Wow…So, you can cherrypick one particular statistic that convolves a lot of different things and was measured over a very limited period of time and then cherrypick a few countries and arrive at such a broad conclusion. That is truly impressive reasoning!
So, how does the fact that your own cite shows that Taiwan and South Korea both had higher rates of productivity increase (105% and 90%, respectively) over this time work into it? By the way, both of those countries have lower rankings than the U.S. (or any of the other countries except France) on Heritage’s economic freedom index that the OP seems to hold in such high regard.
Well Taiwan and South Korea are both developing their manufacturing industries with new technologies to increase productivity. Just as the USA is doing.
They experienced more productivity growth in the 2000-2010 decade. But productivity growth in the USA was still impressive. Much better than France, Canada, Italy, Germany, Japan and the UK.
No, not all of the poor and the middle class, just the ones that vote Republican. The Republicans’ economic plans offer nothing but relieving taxation for the rich and gutting the social safety net that the poor and middle class will need if things go south for them personally, which will certainly be they case if they elect Republicans. So anybody who votes for that plan is voting against their own economic interests (who is not rich). That is not good decision making.
A lot of poor people vote right wing due to issues beyond economics including abortion, religious rights, them damn foreigners, moslems, white man in the white house etc etc.
So, should we try to emulate the economic systems of Taiwan and South Korea more? By your metric, they are doing better.
…which has very little to say about anything. Maybe the US was just slower to adopt technology that Germany and Japan had already put into their factories in the 1990s. (My girlfriend, who spent 9 years in Japan, is always talking about how far ahead the Japanese are in adopting the latest technologies.)
The point is that your figure is basically one snapshot of a very complex picture and yet you are using it to make grandiose claims. This is typical of modern conservatives, who have adopted an attitude that you base your conclusions on your ideology and then cherrypick facts to support them.
That would be incorrect. Let’s look at the average annual manufacturing output per hour growth rate during the 1990-2000 decade.
France = 4.2%
United States = 4.0%
Japan = 3.6%
Germany = 3.0%
United Kingdom = 2.8%
Italy = 2.3%
Canada = 2.1%
The United States achieved higher manufacturing productivity growth than Japan, Germany, Italy, Canada and the UK in both the 1990-2000 decade and the 2000-2010 decade.
Really? We’re not allowed to discuss the ideas of one of the most influential economists of the 20th century without inviting incivility? I’ll remind you that Friedman won a Nobel Prize in economics, the Clark medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Medal of Science.
If you can’t discuss his ideas civilly, that tells me a lot more about you and the strength of your ideas than it does about Friedman. The fact that he’s routinely ridiculed and dismissed out of hand on this board tells me a lot about the state of rational argumentation on the left.
Anyone who’s actually read a lot of Friedman’s works would know that he believed that capitalism was the best system precisely because it helped the poor more than any other system. Global trade has done more to uplift poor countries than any government redistribution scheme. Lowering business regulations and barriers to entry helps the poor far more than it helps the rich, because the rich tend to have captured the regulatory environment to their own ends anyway.
“Sweat Shops” are the bottom rung on the ladder of prosperity, necessary to attract capital and build the infrastructure of the poorest nations. Well-meaning but naive leftists and protectionists who attempt to shut them down and / or force them to use expensive first-world labor conditions destroy the hopes of mobility of the poor by cutting off that bottom rung. This was a theme Friedman went back to over and over again, and he backed it up with hard data.
Big companies like GM and GE, and big financial firms like Goldman Sachs love big, intrusive states. The more regulations there are, the more opportunity to twist them to their benefit, and the harder it is for small entrepreneurs to compete against them.
It’s the poor that benefit most from economic freedom. It’s the entrepreneur and the guy trying to open a small store on the corner who benefits the most from less regulation.
LOL, you really think that. A lot of poor people will always be poor people, it is the duty of society [and by extension government] to ensure we don’t let people slip to far down. And it is your best interests to do this, you do not want a pissed off poor class with access to guns in your country. This is how revolutions start. Yep I said it, disparity between rich and poor leads to revolutions.
I will not disagree with a lot of what you have said, in Australia lowering tariffs, floating the dollar, selling off banks etc etc have been wonderful and it is why Australia is in a strong position today.
I agree with the sweatshop idea. I don’t like it but I agree with it.
