impermanent waste of military budgets, pork and unaccounted sub-sub- sub-contractor funds, spent on imported goods and deposited in Cayman Island Banks, that forms a parasite on the trusting taxpayer.  Then the folks with all that money complain that they have to pay taxes at all.  Most get by with 15%, and little of their deductions guaranteed to invest in anything American and usefully productive for voters.

I may be misidentifying the sentiment present.  I don't know.

It appears all the bizarre little pipe-dreams about the Fed and other money supply management out there are false.  Dreams that near-zero-inflation and "hard-money" and zero/low-taxation will make the world zoom in turbo-accelerated prosperity-for-uber-alles.  To me they're even ridiculous.

Money does not spout out of fountains and gold does not pool in gutters when it is hoarded according to a real-commodity pattern of spread.  Government meanies don't plug all the great joyous spouts of wealth for their fun.

Hard-currency-money [the alternative to the Fed] simply stays where it is already when it is scarce and not loaned.  It is often hoarded and can easily destroy markets far easier than create them.  All of us would not have home computers because investment in the future would be one hundredth what it is now.  People wouldn't have bought.  Products wouldn't be developed. 

Luxurious estates would have still been big and sprawling, as usual, but the permanent investment in education and scientific progress would have lagged. Nothing permanent would have been gained because nothing need be risked (with population growth) to have a reliably larger portion of the whole pie.

Commodities, like gold, do not stay available evenly over time when they are stored in savings and appear again in free spending.  Supply fluctuates. A medium of exchange is only supposed to be reliably able to keep at the same "pressure" everywhere.  Intervening with the Fed's credit makes sense.  Especially when institutions shoot everyone downstream for their mistakes.

It makes little sense to criticize the existence of a huge reservoir or two when the government is using a Howitzer to blow holes in all the city plumbing.

Parasites Increasing Life Support Measures to the Host

Uncle Entity

Wed Jul 30 18:39:23 -0700 2008

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It appears all the bizarre little pipe-dreams about the Fed and other money supply management out there are false.  Dreams that near-zero-inflation and "hard-money" and zero/low-taxation will make the world zoom in turbo-accelerated prosperity-for-uber-alles.  To me they're even ridiculous.

As you bring up two different issues here...

First, the current system of inflationary policy devalues the dollar thereby stealing the wealth of every single holder of the currency for the benefit of the people who get the newly created money which is almost always bankers and their allies in big business. Then you have the phenomena of monetizing debt that the government engages in that uses the exact same principle of devaluation to tax the people.

Any way you look at it inflation redistributes the wealth from one group to another.

With specie it is necessary for someone to go out and dig up whatever commodity that serves as money which is productive as opposed to simply adding a few numbers into an account. If money is in short supply its value relative to other goods will rise creating incentive for people to 'inflate the money supply' and if there is an excess its value will fall and mining operations will be unprofitable. It is a self regulating system unlike the current Fed backed cartel where they produce new money whenever they feel like it contrary to demand.

Secondly, inflationary policies that are geared at lowering the interest rate below its 'natural' rate create boom-bust cycles. Businesses that would be unprofitable at say 7% will be profitable at an artificially low 5% while the underlying demand of customers hasn't changed. Businesses that invest in this fashion will find out soon enough that their investment decision was faulty when the Fed starts raising rates to rein in the inevitable price inflation.

As all this new money never enters the market evenly but gets concentrated in certain sectors like tech stocks or mortgages this has a tendency to drive prices way beyond what they would be if there were no inflationary policy and create 'bubbles'.

Probably don't need to explain how that always turns out.

Now you also bring up taxes. They have a tendency of moving capital from one sector which is profitable to another that isn't either because they don't have that intent like government programs or the leaders have political connections so don't have to be because they can suck off the public teat and almost always also get restrictions placed on any competing business that would enter their particular market thereby guaranteeing them a profit.

Or to put it a bit differently, taxes are the practical application of the Broken Window Fallacy.

Hard-currency-money [the alternative to the Fed] simply stays where it is already when it is scarce and not loaned.  It is often hoarded and can easily destroy markets far easier than create them.  All of us would not have home computers because investment in the future would be one hundredth what it is now.  People wouldn't have bought.  Products wouldn't be developed.

The only way that would happen is if prices were 'sticky' as the Keynesians claim.

Plus the fact that you are ignoring all of human history between the invention of money and the 1930s when the governments of the world decided that a commodity backed currency was a serious impediment to their respective welfare/warfare states.

This also brings up an interesting fact, the computer industry is one of the least regulated and is also one (if not the) most dynamic in respect to scientific breakthroughs.

Commodities, like gold, do not stay available evenly over time when they are stored in savings and appear again in free spending.

Yes, as always, you lack the understanding that 'capital investment' is a form of saving. Someone who buys a new machine for their factory is saving just the same as someone who buys a CD at their local bank. Saving is the act of forgoing current consumption for future consumption.

