Why do you support the right?

[Giancarlo]

Red_Jon:

Fez - you said that government subsidies in utilities helps keep prices low for the consumer.

Yes and? Do you want to be charged $100 US/hour for electricity? No. So the government must help out electricity companies for example. They are local monopolies when in districts. This doesn't violate the laws of economics.

Proposing more control over the private sector grossly violates the laws of economics. More control does not mean maintaining laws which is a entirely different issue at hand. I believe laws must be maintained to prevent Enrons from happening again, but state interference in what is otherwise good business is purely evil.

Redjon, it is called initative. New companies must take the initative by drawing out loans and build up their strength. It is natural for them to fail and new ones to arise. But large corporations are not at all going to dominate the entire market place.

[Giancarlo]

Originally posted by red_jon
I am for capitalism, but relying on charities to help the poor is an incredibly bad idea, unless we're returning to the 19th century.

Then you want to rob the private sector to provide money to those who do not work for a living?

Those purely disabled shouldn't be forced to work but those abled to work and find work, should work or they won't have food on their tables.

Charities are a very good idea! And are up to date. If you consider robbing the private sector up to date I would check again. That is out of date.

[Ned]

red_jon, then you and I are both in favor of welfare for the indigent, the so-called, social safety net. We also appear to favor competition. Since we are on the same page economically, why do you call yourself a socialist and I call myself a free enterpriser?

[Zulu Elephant]

Nice to see the threads doing ok. This is probably my most popular one of all time
*quick celebration*


Economic: -4.25
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -5.90

Hmm, not sure Im THAT economically left wing. The test makes me out to be a socialist on the level of Tony Benn, which I definitly not.


Boddington - Yeah, Im still in contact with Chris.


At the risk of seeming more authoritarian that the test tells me I am, I'd like to try to direct the thread byasking those of you who have stated that they are right wing "because the right is the better supporter of individualism" why you hold individualism in such high regard and what you class as individualism.

That is not to say I am advocating wholesale destruction of individualism for the purpose of the collective good.

Do you consider higher taxes (within reason) as an assault on individualism.

Do you consider property rights as absolute? (which I may start a new thread on - I think this is the main difference between the US and Europe - but thats for another time)

[Asher]

Originally posted by red_jon
But firmly established mulitnational corporations are going to destroy smaller businesses every time. How can new companies be created in areas where there are corporations already in place?

This just isn't so. Linux is stealing market share from Windows and Unix in the server market pretty rapidly, and it's quite literally developed by people in their spare time in their homes.

Even MS and giants like HP started off as garage businesses and competed with the likes of IBM and got to where they are today. Companies like Nvidia are much younger than Matrox, ATI, 3dfx, etc, and still they rose to the top (again starting in a garage).

There's plenty of opportunity and real world examples of small companies outdoing the companies on top.

All it takes is innovation (superior product) and competent administration. New companies with the same ol' thing tend to fail, just because there's no need for anyone to use that company. That's why AMD is having such a hard time, they're like a bad impression of Intel with lower prices.

[Giancarlo]

Asher, don't start me up with how good AMD is and how bad Intel is.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by red_jon
I believe that corporate monopolies are not part of a free-market system. Have you ever seen a marketplace with only one, huge stall?

Yes, and there was a line of women waiting for it about a block long.

[Asher]

At the risk of seeming more authoritarian that the test tells me I am, I'd like to try to direct the thread byasking those of you who have stated that they are right wing "because the right is the better supporter of individualism" why you hold individualism in such high regard and what you class as individualism.

It's quite simple. What makes the human race so special is diversity.

When you start collectivizing society you start chipping away at diversity. People should be able to do their own thing on their own time how they want to. It's part of the basic freedoms of humanity.

[red_jon]

Originally posted by Fez




Then you want to rob the private sector to provide money to those who do not work for a living?

Those purely disabled shouldn't be forced to work but those abled to work and find work, should work or they won't have food on their tables.

Charities are a very good idea! And are up to date. If you consider robbing the private sector up to date I would check again. That is out of date.

Charaties are an appalling idea - I have nothing against charaties themselves but they should not replace areas the government should serve.

And many people are perfectly physically able to work, but we don't live in a perfect world where there is no unemployment - in many areas there simply aren't any jobs, even for those with the right qualifications (as I'm sure Provost Harrison will testify )

Ned - I believe that the noly way for a fair and beneficial capitalist system to survive is to carefully regulate it. Maybe you have ideas that vary from mine as to how competition works in a capitalist economy

[Sikander]

Originally posted by red_jon


But firmly established mulitnational corporations are going to destroy smaller businesses every time. How can new companies be created in areas where there are corporations already in place?

