Futures Forum: "Ignore the populists, neoliberalism is the best system the world has ever known"
This is a very powerful idea:
Futures Forum: Are things actually getting better?
Futures Forum: Technology and economic progress
Futures Forum: Using technology to transform enterprise
Especially that the free market has benefitted not just the 1%:
Futures Forum: "Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century."
Not everyone is convinced of course in the 'universal benefits' of neoliberalism...
Whether it comes to 'freedom':
Futures Forum: The promises of technological innovation >>> "So, if networked communication and cybernetic technologies are so potentially liberating, why are they so authoritarian in the forms they currently take?"
Or more profitable technologies:
Futures Forum: "Where are the flying cars?" or, "What happened to derail so many credible ideas and prospects?"
Or encouraging us to buy stuff we don't need:
Futures Forum: Planned Obsolescence: and The Men Who Made Us Spend
Or stuff which is useless or even harmful:
Futures Forum: VW... and making 'wholly opaque disposable vehicles' >>> rather than making vehicles which 'run for a long time and are easy to fix'
Or having politicians get their priorities rather mixed up - which doesn't help real enterprise from happening:
Futures Forum: The empty promises of 'Job creation' - and the real possibilities from 'entrepreneur-led revitalisation' and the 'return of a spirit of self-reliance'
Or having politicians subsidise and so skew the market in favour of the big boys:
Futures Forum: Subsidies and social engineering: or why we build roads.
Which ends up trashing human lives and the planet:
Futures Forum: We are all truck-drivers now ... The free movement of goods, increased carbon emissions and the destruction of manufacturing industry
In other words, free markets do not bring universal benefits.
Here is a perspective from the Washington Post from last summer:
The stuff we really need is getting more expensive. Other stuff is getting cheaper.
A holiday shopper browses the electronics section against a backdrop of televisions at a Target store in Newport, Ky., on Black Friday in 2015. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Sociologist Joseph Cohen of Queens University is fond of saying that “America is a place where luxuries are cheap and necessities costly.”
A recent chart from economist Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, illustrates this well. Since 1996, the prices of food and housing have increased by close to 60 percent, faster than the pace of inflation. Costs of health care and child care have more than doubled. The prices of textbooks and higher education nearly tripled.
On the other hand, the prices of things like mobile phone service, toys, software and televisions have plummeted over the same period.
Or to put it this way:
Center for a Stateless Society » No, Capitalism Isn’t Making Us All Richer and Richer
And here is a perspective from the UK from today's Guardian:
Forget austerity, here’s who is to blame for your empty pockets | Patrick Collinson | Money | The Guardian
With thanks to:
Smart meters – free market and privatisation gone bonkers | East Devon Watch
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No, Capitalism Isn’t Making Us All Richer and Richer
If you frequent mainstream right-libertarian publications on anything like a regular basis, you’ve probably seen more than one of those breathless articles about how capitalism is making the ordinary poor person richer than a medieval king. For example Calvin Beisner: “No matter how rich you might have been” 150 years ago, “You could not have enjoyed air conditioning or iced drinks during a hot summer…. You could not have taken or viewed photographs, listened to recorded music, or viewed… motion pictures.” (“Material Progress Over the Past Millennium,” FEE, Nov. 1, 1999). I’ve long been infuriated by the way such puff pieces ignore both the inflation in the cost of necessities like housing, and — perhaps more important — the increasing precarity of a growing portion of the working class. Finally someone in the mainstream press — the Washington Post, no less — is pointing out the same thing (Christopher Ingraham, “The stuff we really need is getting expensive. Other stuff is getting cheaper,” Aug. 17).
Yes, computers, smart phones and big screen TVs are getting a lot cheaper. But a lot of much more fundamental stuff is not. “Since 1996, the prices of food and housing have increased by close to 60 percent, faster than the pace of inflation. Costs of health care and child care have more than doubled. The prices of textbooks and higher education nearly tripled. Over the past several decades they’ve all been increasing in price at several times the rate of inflation.”
And for a rapidly growing segment of the working class, job security is becoming a thing of the past. The fastest growing sectors of the job market are precarious jobs with “independent contractor” status where there’s little assurance of being employed next year, next month or even next week. And precarity overlaps with financial fragility. As Neal Gabler points out at the Atlantic (May 2016), “Many Middle-Class Americans are Living Paycheck to Paycheck.” Most Americans lack the savings to deal with a car repair or other unexpected expense of even a few hundred dollars.
Precarity includes not just short-term uncertainty about even minimal basic income needs, but growing indebtedness as a way of life. Stagnant working class incomes have worsened capitalism’s already troubling crisis tendencies towards underconsumption and idle capacity, and rising consumer debt has been the system’s way of generating demand.