Supply fluctuates. A medium of exchange is only supposed to be reliably able to keep at the same "pressure" everywhere.

Oh noes, banks would have to pay their customers more than a token low interest rate to be able to borrow money to reloan it instead of getting it almost free from the Fed with all the problems that causes. Money as a good that follows the law of supply and demand the same as every other good...The end of civilization as we know it...

Probably should quit drinking the Kool-aid.

Parasites Increasing Life Support Measures to the Host

Zortyl

Wed Jul 30 20:40:00 -0700 2008

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First, the current system of inflationary policy devalues the dollar thereby stealing the wealth of every single holder of the currency for the benefit of the people who get the newly created money which is almost always bankers and their allies in big business. Then you have the phenomena of monetizing debt that the government engages in that uses the exact same principle of devaluation to tax the people.

True.  Savers of any vast amount of money (money in cash form) will be lost in dilution of their currency.  Assuredly they will.  All 1% of the population who have any significant amount of dependency on pure cash instead of daily/weekly labor will do very poorly over the period of time of that inflation.  OH woe.  OH pity.  OH loss.

OH wait... they likely have enough money to mint their own anyway.  Savings interest for a few is substituted for a prosperous society with good wages.  Almost all of history is filled with times that < 5% have that sort of dependence on stored currency. 

Currency's main job is to get cooperative effort from buyer to seller and back again by other routes.  Not to reward savers by sitting around.  If we're fighting the bankers... then we don't want investment in the first place.

Also, actually last I checked no bankers sit around fiddling with their newly-fabricated money all day.  They don't order caviar or an don't (or didn't) thumb through the Sharper Image catalog with all that money.  They immediately loan it if there are worthy borrowers.  Approximately 10 times for every dollar they have, they loan it out to make it do some "good" and bring back interest.  THEN they have their caviar.   (30 times for every dollar if they're modern bankers)

There are deflationary spirals as well as inflationary ones.  If a depression or recession dose anything it is to favor those with specie and savings they are sitting on, and by that means, destroying the economy of those who must rent their capital assets [labor] or starve.  Much wealth is created from deflation-spawned paranoia.

Controlling the money supply, with an edge toward expanding it, is the only way to match an increasing labor force... a more productive world of goods and services and to diminish the sheer force of paranoia that can leave no market price where there were markets functioning.  When we're all done making more people, making better things with fewer inputs, profiting from any underused natural resources, then a stable money supply will match the relative wealth that stably exists. 

In all other cases, there's a natural deflation and irrational risk-aversion that society must endure.

Any way you look at it inflation redistributes the wealth from one group to another.

Wealth always transfers.  Live with it.  From faceless poor masses to select or lucky rich.  Its not good.  Its not bad.  Its the capital-tax burden we all live with.  It creates incentive and pays waste with punishment.  Government does it backwards, for a small fraction of the economy, to increase people's willingness to risk consuming and not stuff money in mattresses.

Any baby on the face of the earth at a moment's notice is ready-born to have their life's efforts sucked out of them at the lowest price possible unless they are invested in.  Even so, any generation in a family under strict capitalism is one collapse away from no means to invest in their next generation.  Feel like consuming that flatscreen now?

Still don't believe me?  Go live in Baghdad a few years ago and delight in a pure capitalist economy.  Everything else is a hybrid. 

The absolute fantasy is that saving truly increases net standard of living other than in a civilized, already-wealthy economy.  Every-where, any-when else it is a tool to not starve or be enslaved.

.... unlike the current Fed backed cartel where they produce new money whenever they feel like it contrary to demand.

Actually the Fed does it to negate the "hiding" or slowing of currency flow.  Investment in the future has a horrible bias against it: its in the future and not here now.

When any currency is pooled and hidden, in any account-keeping system, everyone who has a good head on their shoulders loses their ability to try risks and future investment.  Specifically, if a segment of the non-currency economy grows (labor, new homesteads in Kansas, Internet sales, etc.. ) and no one will employ it or invest in its long-term rewards, then the economy is deflating its profits and its future is never worth investing in.  Stabilizing the future of a validly productive activity is all that Fed or any other large currency-control is doing.

As for boom-bust cycles, they are bad.  Don't get me wrong but the natural unguided state of an economy is flattened poverty with a spike of savers who survived the last flattening by charging rent.

Yet, it would appear that other tactics are far stronger than a too-low discount rate.  Rumor-mongering, gambling funds without risk, delusion-filled schemes of shadow banking a shadow-currency.  All those mixed with general gilded-age "exuberance" leads to an legally-unaccountable finance industry which does much worse to a currency.  Also to all who are involved below the top of the collapsing pyramid.

Limiting the number of cabbages everyone plays with on one level is a caveman technique, compared to the games they were playing. 