I don't agree. Check out this column a friend of mine sent me today for a more articulate and better researched take than I could come up with on the spot:

Globalization, argues New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, is "making it possible for . . . corporations to reach farther, faster, cheaper, and deeper around the world" and is fostering "a flowering of both wealth and technological innovation the likes of which the world has
never before seen." To David Korten, a former Ford Foundation official and now a prominent globalization critic, it is "market tyranny . . . extending its reach across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet's living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money." The careful listener to this by-now-familiar debate can actually discern a striking point of
agreement: Both sides assume, one with euphoria and the other with fear, that global-scale business is the wave of the future. Yet there's mounting evidence that multinational firms may be less capable of delivering competitive products than national or local firms.

AT&T stunned financial analysts in October 2000 when it announced that it was carving itself up into four, more versatile, companies. In May 2001, British Telecom unveiled a plan to spin off its wholesale arm, part of its wireless business, and numerous assets in Asia. Other
self-initiated split-ups and slim-downs seem likely to follow. These developments are important reminders of a point all but forgotten in the globalization debate: Scale matters.

Any first-year economics student learns that firms can lower average costs by expanding, but only up to a point. Beyond that point (according to the law of diminishing returns to scale), complexities, breakdowns,
and inefficiencies begin to drive average costs back up. The collapse of massive state-owned enterprises in the old Soviet Union and the bankruptcies of Chrysler and New York City are notable reminders of a lesson we should have absorbed from the dinosaur: Bigger is not always better.

A telling example in economic life is commercial banking. Despite all the headlines about mergers, researchers at the Federal Reserve in Minneapolis have concluded that "after banks reach a fairly modest size [about $100 million in assets], there is no cost advantage to further
expansion. Some evidence even suggests diseconomies of scale for very large banks." The Financial Markets Center, a financial research and education organization, has found that, compared to banks with far-flung portfolios, those that concentrate lending in a geographic region were typically twice as profitable and wind up with fewer bad loans. While the press has diligently reported national and global mergers, it has
largely ignored the recent proliferation of community banks, credit unions, and microloan funds.

Banking, it turns out, is not the only exception to the rules of globalization. Five factors are playng a significant role in shrinking the economies of scale for a wide range of industries.

1. First, it turns out that global-scale industry is surprisingly inefficient at distribution. In 1910, for every dollar Americans spent for food, 50 cents went to farmers and 50 cents to marketers and providers of inputs like seeds, energy, and fertilizer; now 9 cents goes to farmers, 24 cents to input providers, and 67 cents to marketers. The marketers' 67 cents are largely unrelated to the end product that consumers really want. They're wasted on packaging, refrigeration,
spoilage, advertising, trucking, supermarket fees, and middlemen.

When farmers can link more directly with nearby consumers, they can cut out these inefficiencies. This explains the spread of community-supported agriculture (CSA), pioneered initially in Japan and then Switzerland, now growing by leaps and bounds across North America. It works like this: A farmer is supported by 60 or 70 households, each of which pays a fee to receive a weekly supply of vegetables. More than 600 community-supported agricultural or horticultural operations now
operate in 42 states, with 100,000 members.

2. A second factor exacerbating the inefficiency of global-scale distribution is the rising cost of shipping. In the past two years the per-barrel price of oil has quadrupled. And with expected increases in global population and per capita consumption, the U.S. Energy
Information Administration projects that demand for oil worldwide will grow by 20 million barrels a day, a third more than current consumption levels. Improving technologies for petroleum recovery may ease upward
pressures on oil prices a bit. But political pressures, including attempts to levy "green taxes" and political instability in oil regions like the Middle East and Central Asia could drive up prices. Until other fuels are substituted for oil, global shipping probably will become more expensive.

3. A third challenge facing global businesses is the
difficulty of managing information. Conservative economist Friedrich Hayek once argued convincingly against state socialism by noting that knowledge is too complex, too subjective, and too dependent on particular circumstances of time and place for even the best-intentioned national-scale bureaucracies to grasp it. The exact same problem afflicts multinational corporations.

In principle, a global producer can wield its resources to produce different products for different local tastes. But in practice, a local producer is better situated to intuit, design, manufacture flexibly, and deliver just-in-time products. Consumers can better communicate their
needs to local producers, either directly or through local retailers. General Foods probably will never be able to convince New Yorkers to replace their locally baked bagels with Minnesota-made generics. Microbrewers have flourished throughout the United States and the United Kingdom because each of them caters to highly specialized tastes. The desires of Bay Area food shoppers wanting more varieties of locally grown fruits and vegetables, have expanded the region's agricultural economy by 61 percent over the past decade, which translates into $915 million of additional agricultural income in the local economy each year.

