conservation of Euros

[Bill Sloman]

On May 14, 5:18 pm, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 14, 9:51 am, John Larkin



jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2010 22:16:49 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com
wrote:

On May 13, 5:02 pm,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 13, 8:20 pm, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

The argument for progressive taxation is usually put in terms of those
with the broadest shoulders carrying more of the load.

Right.  That's how the Little Red Hen got a hold of all the other
animals' bread, greedy thing that she was.  She had broad shoulders.

This falls a
long way short of Marx -

Marx was kind of an idiot.

"The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e.,
that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely
requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer."
  --The Communist Manifesto

 See what I mean?

Yeah, he wouldn't understand a female plumber making $150K.

What created our modern wealth was engineers applying science.

Yep.  They made machines to relieve human toil, to improve the human
condition.

Evil capitalists.  Marx the Moocher should've stopped 'em.

Some of the capitalists were quite evil, as Martin Brown has pointed
out elsewhere in this thread. Trade unions were one of the mechanisms
that reigned in the greedy, evil, short-sighted minority.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 11:08:20 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 14, 4:48 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 01:45:16 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 13, 10:05 pm, Greegor <greego...@gmail.com> wrote:
BS > Do pay attention. The trouble that Greece is
BS > now in will be fixed by Greece. The EU - as
BS > a whole - will under-write Greek borrowing
BS > until that happens.

Oh GOODY!   More DEBT!   THAT'LL fix em!   LOL!

The alternative was to let them go bankrupt, taking down a bunch of
Eurpean banks that had lent them money. This is pretty much what
happend in 1929, and the relevant politicians know enough history to
be aware of this, and didn't fancy going down that route again.

There's a good argument that the government interventions in the '30s
created a decade-long depression that otherwise would have been a
year-or-so stock market bust. The "success" of the Roosevelt acts has
entered our mythology.

You've peddled this nonsense before. Unemployment in the US was around
25% in the early 1930's, and Roosevelt's New Deal got it down to 9% in
1937, before an unfortunate revival in economic conservatism undid the
good work and pushed it back up to 17%.

When you last posted on this subject, you ignored the fact that
unemployment got down to 9% at the start of of 1937, which did make
nosense of the story you were trying to sell.

Correlation is not causality. It might have got down that low sooner
all by itself. Spending money cutting hiking trails and painting
murals is nice, but it's not the kind of productivity that hungry
people need.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 17:53:22 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2010 16:06, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:31:49 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

Engels saw first hand what greedy industrialists were doing to their
workers in the Lancashire cotton industry. Boiler explosions were
commonplace up until the Vulcan insurers made a stand and insisted on
proper boiler safety inspections. And in cases of tampering with safety
relief valves they would not pay out.

[snip]

It makes reasonable sense to pay your workers a living wage for the work
that they do rather than pay them less than they can sensibly live on.
Ford was about the first in the USA to actually do this.

It only makes sense if the money comes from somewhere. If all the
employers arbitrarily doubled wages, inflation would take it all away

We are talking here of industrialised manufacture that was possibly two
or more orders of magnitude more productive. All the profits went to the
mill owners and their workers were left to starve on a subsistance level
of pay because it was marginally better than being out of work.

That effect was transient. The first mill owners could indeed hire
unemployed labor cheap. As other mill owners got into the act, they
had to compete for labor whether they were nice people or not. The
laborers benefitted on the other side as food, clothing, building
materials, all sorts of stuff, got cheaper because productivity and
transportation were indeed orders of magnitude improved by new
technology.

Productivity is the ultimate benevolence. Technology pushes
productivity.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 10:40:49 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 09:13:21 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2010 16:25, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:50:11 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

A pure sales tax paid only by the non-business end user would be a lot
simpler. Allowing businesses not to have to fight with badly paid VAT
advisers. I have had some amusing run-ins with them on reclaiming VAT
for a charity making disabled access improvements.
There's nothing wrong or difficult about having businesses pay sales
tax. We in California pay sales tax on anything we consume, like
I see that as faintly odd. Taxing businesses for buying stuff to help
run their business and new equipment doesn't really make any sense.

Moving the business to Montana and will make that problem go away

[...]

Yes, but it would also make my edgier employees go away too.


I dunno, depends on whether they are the outdoors kind or not. Once a SW
guys threw the question into the round: "What if we all packed it up and
moved to Bozeman, Montana?". Some silence. Then one by one the guys
uttered "Yeah", "Cool", "I'd come" and so on.


