Posted on 09/04/2011 4:26:04 PM PDT by chickadee
In fact, in Britain, the US and many other developed countries over the past 20 or 30 years, the opposite has been happening. Job security doesn't exist, the trades and professions of the past have largely gone and life-long careers are barely memories.
If people have any wealth it's in their houses, but house prices don't always increase. When credit is tight as it is now, they can be stagnant for years. A dwindling minority can count on a pension on which they could comfortably live, and not many have significant savings.
More and more people live from day to day, with little idea of what the future may bring. Middle-class people used to think their lives unfolded in an orderly progression. But it's no longer possible to look at life as a succession of stages in which each is a step up from the last.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
That’s my particular pet peeve about China. They’re actually depressing demand in their own country relative to the global economy.
Weak currency + capital controls = reduced demand.
I think most of us would agree that capitalism - of the extremely “free” variety you seem to advocate - needs some regulation.
$5 a day - of course, thank you.
China has industrialized via foreign capital, and again, with the use of forced, often slave, labor. It is not a free market by any means. You have a skewed view of history and economics.
Nonsense. It is a Leftist BBC article. Capitalism is the most free open economic plan that ever existed. It is the Communists and the many other “isms” that have been planning and working for generations to undermine Capitalism.
Precisely my point.
After Capital created (or allowed the creation of, if you object to the personification) the modes and methods of industrialization, other systems used those modes and methods.
Capital is the radical cause.
To use another example, Hitler created Volkswagen through state power. Do you think he would have done so, or could have done so, without the modes and methods of his Capitalistic pal, the aforementioned Henry Ford?
Most of you Marxists, of course.
Sound familiar?
Actually, Ford was acting rationally as a businessman. He faced 300% turnover at some positions and couldn’t keep skilled labor. His workforce wouldn’t stay in high labor Detroit. Thus his wage increase was simply a reflection of a tight labor market for autoworkers. That’s simply the free market.
Furthermore, Ford believed that union leaders had a perverse incentive to foment perpetual socio-economic crisis as a way to maintain their own power. He fought unions.
I've never heard of this before. Could you cite a source?
Google Henry Ford and any history of him will include his wage increase.
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