Global Capitalism Has Written Off The Human Race

[Ichingcarpenter]

Economic theory teaches that free price and profit movements ensure that capitalism produces the greatest welfare for the greatest number. Losses indicate economic activities where costs exceed the value of production, thus investment in these activities is curtailed. Profits indicate economic activities where the value of output exceeds its cost, thus investment increases. Prices indicate the relative scarcity and value of inputs and outputs, thus serving to organize production most efficiently.

This theory doesn’t work when the US government socializes cost and privatizes profits as it has been doing with the Federal Reserve’s support of “banks too big to fail” and when a handful of financial institutions have concentrated much economic activity. Subsidized “private” banks are no different from the former publicly subsidized socialized industries of Great Britain, France, Italy, and the former communist countries. The banks have imposed the costs of their incompetence, greed, and corruption on taxpayers. Indeed, the socialized firms in England and France were more efficiently run and never threatened the national economies, much less the entire world, with ruin as do the private US “banks too big to fail.” The English, French, and communists never had to print $1,000 billion dollars annually to save a handful of corrupt and incompetent financial enterprises.

This only happens in “free market capitalism” where the capitalists, with the approval of the corrupt US Supreme Court can purchase the government, which represents them and not the electorate. Thus, the taxation and money creation powers of government are used to support a few financial institutions at the expense of the rest of the country. This is what is meant by “markets are self-regulating.”

Several years ago Ralph Gomery warned me that the damage done to US labor by jobs offshoring was about to be superseded by robotics. Gomery told me that the ownership of the technology patents is highly concentrated and that breakthroughs have made robots increasingly human in their capabilities. Consequently, the prospect for employment of humans is dismal.


http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/global-capitalism-has-written-human-race-5532?google_editors_picks=true


NASA/Goddard Study Models Irreversible Collapse Of Industrial Civilization


A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.



http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists

[jtuck004]

1. A continuation and worsening unequal wealth distribution is part of the subject

of this book as well "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty discussed Here.

Among other things, he things the assumption that it is going to equalize because of market forces is wrong, and shows why. I will have to look at that second article and see where they hit along the same lines.

And I do think software is going to start replacing people higher up the food chain. That is going to provide some real challenges.

[DeSwiss]

2. I don't agree with the assertion of the 2nd paragraph......

...that the theory doesn't work as they suggest. It does in fact work exactly as it was designed to. To defray all expense and loss onto someone else is the core essence of Capitalism. It is all based upon a fairy tale economic science which allows for ''interest'' to be created from and based upon nothing -- just like its ''money'' is. You cannot make something from nothing, except in Capitalism.

That is a theory which doesn't hold up, in any of the sciences, except in capitalist economics. All fiat monetary systems are frauds. No matter what form of government controls, interventions, stock market brakes and sell-off controls, etc., they are all based upon The Big Lie and are manipulated to maintain a semblance of solidity. There is no such thing as a free market, and thus all of them are fraudulent.

And all markets essentially have the same flaw, this mutation. It is what makes the institutions of capitalist finance a cancer within a society. Because its growth and its benefit is only for its own sake. We are ''The Tricklees.'' We are always secondary, when counted at all.

- And now it has reached a stage that all cancers do when allowed to run rampant and free: It's metastasizing and will kill every ''little'' thing in its path. The rest who remain attached to it will be taken along for the ride.

K&R

''Rome’s ruling class was unable to restrain its rapacity, even in its own ultimate interest. Adams saw what liberals are rarely willing to admit—namely, that a system based on corrupt practice cannot be saved merely by tinkering with it.''

'The Economics of Human Energy' in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University

[daleanime]

3. K&R....