We could set up a manufacturing company in another state, or just
subcontract manufacturing and some engineering there. Arizona sounds
good, just to tweak the local idiots on the Board of Stupidvisors.


Check the tax situation first, all taxes including property taxes, cost
of living, et cetera. AZ may not be the first contender then.

Actually, I might move to Nevada. I could buy a bit of land somewhere
in the boonies, with a shack on it, for maybe $20K.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 11:29:35 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 14, 5:18 pm, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
On May 14, 9:51 am, John Larkin



jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2010 22:16:49 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com
wrote:

On May 13, 5:02 pm,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 13, 8:20 pm, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

The argument for progressive taxation is usually put in terms of those
with the broadest shoulders carrying more of the load.

Right.  That's how the Little Red Hen got a hold of all the other
animals' bread, greedy thing that she was.  She had broad shoulders.

This falls a
long way short of Marx -

Marx was kind of an idiot.

"The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e.,
that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely
requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer."
  --The Communist Manifesto

 See what I mean?

Yeah, he wouldn't understand a female plumber making $150K.

What created our modern wealth was engineers applying science.

Yep.  They made machines to relieve human toil, to improve the human
condition.

Evil capitalists.  Marx the Moocher should've stopped 'em.

Some of the capitalists were quite evil, as Martin Brown has pointed
out elsewhere in this thread. Trade unions were one of the mechanisms
that reigned in the greedy, evil, short-sighted minority.

No. Competition did.

John

 

[Joerg]

John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 10:40:49 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 09:13:21 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2010 16:25, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:50:11 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

A pure sales tax paid only by the non-business end user would be a lot
simpler. Allowing businesses not to have to fight with badly paid VAT
advisers. I have had some amusing run-ins with them on reclaiming VAT
for a charity making disabled access improvements.
There's nothing wrong or difficult about having businesses pay sales
tax. We in California pay sales tax on anything we consume, like
I see that as faintly odd. Taxing businesses for buying stuff to help
run their business and new equipment doesn't really make any sense.

Moving the business to Montana and will make that problem go away

[...]
Yes, but it would also make my edgier employees go away too.

I dunno, depends on whether they are the outdoors kind or not. Once a SW
guys threw the question into the round: "What if we all packed it up and
moved to Bozeman, Montana?". Some silence. Then one by one the guys
uttered "Yeah", "Cool", "I'd come" and so on.


We could set up a manufacturing company in another state, or just
subcontract manufacturing and some engineering there. Arizona sounds
good, just to tweak the local idiots on the Board of Stupidvisors.

Check the tax situation first, all taxes including property taxes, cost
of living, et cetera. AZ may not be the first contender then.

Actually, I might move to Nevada. I could buy a bit of land somewhere
in the boonies, with a shack on it, for maybe $20K.

You could probably even buy commercial real estate there right now for a
song, and get the property taxes assessed at that lower value. Your
place in S.F. should still fetch a pretty penny because there's enough
people who absolutely must live there, for reasons that completely elude me.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 15:07:07 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 14, 10:42 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 17:53:22 +0100, Martin Brown



|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:
On 14/05/2010 16:06, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:31:49 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk>  wrote:

Engels saw first hand what greedy industrialists were doing to their
workers in the Lancashire cotton industry. Boiler explosions were
commonplace up until the Vulcan insurers made a stand and insisted on
proper boiler safety inspections. And in cases of tampering with safety
relief valves they would not pay out.

[snip]

It makes reasonable sense to pay your workers a living wage for the work
that they do rather than pay them less than they can sensibly live on.
Ford was about the first in the USA to actually do this.

It only makes sense if the money comes from somewhere. If all the
employers arbitrarily doubled wages, inflation would take it all away

We are talking here of industrialised manufacture that was possibly two
or more orders of magnitude more productive. All the profits went to the
mill owners and their workers were left to starve on a subsistance level
of pay because it was marginally better than being out of work.

That effect was transient. The first mill owners could indeed hire
unemployed labor cheap.

At the time, the mechanisation of agriculture was decreasing the
demand for agricultural labourers in the country, so they moved into
the cities to find work.

As other mill owners got into the act, they
had to compete for labor whether they were nice people or not.