4. A fourth trend is the transformation of the U.S. economy from manufacturing goods to providing services. The main reason for this shift, according to MIT's Paul Krugman and Harvard's Robert Lawrence, is
that technological advances have brought down the prices of many manufactured goods. As Americans spend less to acquire the same refrigerators and toasters, they spend more on services. These changes,
Krugman argues in Pop Internationalism (MIT Press, 1997), are moving the U.S. economy inexorably toward what he calls localization: "A steadily rising share of the workforce produces services that are sold only within that same metropolitan area." For most services--whether it is health care, teaching, legal representation, accounting, or massage--consumers demand a personal, trusting relationship.

5. A fifth difficulty facing large-scale business is the information revolution. Global corporations are still amassing huge networks of factories, technology centers, and experts at a time when profitability
is increasingly uncoupled from size. Small companies can now fit what used to be busy departments overseeing accounting, management, taxes, communications, and publications neatly onto a desktop computer. The
Internet has given even home-based businesses the ability to compete against established, large-scale players in practically everything, including books and CDs, stocks and bonds, airline travel, and hotel rooms.

Even for industries like automobiles, where large economies of scale still make sense, the communications revolution is making it possible
for small firms to achieve the same advantages through collaborations and partnerships. In northern Italy, locally owned firms involved in flexible manufacturing networks have become world-class exporters of
high-tech products like robotic arms. A network typically forms temporarily to create a specific project for a well-defined niche market. Once the project is complete, the network disbands. Following successful models in Europe, more than 50 flexible manufacturing networks have been set up in the United States.

These five trends do not mean that all goods and services can be produced cost-effectively in every community. (The economics of any company or industry depend on how the new diseconomies of large scale
balance against the old economies of scale.) At a minimum, however, they suggest that much of the hype from globalization's fans--and its enemies too--is overblown. If smaller businesses wind up being the most efficient producers and suppliers of many goods and services to nearby markets, then neither the utopian nor the nightmare scenarios of globalization
will come to pass. Indeed, global trade may simply become a relatively minor part of most economies, as it is for ours right now (exports are responsible for less than 10 percent of our national income)--provided,
of course, that politicians resist the temptation to bail out global businesses doomed by inappropriate scale.

The next wave of economic development--local, national, and global--may turn not on the rise or fall of any grand concepts like globalization, but on the slow, steady creation of appropriately scaled businesses. As
the poet Wendell Berry once remarked, "The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling. . . . Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous."

-- Michael Shuman

Michael H. Shuman, an attorney and economist, is co-director of the Institute for Economics and Entrepreneurship for the Village Foundation,
a Washington, D.C.

[Asher]

I certainly don't think we should rely on charities to help people. I fully support government welfare, if it's conditional.

Like for employment insurance, you must prove you're actually looking (and applying) for a job to receive it.

For general welfare, I think everyone should have the same basic right to live a satisfactory life. If someone is working minimum wage and can't afford enough food for the kids, they should receive aid from the government. The mother is doing all she can and it's just not enough.

I'm not as right wing as many people here, but I still believe the government should take a hands off approach to the economy, unless they're ensuring it's a fair market.

[red_jon]

Originally posted by Asher
I certainly don't think we should rely on charities to help people. I fully support government welfare, if it's conditional.

Like for employment insurance, you must prove you're actually looking (and applying) for a job to receive it.

What if there are no jobs offered in the area? How could you apply for a position that doesn't exist?

[Asher]

Originally posted by red_jon
What if there are no jobs offered in the area? How could you apply for a position that doesn't exist?

What the hell are you still doing living there? Take out a loan and move your ass.

The answer is definitely not living off the government's generosity, though, that's for sure.

[red_jon]

Originally posted by Asher

What the hell are you still doing living there? Take out a loan and move your ass.

The answer is definitely not living off the government's generosity, though, that's for sure.

But if someone has a family and cannot afford to move from an area, then they can't. Many areas in the north lost the vast majority of the jobs when the mines were closed.

[Asher]

Originally posted by red_jon
But if someone has a family and cannot afford to move from an area, then they can't. Many areas in the north lost the vast majority of the jobs when the mines were closed.

I think the government should be giving loans to people to move to a better job market. It's the same deal with eastern Canada.

If there's no jobs to apply for at all (I very very much doubt this), there's no excuse for staying there. At all. You can't get a free ride off other people's tax money because you don't want to move to a better job market.