Your point about big companies is wrong. Strong regulation is required to ensure these companies do not continue to dominate the economic landscape and destroy competition. I like to use the example of the banking system, when something is to big to fail we have a problem. Creative destruction is key to allowing new competitors and business models to emerge, without this we are doomed to repeat the past. Consumer protection, lowering of tariffs, tax breaks for entrepreneurs, government favoring smaller companies these are all good examples of good regulation.
Who exactly do you think wrote the banking regulations? Bankers. Who did Geithner consult when figuring out how to disperse TARP funds and under what conditions? The very people he was giving the money to.
Did you know that before the TARP bailout happened, the banks were negotiating with each other and their insurers about how much of a ‘haircut’ they’d have to take? They all assumed that they were going to only get a percentage of what was owed, and they were trying to sort out the losses and who would take them.
Enter the U.S. government. Once they came in to put liquidity back into the system, all talk of ‘haircuts’ was gone. ONE bank offered to take a 2% cut, and Geithner didn’t even take that.
And now, the Fed has announced QE3, an open-ended injection of capital into the markets. So stocks soared, and the bankers are happy - because the government just gave them a massive gift.
When the state gets very big, and controls a lot of the economy, the details are too much for the bureaucracy to deal with. So it has to bring in consultants and experts to help shape regulations. These are people that come from the industry that is going to be regulated. Just what do you think they are going to lobby for? If you let ex-Goldman people write the regulations that will affect Goldman Sachs, just how much of an advantage do you think they’re going to make sure ‘their’ guys get?
Chris Dodd was the best friend Hollywood had in the government. Guess what he’s doing today? He’s head of the Motion Picture Association of America, despite knowing nothing about motion pictures. What he does have, however, is connections in government.
Robert Rubin was one of the highest officials in Goldman Sachs. Then he went into the Clinton Administration, heading the Nationnal Economic Council. Then he became Treasury Secretary, and pushed for the Mexico Bailout - which has been said to have been a bailout of U.S. banks. The largest underwriter of Mexican debt? Goldman Sachs. Rubin was also a driver behind the repeal of Glass-Steagall.
After the Clinton Administration, Rubin joined the board of Citigroup, in a role described as ‘murky’. He has received more than $51 million dollars in that role.
This is typical of the revolving door between regulated industries and the government. Both Democrats and Republicans do it. They do the bidding of lobbyists, and in return when they leave office they get cushy jobs in the industries they ‘regulated’. But most of the corruption is just plain old bias - by necessity, regulating an industry requires that people who know that industry write the regulations. And even if they’re trying to be good citizens, they’re going to be biased and steer the regulations in the direction that helps their industry.
Hey, remember Peter Orszag, president Obama’s first director of OMB? Guess where he is now? He’s Vice President of global banking at Citigroup.
You might want to read more about the Revolving Door in Washington. From the article:
See, if you’re an SEC official, you know that a very lucrative job is waiting for you once you leave office, so long as you’re not TOO hostile to the big interests looking to shape regulations in their favor. Then they hire you, expecting you to trade on your connections and insider knowledge of the SEC to twist future regulations to their benefit. And the people you’re trying to influence know that so long as they play ball, a lucrative job is waiting for them as well…
One day the left will wake up and realize that its blind belief in big government and big regulation has resulted in the rich getting richer and the poor and non-connected being kicked in the teeth. Their support for teacher’s unions has hurt poor inner city children more than anyone. Their support for anti-globalism in the guise of ‘protecting workers’ has hurt the poorest people in the world more than anyone else.
Milton Friedman understood that. He saw what happens when government gets too large - the little guy wanting to open a store or who has an idea for a new product is hammered with demands for licenses, inspections, sign-offs, and pays full freight on taxes. The big guys get tax exemptions and lobby for even more regulations - but only those regulations that give them a competitive advantage.
In certain ways Friedman was a bit hacky. Although undoubtedly successful as an economic theorist and historian, he was too prone to sweeping pronouncements where unqualified; the simplifications necessary for tractable theory really should have pushed him to greater caution. And the naïve Popperianism on display in his famous article on methodology was cringeworthy to anyone except economists ignorant of the philosophy of science, and its pernicious influence remains to this day. Grr.
That could be just a pet peeve of mine.
Anyway. On this topic, it does a certain amount of ignorance to dismiss him out of hand. Whatever else he was, he was no crank.
Technically true…but if you look at the period 1950-1973, your own cite shows that the U.S. had the lowest productivity growth rate of those that you mention! From 1973 to 1990, it had the lowest except for Canada. And, over the entire 1950-2000 period, the U.S. had the lowest productivity growth rate! (Probably when updated through 2010, that would no longer be true…but I doubt the U.S. would jump to the lead.)