They didn't have to compete; they could agree to divide up the
labourers availalble and pay them the same subsistence rate. Cartels
and trusts formalised the process by which evil factory owners
conspired to rip off their employees, and employers who upset the
apple-cart by offering higher pay could sudenely find that they
couldn't buy the feed-stock from which their products were
constructed. Why do you think that US first introduced anti-trust
legislation in 1887?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

The
laborers benefitted on the other side as food, clothing, building
materials, all sorts of stuff, got cheaper because productivity and
transportation were indeed orders of magnitude improved by new
technology.

If the factory owners didn't reduce wages to reflect the new, lower,
cost of living ...

Productivity is the ultimate benevolence. Technology pushes
productivity.

Perfectly true. But it doesn't do a thing to ensure that the benefits
of increased productivity are equally shared between capital and
labour.

Competition does that, and anti-trust laws make companies compete.
Unfortunately, no laws make unions compete. So business reacts
logically, by leaving the country or going out of business.

But what would you know about productivity?

John

 

[krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:50:11 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2010 05:12, krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2010 21:03:14 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 13, 10:21 pm, "k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz"
k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz> wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2010 19:08:20 -0700, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

VATs tend to be sales taxes, in reality.

VAT is applied all up and down the production chain. So the only stage
that can be selectively taxes is the last one, at point of sale. I
prefer a true 100% visible point of sale sales tax. VAT is designed to
hide the actual taxation level, at considerable cost of complexity.

That's the theory but in practice, AIUI, VATs are only collected at the end of
the pipe.

No. They're charged and credited throughout the chain. Your thing
gets taxed, then rebated and the next guy pays, then gets his rebate,
etc.

So it's only collected at the end.

Maximum work for everyone. Maximum intrusion. Horrible.

A lot of work, sure, but money only changes hands at the end of the pipe.

No. You have it wrong.

No, I don't. Tha Canuckistani "VAT" is paid by the buyer. It shows up on the
receipt (which I used to turn in at the borDER for a refund).

Every stage in the pipeline *pays* VAT inclusive
prices to their suppliers and totals up their input tax and then charges
their customers including VAT and totals up their output tax. Then
every month if large or three months if a small company you send a VAT
cheque to HMRC which is the difference of those two numbers.

A modern computer system doesn't find this too difficult. Unless that is
some half baked government changes the VAT rate from 17.5% to 15% in the
run up to Christmas as they did last year. That was a disaster for shops
as shelf prices are all marked inclusive of VAT. UK VAT is expected to
go to 20% shortly to deal with the deficit. It will make mental
arithmetic a lot easier - I never learnt my 17.5x table.

That's like saying that our income tax system isn't too difficult because
computers do the work. Bull.

Exceptions exist for cross boarder trades in the EEC which allow not
charging VAT if the goods are for export to another country in the EEC.
This leads to a complex form of cross border trade called carousel fraud
which typically involves small high value objects like memory chips,
mobile phones and latterly carbon credits.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5204422.stm

...and IIRC, the Canuckistani VAT is paid by the buyer; a sales tax.

A pure sales tax paid only by the non-business end user would be a lot
simpler. Allowing businesses not to have to fight with badly paid VAT
advisers. I have had some amusing run-ins with them on reclaiming VAT
for a charity making disabled access improvements.

Here, businesses do pay sales tax on stuff they consume.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 14, 10:42 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 17:53:22 +0100, Martin Brown



|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:
On 14/05/2010 16:06, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:31:49 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk>  wrote:

Engels saw first hand what greedy industrialists were doing to their
workers in the Lancashire cotton industry. Boiler explosions were
commonplace up until the Vulcan insurers made a stand and insisted on
proper boiler safety inspections. And in cases of tampering with safety
relief valves they would not pay out.

[snip]

It makes reasonable sense to pay your workers a living wage for the work
that they do rather than pay them less than they can sensibly live on..
Ford was about the first in the USA to actually do this.

It only makes sense if the money comes from somewhere. If all the
employers arbitrarily doubled wages, inflation would take it all away

We are talking here of industrialised manufacture that was possibly two
or more orders of magnitude more productive. All the profits went to the
mill owners and their workers were left to starve on a subsistance level
of pay because it was marginally better than being out of work.

That effect was transient. The first mill owners could indeed hire
unemployed labor cheap.