They could have constructed currency out of patents on colors of toilet paper backed by "Grade AAA Bond Ratings" and it would have not been the Fed's fault.  All anyone needs for a currency is some original pooled wealth, trust in its holder, and a need to invest it without the original's limits of use.

One could easily accuse the booms of late to come from those in authority who know the industry yet turn a blind eye, allowing risk to be distanced from payment.  So your count-the-cabbages money supply would be replaced anyway by an unstable modern one.

Lastly... lavish investment in the future is a good idea.  Far better than in most of history and in most countries.

Again, by the way, wealth always flows around.  Customer demand is not always the same.  The discount rate has an inherent deflation in it just because demand never stays the same and usually increases, along with the number of risk-based investments.  All of them fight for dollars to invest in them.

Who'd be able to pay for an integrated circuit?  Why?  Who'd risk personal electronics?  Who'd risk supply chains far from home? 

Provably, taxes are a wonderful investment in the long term future at times, though a horrible one when mismanaged.  Voters must keep watch.  Taxes are very profitable indeed if well placed, but the profit comes from taxing companies that are unable to sell now.  Stable educated societies and complex layered varieties of entertainment and culture were not in demand originally.  Roads to drive/travel/ship on were not part of production quotas.  Telecom was not available to order with. International Trade marketing plans were not available to link efficiencies.  Even Railroad fees were busted when their new markets mattered more than their monopoly-maintained fees.  Government intervenes to make itself richer someday on wealth that can't be taxed now.

Read "Supercapitalism."  Its main conclusion is that the 3-year investor is all that rules today.  Markets are so flexible and so profitable and investors so selfish that nothing can withstand that greed-horizon.  Not even futures markets can help.  Government, for good or ill, can do it if it voters care about its future. 

In the USA we do it because we agree the military needed it and we spent lavishly to get it.  Tax and spend... and some investments paid off.  (Most often it merely prevents social chaos like Baghdad.  Badly.)

So Government focuses on markets that emerge after a new area has no burdens.  The invisible hand is only a short-term and low-risk hand, by the tragedy of the commons.  All those assets above created vast new sections of the economy and their risk and scale was too much to comprehend.

Much less investment occurs if the constant deflation of the currency leaves money in larger and larger concentrations gathering dust.

Parasites Increasing Life Support Measures to the Host

Uncle Entity

Wed Jul 30 22:28:56 -0700 2008

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Savers of any vast amount of money (money in cash form) will be lost in dilution of their currency.  Assuredly they will.  All 1% of the population who have any significant amount of dependency on pure cash instead of daily/weekly labor will do very poorly over the period of time of that inflation.  OH woe.  OH pity.  OH loss.

I guess you missed the part where they talked about using inflation to reduce real wages to fight price inflation during your indoctrination. Also there is a vast amount of savers out there that are hurt by inflation that are also workers, you have a retirement fund don't you?

Your 1% comment is what I like to call the Scrooge McDuck Fallacy, the assumption that the rich have a big pile of cash sitting in their basement vault and rely on that for their income instead of investing it into productive means.

Currency's main job is to get cooperative effort from buyer to seller and back again by other routes.  Not to reward savers by sitting around.  If we're fighting the bankers... then we don't want investment in the first place.

Like I said, you lack an understanding of capital and time in economics.

Very few people 'save' by holding capital. They invest it in some way that it will reward them for forgoing current consumption, this can be interest, profit, return on investment, whatever you want to call it. Without this saving there would be no producer goods to mix with labor to turn into consumer goods for money to do its 'main job...to get cooperative effort from buyer to seller'.

You also don't really understand the mechanism behind fractional reserve banking but that's not really important.

Wealth always transfers.  Live with it.  From faceless poor masses to select or lucky rich.  Its not good.  Its not bad.  Its the capital-tax burden we all live with.  It creates incentive and pays waste with punishment.

WTF, capital tax burden?

Creating money doesn't magically create new wealth but only creates a false claim on already existing wealth for the bank that creates it. If anyone but the banking cartel does this it is properly called counterfeiting which by all accounts is fraud and theft from the people who they trade the new money with in exchange for goods and services.

The absolute fantasy is that saving truly increases net standard of living other than in a civilized, already-wealthy economy.  Every-where, any-when else it is a tool to not starve or be enslaved.

So you deny that a person or group of people getting together to invest in a tractor in some 3rd world country would increase their standard of living due to the multiplication of their labor the tractor would afford? If they immediately spent all their income as they received it they would never better their lot in life but would also have nothing to plant the next season because they didn't hold back anything to be able to have seeds.

As for the rest of your comment, there's only so much time in the day allocated to economic fallacy so it must remain uncommented upon unfortunately.

Misleading Section AND Title?

Mathinker

Thu Jul 31 08:44:27 -0700 2008

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This article is neither about biological parasites and it does not belong in the "About Technocrat.net" section.

In the future, please set the section properly and use a less ambiguous title.