The things which are most essential to life and basic material security also happen to be the things which capitalists, in alliance with the state, have been most successful at enclosing with artificial property rights and extracting rents from. The landlord monopoly — by which vacant land is engrossed and enclosed and then either held out of use altogether, or opened to use only in exchange for tribute — is the obvious example.
But the healthcare industry is riddled with things like drug patents, licensing monopolies that restrict the number of practitioners, and corporate hospital chains protected by all kinds of government entry barriers and accreditation rackets that drive up overhead with enormously wasteful and irrational capital spending outlays and bloated senior management salaries. The health insurance industry is a racket in its own right. But the main source of cost inflation is on the provision of service side, with all the interlocking monopolies and cartels that make any procedure in America cost several times what it does elsewhere in the world.
College education has become a necessity mainly because of cooperative efforts by the state, employers and the higher education industry itself to inflate credentialing requirements for employment. And given this artificially created necessity, and the willingness of the student loan industry to ensnare new victims, higher education takes advantage of the ever higher tributes flowing in from its captive clientele to pour billions into wasteful building projects and grow the numbers and salaries of administrators at several times those of faculty and support staff. Students, meanwhile, incur a lifetime of debt peonage to pay this inflated tuition, with the likelihood of years of unpaid internships before they can finally get into a bottom-rung paid white collar position.
Even in the case of stuff that really is getting cheaper, of course, the falling price doesn’t dispense with questions of justice. Most of the price of those electronic goods comes not from the actual labor and material inputs required to make them, but from the embedded rents on patent and copyright monopolies. And Internet access on those computers comes through data pipelines controlled by robber baron telecom monopolies that operate fist-in-glove with the state. So the stuff is becoming cheaper — but not nearly as cheap as it should be. And the difference is going into the pockets of parasitic rentiers.
No, Henry VIII could never have obtained an air conditioner or computer. But Henry VIII didn’t spend half his month’s income on rent, or live a single paycheck away from eviction.
It’s time for libertarians to stop putting a positive spin on how wonderful things are under capitalists’ and landlords’ unholy alliance with the state, and start attacking that collusive power relationship. It’s time to abolish all monopolies and artificial property rights that make the necessities of life expensive, and turn the productivity of our collective intellect into a source of rents.
Yes, computers, smart phones and big screen TVs are getting a lot cheaper. But a lot of much more fundamental stuff is not. “Since 1996, the prices of food and housing have increased by close to 60 percent, faster than the pace of inflation. Costs of health care and child care have more than doubled. The prices of textbooks and higher education nearly tripled. Over the past several decades they’ve all been increasing in price at several times the rate of inflation.”
And for a rapidly growing segment of the working class, job security is becoming a thing of the past. The fastest growing sectors of the job market are precarious jobs with “independent contractor” status where there’s little assurance of being employed next year, next month or even next week. And precarity overlaps with financial fragility. As Neal Gabler points out at the Atlantic (May 2016), “Many Middle-Class Americans are Living Paycheck to Paycheck.” Most Americans lack the savings to deal with a car repair or other unexpected expense of even a few hundred dollars.
Precarity includes not just short-term uncertainty about even minimal basic income needs, but growing indebtedness as a way of life. Stagnant working class incomes have worsened capitalism’s already troubling crisis tendencies towards underconsumption and idle capacity, and rising consumer debt has been the system’s way of generating demand.
The things which are most essential to life and basic material security also happen to be the things which capitalists, in alliance with the state, have been most successful at enclosing with artificial property rights and extracting rents from. The landlord monopoly — by which vacant land is engrossed and enclosed and then either held out of use altogether, or opened to use only in exchange for tribute — is the obvious example.
But the healthcare industry is riddled with things like drug patents, licensing monopolies that restrict the number of practitioners, and corporate hospital chains protected by all kinds of government entry barriers and accreditation rackets that drive up overhead with enormously wasteful and irrational capital spending outlays and bloated senior management salaries. The health insurance industry is a racket in its own right. But the main source of cost inflation is on the provision of service side, with all the interlocking monopolies and cartels that make any procedure in America cost several times what it does elsewhere in the world.
College education has become a necessity mainly because of cooperative efforts by the state, employers and the higher education industry itself to inflate credentialing requirements for employment. And given this artificially created necessity, and the willingness of the student loan industry to ensnare new victims, higher education takes advantage of the ever higher tributes flowing in from its captive clientele to pour billions into wasteful building projects and grow the numbers and salaries of administrators at several times those of faculty and support staff. Students, meanwhile, incur a lifetime of debt peonage to pay this inflated tuition, with the likelihood of years of unpaid internships before they can finally get into a bottom-rung paid white collar position.