At the time, the mechanisation of agriculture was decreasing the
demand for agricultural labourers in the country, so they moved into
the cities to find work.

As other mill owners got into the act, they
had to compete for labor whether they were nice people or not.

They didn't have to compete; they could agree to divide up the
labourers availalble and pay them the same subsistence rate. Cartels
and trusts formalised the process by which evil factory owners
conspired to rip off their employees, and employers who upset the
apple-cart by offering higher pay could sudenely find that they
couldn't buy the feed-stock from which their products were
constructed. Why do you think that US first introduced anti-trust
legislation in 1887?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

The
laborers benefitted on the other side as food, clothing, building
materials, all sorts of stuff, got cheaper because productivity and
transportation were indeed orders of magnitude improved by new
technology.

If the factory owners didn't reduce wages to reflect the new, lower,
cost of living ...

Productivity is the ultimate benevolence. Technology pushes
productivity.

Perfectly true. But it doesn't do a thing to ensure that the benefits
of increased productivity are equally shared between capital and
labour.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 13:47:27 -0400, Spehro Pefhany
<speffSNIP@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 10:40:49 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:


Check the tax situation first, all taxes including property taxes, cost
of living, et cetera. AZ may not be the first contender then.

Maybe they have some "boycott days" special deals.

That's what I'd do, were I an AZ politician. "Move your business to AZ from
CA special - two years, no taxes - offer good while CA boycott in progress".

;-)

 

[krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 11:21:11 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@On-My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 13:47:27 -0400, Spehro Pefhany
speffSNIP@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 10:40:49 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:


Check the tax situation first, all taxes including property taxes, cost
of living, et cetera. AZ may not be the first contender then.

Maybe they have some "boycott days" special deals.

There's idle talk around here to cut off Californica's water and
electricity... wonder how Californica would like Arizona's style of
"boycott" ? LA would shrivel up and die.

Too late.

 

[krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 10:08:36 -0700, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 09:17:15 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 07:39:56 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

[...]

I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts
business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because
it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No
accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no
quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost.

Tax consumption. Don't tax savings or investment or job creation. If a
person is rich but doesn't spend any money, nobody can reasonably be
jealous of his wealth.

A serious problem with that: It punishes frugal people who have saved
for their retirement and rewards those who squandered everything. The
money they saved _has_ already been taxed.

Simple fix: don't tax income.


Yeah, but how do you deal with income that _has_ already been taxed but
not spent yet because people saved it for their retirement? A flat
VAT-type tax is the same as confiscating xx% percent of that. Not fair
at all.

As I suggested, exempt basics, like food, reasonable rent, generic
medicines. If people can afford a yacht, they can afford to pay sales
tax on it.

The point is that that money has already been taxed. It shouldn't matter if
it is used to buy a yacht. Taxing it again is wrong (one reason I don't trust
Roth IRAs).

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 22:55:23 -0500, "krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz"
<krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 10:08:36 -0700, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 09:17:15 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 07:39:56 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

[...]

I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts
business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because
it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No
accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no
quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost.

Tax consumption. Don't tax savings or investment or job creation. If a
person is rich but doesn't spend any money, nobody can reasonably be
jealous of his wealth.

A serious problem with that: It punishes frugal people who have saved
for their retirement and rewards those who squandered everything. The
money they saved _has_ already been taxed.

Simple fix: don't tax income.


Yeah, but how do you deal with income that _has_ already been taxed but
not spent yet because people saved it for their retirement? A flat
VAT-type tax is the same as confiscating xx% percent of that. Not fair
at all.

As I suggested, exempt basics, like food, reasonable rent, generic
medicines. If people can afford a yacht, they can afford to pay sales
tax on it.

The point is that that money has already been taxed. It shouldn't matter if
it is used to buy a yacht. Taxing it again is wrong (one reason I don't trust
Roth IRAs).

As I suggested, eliminate income taxes and go to sales tax. Then
things are only taxed once.

John

 

[krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 21:26:28 -0700, John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 22:55:23 -0500, "krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz"
krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 10:08:36 -0700, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 09:17:15 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 07:39:56 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

[...]

I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts
business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because
it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No
accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no
quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost.

Tax consumption. Don't tax savings or investment or job creation. If a
person is rich but doesn't spend any money, nobody can reasonably be
jealous of his wealth.