So, again, we are left with what I said before: “The point is that your figure is basically one snapshot of a very complex picture and yet you are using it to make grandiose claims. This is typical of modern conservatives, who have adopted an attitude that you base your conclusions on your ideology and then cherrypick facts to support them.”
My point is simply that you are cherrypicking to get the result you like. And, you are doing this in a variety of ways: You are choosing the metric and the time over which the metric was measured to get your desired result, even though choosing different time periods (and presumably different metrics) yield very different results.
You are also making some very simplistic classification where you are classifying every country there other than the U.S. as “socialist”, which is bogus. And, in fact, as I pointed out, the OP’s metric of the Heritage Economic Freedom Index ranks one of these countries ahead of the U.S. and the most of the others not too far behind. I am not saying that I think that particular ranking is so great, but my point is that both you and the OP seem pretty much seem to be making what your ideology want to be true the truth and then cherrypicking evidence to try to support it.
This line of argument assumes that we have an accurate measure of where lives are better and worse. There are many ways to measure the goodness of life. There are many indices that seek to put a number on the concept. Besides the HDI and the IHDI, there’s the one I linked to in post #51 and we could doubtlessly find many more. They do not all agree on how the USA, western European countries, and other wealthy countries stack up against each other. They do all agree generally that wealthy countries have better quality of life than poor countries. So we can broadly say that the greater economic freedom of the first world makes life better than the policies of the third world. We cannot firmly say that people in other first world countries have better lives than Americans do. The data do not support that.
Likewise for your specific claims, such as that Americans have lower wages. Since when? The median income in America in higher than anywhere else except Luxembourg. How could that be true if our wages were so low? Longer workweeks? The Europeans average 39.7 hours, not too much different from us. The idea that Europe has created an economic paradise vastly and indisputably greater than ours simply does not hold up.
There is no quantitative measure of how “socialist” a country is. The Index of Economic Freedom gives us the best overall measure of how free an economy is, and it’s compiled quite rigorously. By that measure, the United States economy is less free than Canada or some European countries. That’s what the facts say. What’s absurd about telling the facts?
Not so. The article that I linked to earlier specifically looked at financial statements from the 2,000 largest corporations and calculated the effective tax rates that they paid. Its conclusion is clear: the rate that American corporations actually paid is higher than the rate paid by corporations in almost all other countries.
[quote]
A more honest way to phrase that information would have been to say, “There is no country in the world in which a particularly rich person is not permitted to spend his own money for medical treatment beyond what the government guarantees.” Yes, we know that even in Canada, a very rich person can hire a private doctor to live in his guest house and be available for private medical consultation at any time. That doesn’t mean Canada’s health care distribution system isn’t actually socialized, as you dishonestly implied.
According to this graph, in the USA government covers 53% of health care. In Switzerland, for instance, 59%. In Israel it’s 60%. Countries with agreed-upon socialized health care systems range from the upper 50’s to the 80’s. I’ve already said that health care is one area where the USA has less government control over health care than most other first-world nations. I was merely pointing out that the gap isn’t as large as some might think.
The notion that our slightly-less-government-controlled health care system produces worse health results than Europe’s socialized systems also does not hold up. If we look at a numerical measure like longevity, the USA ranks behind some European nations but ahead of others. Some nations where the government pays for more of health care, such as Portugal, Poland, or Romania, get worse results. There are other reasons to be skeptical of the wonders of government control. A study presented at the meeting of the American Surgical Association found that patients on Medicaid were not only more likely to die than patients on Medicare or private insurance, but also more likely to die than the uninsured. Another study found that in some cases those on Medicaid were less likely to have cancers detected early than the uninsured, or those with private insurance. If government-provided insurance for the poor isn’t better than no insurance, why would the poor want to have it?
I wouldn’t doubt for a second that democracy causes prosperity. That would support, rather than tear down, the notion that economic freedom causes prosperity, because democracy and all types of freedom travel together. When there’s democracy, the people can protect their freedoms and demand new ones. When people have freedom, they can protect their democracy.
I would suggest that democracy does not cause prosperity but in fact is the best system that allows us to have a system of government that is reliant on the rule of law. Once we rely on the rule of law [assuming fair laws of course] we can have a fair fight in a capitalistic sense. So again it is rule of law that allows prosperity and there is nothing stopping a dictator doing this.