Even in the case of stuff that really is getting cheaper, of course, the falling price doesn’t dispense with questions of justice. Most of the price of those electronic goods comes not from the actual labor and material inputs required to make them, but from the embedded rents on patent and copyright monopolies. And Internet access on those computers comes through data pipelines controlled by robber baron telecom monopolies that operate fist-in-glove with the state. So the stuff is becoming cheaper — but not nearly as cheap as it should be. And the difference is going into the pockets of parasitic rentiers.
No, Henry VIII could never have obtained an air conditioner or computer. But Henry VIII didn’t spend half his month’s income on rent, or live a single paycheck away from eviction.
It’s time for libertarians to stop putting a positive spin on how wonderful things are under capitalists’ and landlords’ unholy alliance with the state, and start attacking that collusive power relationship. It’s time to abolish all monopolies and artificial property rights that make the necessities of life expensive, and turn the productivity of our collective intellect into a source of rents.
Center for a Stateless Society » No, Capitalism Isn’t Making Us All Richer and Richer
And here is a perspective from the UK from today's Guardian:
Forget austerity, here’s who is to blame for your empty pockets
It’s less to do with government cuts and more to do with profiteering by private companies
Piling on the agony as household bills rocket in price. Photograph: Alamy
The mood of the country, we are told, is turning against years of government-imposed austerity. We are fed up with being squeezed by spending cuts; we are rebelling against 1% pay caps – and we are absolutely right to do so. But the real reason the average household feels so badly off is less to do with government cuts and more to do with profiteering by private companies.
Research this week by Santander blows the whistle on the ever-growing portion of our monthly pay that goes on largely unavoidable household bills. It looked at bills for gas, electricity, water, TV, phone and so on – and found they have escalated in price far, far ahead of average wage rises. Since 2006, average pay packets in Britain have gone up by 19% in pounds and pence terms (in other words, not adjusting for inflation). Meanwhile, the average gas bill has gone up 73%, electricity 72%, and water 41%.
These are extraordinarily large real rises, and all the grimmer for families and pensioners on very tight budgets. These are the bills that simply have to be paid, leaving families with harsh choices about what to cut elsewhere.
For those on average incomes, it means the axe falls on the nicer things in life, such as the annual holiday or the occasional meal out. At the bottom of the income scale, already suffering from cuts to welfare benefits, the “choice” is not between an iPhone 5 or 6, but between shivering or eating.
At the top of the utility companies the view is very different. Just weeks after arguing against consumers having their bills capped to save them £100 a year, the boss of one utility, SSE, was given a 72% pay rise to £2.92m after this “robust performance”. The reward comes after years of bumper dividend payouts which have doubled from 32.7p a share 10 years ago to 62.5p most recently.
The water companies have also been fabulous performers – for the stock market, not you. As a study by the University of Greenwich found last month, consumers are paying around £2.3bn more a year in water and sewerage bills to the privatised companies than if they had remained in state ownership.
It found they have invested no significant new shareholder equity, but have managed to extract nearly all of their post-tax profit as dividends. The report calculated that every household is worse off by around £100 a year as a result.
The Santander research into household costs found that it wasn’t just the energy and water companies stiffing us with rising bills. Council tax has risen by 27% since 2006, while TV, phone and broadband prices are up 24%. Every bill that Santander looked at had risen faster than wages. What’s more, its research didn’t include the biggest bill for most young adults – the rent.
Is the rise in bills a failure of privatisation? Mostly. But it’s also a failure of the sector regulators who are immersed in the neoliberal consensus that private markets and competition always provide the best outcomes for consumers. They can – but very often do not.
In my column last week I asked why Britain’s smart meter rollout was costing £11bn and France’s just £4bn. One industry insider contacted me to say that it was partly because France’s “Linky” programme is for electricity meters only, whereas the UK’s is both electricity and gas. But it’s also because France does not have competition among utility providers, and we do.
Here, each supplier has to install smart meters only for their own customers, which means they can’t just go “street to street” – they have to contact individual customers wherever they live, agree for them to allow access and organise engineers around that.
The result is that we will be wasting billions in duplicated activity, with the bill passed on to consumers to satisfy the rules on “competition” – and also ensuring shareholders continue to receive those dividends.
Forget austerity, here’s who is to blame for your empty pockets | Patrick Collinson | Money | The Guardian
With thanks to:
Smart meters – free market and privatisation gone bonkers | East Devon Watch
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