A serious problem with that: It punishes frugal people who have saved
for their retirement and rewards those who squandered everything. The
money they saved _has_ already been taxed.

Simple fix: don't tax income.


Yeah, but how do you deal with income that _has_ already been taxed but
not spent yet because people saved it for their retirement? A flat
VAT-type tax is the same as confiscating xx% percent of that. Not fair
at all.

As I suggested, exempt basics, like food, reasonable rent, generic
medicines. If people can afford a yacht, they can afford to pay sales
tax on it.

The point is that that money has already been taxed. It shouldn't matter if
it is used to buy a yacht. Taxing it again is wrong (one reason I don't trust
Roth IRAs).

As I suggested, eliminate income taxes and go to sales tax. Then
things are only taxed once.

You're missing the point. Those millions of people who have saved all their
lives will be taxed a second time. They've *already* been taxed on that
money.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 14/05/2010 21:42, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 17:53:22 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2010 16:06, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:31:49 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

Engels saw first hand what greedy industrialists were doing to their
workers in the Lancashire cotton industry. Boiler explosions were
commonplace up until the Vulcan insurers made a stand and insisted on
proper boiler safety inspections. And in cases of tampering with safety
relief valves they would not pay out.

[snip]

It makes reasonable sense to pay your workers a living wage for the work
that they do rather than pay them less than they can sensibly live on.
Ford was about the first in the USA to actually do this.

It only makes sense if the money comes from somewhere. If all the
employers arbitrarily doubled wages, inflation would take it all away

We are talking here of industrialised manufacture that was possibly two
or more orders of magnitude more productive. All the profits went to the
mill owners and their workers were left to starve on a subsistance level
of pay because it was marginally better than being out of work.

That effect was transient. The first mill owners could indeed hire
unemployed labor cheap. As other mill owners got into the act, they
had to compete for labor whether they were nice people or not. The

That isn't how it worked at all. There were enough starving people
migrating to the cities that the mill owners could fix the price they
were prepared to pay and anyway preferred to employ children at roughly
1/10 of the adult rate where possible. The working day was unregulated
but typically around 14 hours. A brief history of some of the worst
areas of the country for these practices is online at:

http://www.manchester2002-uk.com/history/victorian/Victorian1.html

The poor were viewed as an underclass to be exploited for commercial
gain like beasts of burden and kept poor. They lived in squalour and
paid barely enough to stay alive. This "transient" situation persisted
until the late 19th century which is how Engles came to observe it.

The blockade of cotton during the American War of Independence led to
mass starvation in Lancashire as without raw cotton the mills closed.
Like all these things the reality was more complex than the simple anti
slavery storyline history that is taught in schools. eg.

http://www.spinningtheweb.org.uk/m_display.php?irn=10&sub=overview&theme=overview&crumb=Lancashire+Cotton+Famine

And there was cotton available but spivs and speculators were holding it
in warehouses waiting for the price to rise even more.

laborers benefitted on the other side as food, clothing, building
materials, all sorts of stuff, got cheaper because productivity and
transportation were indeed orders of magnitude improved by new
technology.

No they didn't. The food was deliberately overpriced by way of the Corn
Laws (which misleadingly apply to wheat) whereby rich land owners and
the merchants in the cities could rip them off. It was paradoxically the
more enlightened of the mill owners who fought back against this
particularly nasty exploitation of the poor to keep their wage bills low
by forming the anti-Corn-Law League in Manchester in about 1840.

About the same time as the banking system crashed spectacularly as a
result of a new cunning scheme by merchant wankers. It was indirectly
related to the Mississippi banking crisis but effectively crippled
global trade. I think in part triggered by a collapse in raliroad mania.
There was even a similar letter from the Bank of England reprimanding
the bankers for their "irrational exuberance" aka wild speculation. It
led to a campaign against the gold standard.

It seems that the global banking system has major crashes with an almost
predictable period of 80-90 years - 1847, 1929, 2008

Productivity is the ultimate benevolence. Technology pushes
productivity.

Increased productivity is good, but only when some of the proceeds are
shared with the people who are doing the work. In the Victorian era most
of the mill owners were out to exploit the poor for maximum profit. They
had enough money to buy the capital kit to enter the market and were
determined to keep it that way. The eventual rise of a powerful middle
class of managers and administrators eventually broke the deadlock but
the workers at the bottom of the pile had little option but to form
unions if they were ever to get a fair deal.

