The easiest way to solve the job problem may be to simply mandate 3 days of public holidays per week. Friday, saturday, and Sunday. If that's not enough let's make thursday a holiday too. Wages will go way up, and so does inflation but most people don't have a lot of cash on hand anyways. Nope it won't create real wealth and won't improve productivity but it seems we got too much productivity anyways and too little demand.
Do you even know anything about the history of the USA? Slavery existed up until 1865 and the racial segregation up until 1968! Not to mention the abandonment of the Gold standard in 1971 by Nixon, thereby creating money out of thin air and deceiving the whole world with all those fake worthless pieces of papers (= the US dollar). It cracks me up hearing "FREEDOM AND OPPORTUNITY":eek:
If everyone is forced to work, then it's a totally different system of Government where the rights of the People (aka the State) take precedence over the rights of the individual. A free society is one where citizens are free to succeed or fail based on their own work and merit. Collectivist Governments that put the groups rights above the individual, are notoriously corrupt, wasteful and despotic. This is not the type of system that fosters wealth creation. The second problem is not all work is equal. Some people are more productive than others. And much of that additional productivity comes from additional sacrifice. Why would a neurosurgeon go to med school for 12 years, so 1 hour of his time equals similar time from a snow shoveler? Or a pizza maker? Why would an engineer take years to hone his talents in exchange for similar time from a butcher, or a janitor? The problem here is that people intuitively know the value of their skill relative to others, and if forced to exchange their time on an equal basis, will choose *not* to sacrifice years and $$$ at engineering school, medical school, or business school. They'd stay at home and deliver pizza. Then innovation, technology and progress would stagnant and even known technologies would go totally unused because people wouldn't invest years of their time and effort to master a losing proposition. IOW, living standards would go to shit. Then, if you suggest we create some type of 'relative value system' for persons of varying skills sets, that's the type of system we already have. Buyers and sellers arrive upon a mutually agreed upon price expressed in units of currency.
Given our political, and globalized socioeconomic culture... I don't believe our economy can be "fixed". The BEST we are likely to do is adapt to a a dumbed-down everything.
Not really. Lincoln printed interest-free Green-backs. Same idea. Every dollar in circulation today - electronic or paper - is a debt-bearing note, accumulating interest to the Private or Central Bankers who bought that debt (with credit). The whole idea is to get away from this parasitic system where private banks literally create money out of thin air, then loan it back to us, at interest. The FED supposedly retires that interest back to the Treasury. But the private Bankers don't !!! Citi, JP, Goldie, MorganChase. All of them, keep that interest. So instead of issuing Treasury bonds that are purchased by these private banking leeches, Congress just instructs the Treasury to print the money needed, credits the Government account, then Congress spends it accordingly. It makes no difference to the price level. Either the Government prints it out of thin air, or the private bankers print it out of thin air. Except when Congress does it, we don't pay interest to those carpet-bagging motherfuckers. And it's not just American banks profiting from the interest on the US national debt, but all the private bankers of the world, buying all the sovereign debts of the world, parasitically feeding off the labor of the entire planet like some global slave plantation ruled over by these sick Banker fucks. I didn't realize this before. What clued me in was Greece. They kept talking about how European banks were heavily exposed to Greek debt. Then I put 1 + 1 together and realized it wasn't just consumer and corporate debt banks issued credit for. But also national debt. What had me is FED regulations were changed back in the 60's (I think) to remit all interest earned on US bonds back to the Treasury. A net wash, right? But it's the private bankers that are exempt from destroying that interest. They keep it. This way, they milk hundreds of billions - soon to be TRILLIONS of dollars - in annual interest payments off the backs of the collective American Taxpayer. Year after year. This why America is so fucked up. There's literally hundreds of billions going out the window to pay bankers interest on money they created from nothing. And that's the big plan. Run up the national debt so high, the economy implodes, and bankers take real assets -- PHYSICAL PROPERTY --- as collateral on debt created out of NOTHING. A flick of pen. An electronic journal entry. Look at Greece, right now. They're surrendering physical territory - entire Island chains!! - to pay these guys off. And the sickest part about it? We - the broader economy - pay the cost of that debasement the moment Bankers create that credit and buy Government debt. WE are the ones who pay higher prices so bankers can have the privilege to counterfeit money they use to literally steal our labor, physical property, and eventually, the Country. This is EXACTLY what Thomas Jefferson warned us about and lamented. Exactly. Fucking sick.
during the great depression we were an exporter. My reading indicates that Europe got a little protectionist and did not suffer nearly as badly as we did. If we replace income tax with tariffs we will unleash our economy with massive stimulus and we will create jobs in manufacturing because our manufacturers will start off with a 10% edge in our home market. Since we are the market everyone exports too. We should net jobs. My advice to govt is that we phase the 10% tariff in intelligently and we workout reciprocal tariffs with other countries so world trade adjusts properly.
Scataphagos I appreciate your inputs to the various threads. I also don't think there is a real answer to the mess we are in. It's way above my grade level. I don't think rampant manufacture without limits is sustainable. There are limits to resources.There doesn't seem to be limits to population or human desires.