Ulitimately it came down to the golden rule:

He who has the gold makes the rules.

Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Greegor]

BS > Do pay attention. The trouble that Greece is
BS > now in will be fixed by Greece. The EU - as
BS > a whole - will under-write Greek borrowing
BS > until that happens.

G > Oh GOODY!   More DEBT!   THAT'LL fix em!   LOL!

BS > The alternative was to let them go bankrupt, taking down a bunch
of
BS > Eurpean banks that had lent them money. This is pretty much what
BS > happend in 1929, and the relevant politicians know enough history
to
BS > be aware of this, and didn't fancy going down that route again.

JL > There's a good argument that the government
JL > interventions in the '30s created a decade-long
JL > depression that otherwise would have been a
JL > year-or-so stock market bust.

Wasn't that from the GAO, too?
I seem to recall that was not reported by
a source that was easily dismissed.

JL > The "success" of the Roosevelt acts has
JL > entered our mythology.

Bread and circuses....

JL > It's not as though economists understand any of this stuff.

The Keynesian principles were violated OUTRIGHT
for decades and I doubt even the economic
catastrophe will force us to honor those reasonable directives.

Storing up in times of plenty to shore up the economy
in hard times seems like reasonable advice.

There are people who spend like money burns a hole
in their pocket. It seems to happen at all economic
strata but more crucially, IN CONGRESS.

BS > Right-wing nitwits are less familiar with history,
BS > and correspondingly more enthusiastic about
BS > repeating their ancestor's mistakes.

JL > History records that we had stock market
JL > bubbles and busts for hundreds of years
JL > before 1929, and that the first great
JL > government intervention in such a bust was
JL > followed by the first Great Depression.

BS > Make no mistake. The Greeks are in the
BS > process of reforming their economy.

JL > Beginning with a general strike.
JL >
JL > Already public servants are getting 10%
JL > lower salaries, and their retirement age
JL > has been raised from 61 to 65. There's
JL > a lot more  of that kind of belt-tightening
JL > in the pipe-line.
JL >
JL > When "public servants" getting a 10%
JL > pay cut has serious effects on an
JL > economy, you know that you have way
JL > too many "public servants."

Growing up in Minnesota I recall that there
was a genuine fear of welfare recipients
dominating the entire election process.

Reagan's welfare reform may have actually
saved the liberals there, though they would
probably never acknowledge that.

Sloman seems to be some kind of idealogue,
a sort of cartoon of liberal thought.

What other people might easily recognize as
indoctrination and propaganda, he blithely
considers to be factual scientific education.

Any idealogical challenge is an assault on his religion.

It seems like when liberals live in very liberal places
they start believing their own BS and they get
into the "crowd mentality" or "riot mentality"
where they presume they are superior and
they are large and in charge. Sometimes they get
so carried away with this they do outrageous
things.

It seems to be akin to "risky shift" in juries
or "confirmation bias" in scientific endeavors.

Police routinely whack a few heads and it
breaks the mental spell.

Consider Sloman's advice and ""proof""
almost as you would advice on US
economics from a Russian Stalinist.

Ask him how he likes capitalism! LOL

 

[Martin Brown]

On 14/05/2010 21:52, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 11:29:35 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 14, 5:18 pm, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
On May 14, 9:51 am, John Larkin

What created our modern wealth was engineers applying science.

Yep. They made machines to relieve human toil, to improve the human
condition.

That was not how it looked to the poor sods that had to work the machines.

Evil capitalists. Marx the Moocher should've stopped 'em.

Some of the capitalists were quite evil, as Martin Brown has pointed
out elsewhere in this thread. Trade unions were one of the mechanisms
that reigned in the greedy, evil, short-sighted minority.

No. Competition did.

But it didn't. The mill owners were small enough in number to form a
cartel and fix the wages they were prepared to pay. Anyone that broke
ranks by being too generous to their workers quickly found that their
raw materials supply became erratic. The quaker firms tended to be the
least bad employers but they were limited by the others. It would have
stayed that way forever if there had not been some counter balance to
the enormous power and influence that the ruling classes possessed.

See the history of Manchester link I posted earlier for a fairly
balanced account of what it was like in the Lancashire cotton industry
that formed the basis of Engels observations.

And it was frequently the exact opposite of competition. Effective
monopolies were created when Pilkingtons, Chance & Hartley who were
usually amongst the good guys but teamed up to drive other glass makers
with a better process to the wall. Hardline monopolistic practices of
undercutting and taking turns to make raw materials unavailable to
competitors. Once they had established a monopoly prices for finished
goods went through the roof and employee wages were driven downwards.

Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Greegor]

On May 14, 4:49 am, Bill Sloman <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 14, 7:16 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 13, 5:02 pm,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 13, 8:20 pm, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
The argument for progressive taxation is usually put in terms of those
with the broadest shoulders carrying more of the load.

Right.  That's how the Little Red Hen got a hold of all the other
animals' bread, greedy thing that she was.  She had broad shoulders.

I think you are mixing your metaphors. If you want to refer to
Orwell's "Animal Farm" you had better read it first.

This falls a
long way short of Marx -

JL > Marx was kind of an idiot.

BS > The same kind of idiot as Darwin, who
BS > laid out the obvious facts that
BS > nobody had noticed before.

Your knee jerks when somebody assails Marx.
Then you compaare it to ... SCIENCE! LOL

It's a cult like religion to you.

"The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e.,
 that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely
 requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer."
   --The Communist Manifesto

  See what I mean?

That pretty much describes the state of industrial workers in
Victorian England before the trade union movement got under way. Marx
was describing the way the world worked at the time when he wrote
that, based - in part - on the data that he got from Friedrich Engels,
who not only supported Marx financially, but also provided a lot of
the social statistics on which Marx based his work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels

Marx's economic writings were much more evidence-based than those of
his contemporaries. If Marx is a kind of idiot, it is the kind of
idiot that we should see more often.

Your comment demonstrates that you don't understand why industrial
workes are no longer paid a bare subsistence wage, and the
contribution that Marx made to the process that changed their
condition.

  Of course Marx himself was a n'er-do-well who never earned his keep,
a pseudo-academic parasite sponging off patron Engels.  Engels in turn
coasted off the family business.  Marx made his living guilt-tripping
Engels with econobabble, a fine tradition carried on by Marxists
today.

There was nothing pseudo-academic about Marx. He revolutionised
academic economics, in part by exploiting statistical data about the
actual economies of the time, quite a bit of which was collected by
Engels.

Marx and Engels are like deities to you!

You seem to prize academia over real world experience.

Not every idea that enters the College (arena)
of thought is inherently patently true.

You worship Noam Chomsky too, don't you?

  "To each according to need" really means "From you to me."  "Dear
Fred, I need that grocery money, and I deserve it, luv Karl, xoxoxoxo
P.S. Stop exploiting me! KM"

Perhaps. Marx didn't have an appealing personality. But he was doing
important - ground-breaking  - work, and Engels saw its value and
provided the financial and intellectual support that allowed Marx to
get on with it.

That you don't see its value reflects your - negligible - intellectual
status as a right-wing nitwit.

  Marx's moronic precepts ruined scores of countries, and killed tens
of millions, maybe hundreds.

The Bolshevik version of Marxism, with its emphasis on the "leading
role of the party" has damaged a lot of countries, and killed a lot of
people. The problem isn't with Marxism, but the concentration of power
into the hands of an unrepresentative and irresponsible elite - the
Communist party in Stalin's Russian, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's
Cambodia killed a lot of people, but the Nazi Party in Hitler's
Germany, the Fascist parties in Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain
weren't far behind, despite their violently anti-Marxist ideologies.

What? Your GOD didn't foresee the greedy
limitations in the real world? An ACADEMIC?? Nah.

 "Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean
  the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form
  of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no
  need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a
  great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying
  it daily."  --The Communist Manifesto

But, dim-witted Marx had it exactly bass-ackwards--industry was the
very salvation for the proletariat, pulling them up out of poverty.

Only after the trade union movement forced industrial employers to pay
their workers at above subsistence levels. Sometimes they achieved
this by direct strike action, but more often far-sighted employers
anticipated trade union activism by improving conditions of work to
make the jobs of trade union recruiters more difficult, in much the
same way as Bismark invented modern universal health care as a way of
stealing votes from his socialist political rivals.

You think your attitudes are SCIENTIFIC FACT, right?

"Industry?" you ask?  Productivity-amplifying machines, powered by
fossil fuels.  Let's get rid of those, shall we?

Why? You do like introducing silly straw-man arguments.

Why do liberals accuse others of straw man
arguments so frequently? Kinda stuck in
a high school (ACADEMIC) debate society mode?

It would be a
much better idea to improve industry so that the machines didn't have
to be powered by burning fossil fuels, but understanding how one might
do this requires a better grasp of technological possiblities than you
have ever demonstrated.

from each according to the abilities, to each
according to their needs - and is compatible with a society where some
people can afford fancier cars, bigger houses and finer wines than
their neighbours, though the rich no longer have access to the
services of a truly deprived under-class who will do almost anything
to save their kids from starvation.

Socialist countries are the ones who crush their peoples in poverty,
and whose people flee to the USA, not the reverse.

And your statistical evidence for this unlikely story is?

Forty years ago, the USA did offer a higher standard of living than
any other country in the world, but that hasn't been true for quite
some time now. It still offers respectable material prosperity, but
education and health care are both now so expensive that immigrants
from the more prosperous  parts of Europe have to be confident of
getting very well paying jobs before they could contemplate making a
permanent move.

You got rejected because you're a Marxist, Bill?
The INDIANS are flooding in on tricked up H1b visas
and most of them are very much CAPITALISTS!

This guy makes your case for you:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0wwK7fggOs&NR=1

The link doesn't work for me, and if it had worked I imagine that its
content would be just as half-baked as your argument.

Pity.  A conspiracy idiot.  He makes your case well.

And what is the "conspiracy" to which you think I might be referring?
You right-wing nut cases

You DO realize that being a Marxist and
citing Engels places you firmly into
KOOK LEFT territory, right?

To you, almost EVERYBODY is relatively right wing!

It's not like Marxists are seen as main stream thought, Bill!
LOL


-----------------------------------------------------------------

BS > do seem to share a number of delusions,
BS > but that can be explained without resorting
BS > to any conspiracy - simple-minded nitwits
BS > like simple solutions, and lack the historical
BS > insight to realise that these solutions
BS > haven't worked in the past and are even
BS > less likely to work now.

Translation:
Your ( ad hom) opponents are short sighted and
their solutions have failed, so we should do what YOU say.

Isn't that what that paragraph of pseudo-intellectualism said?

Your first language IS English isn't it??

 

[Greegor]

On May 14, 10:53 am, Martin Brown <|||newspam...@nezumi.demon.co.uk>
wrote:
[...]
MB > I presume that noone bothers in the US like buying
MB > stuff from another state to evade state sales taxes.

Yes, and states are quite testy about that!

I'm not a smoker but there are some HUGE differences
in state tax on cigarrettes, and there is a cottage industry
of truckloads of cigs sneaking from low tax states
into high tax states.

VAT sounds like it involves an insane amount of paperwork
which would increase the cost of production.

I still favor the FLAT INCOME TAX with all of the
thousands of exceptions, breaks and subsidies
pared down to mere dozens.
(handled by separate sheet or filing for each)

No more logarithmic tax tables, just
a minimum, a % and
get rid of the left handed peanut farmer tax break,
IRS can watch the FEW exception forms like hawks.

 

[Joerg]

krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 21:26:28 -0700, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 22:55:23 -0500, "krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz"
krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 10:08:36 -0700, John Larkin
jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 09:17:15 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 07:39:56 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
[...]

I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts
business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because
it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No
accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no
quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost.

Tax consumption. Don't tax savings or investment or job creation. If a
person is rich but doesn't spend any money, nobody can reasonably be
jealous of his wealth.

A serious problem with that: It punishes frugal people who have saved
for their retirement and rewards those who squandered everything. The
money they saved _has_ already been taxed.
Simple fix: don't tax income.

Yeah, but how do you deal with income that _has_ already been taxed but
not spent yet because people saved it for their retirement? A flat
VAT-type tax is the same as confiscating xx% percent of that. Not fair
at all.
As I suggested, exempt basics, like food, reasonable rent, generic
medicines. If people can afford a yacht, they can afford to pay sales
tax on it.
The point is that that money has already been taxed. It shouldn't matter if
it is used to buy a yacht. Taxing it again is wrong (one reason I don't trust
Roth IRAs).
As I suggested, eliminate income taxes and go to sales tax. Then
things are only taxed once.

You're missing the point. Those millions of people who have saved all their
lives will be taxed a second time. They've *already* been taxed on that
money.

Exactamente!

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.