PAST BLAST RE ENTREPRENEURS CAPITALISM RAND ETC

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2010/07/just-few-brief-syllables-on.html

JUSTIN IWTFYB TIMBERLAKE

Forget about naming your child Justin.

Thanks.

RE GLOBALIZATION OR CAPITALISM WHAT MATTER THIS OR THAT REASON

"For example, whether we used capitalism or socialism to extend globalisation we might still see that rise in inequality. So blaming capitalism, trying to fix capitalism so the inequality doesn’t occur, would be useless if our still increasing globalisation kept increasing that inequality."

American leftists and rightists are, and have been, both, globalizers, for their different reasons, and, in the case of the liberal elites, their pretexts.

review of Mervyn King review of Piketty

"...This is akin to my own reading of the inequality story. We have greater within country inequality as an almost inevitable consequence of globalisation. That same globalisation leading to ever reducing global inequality. So to call increased incountry inequality some inevitable part of capitalism as Piketty does seems a little strange. For it might well be an inevitable property of globalisation but not of capitalism. And, as ever, if we blame something on the wrong cause then we’ll take action to solve the wrong thing. For example, whether we used capitalism or socialism to extend globalisation we might still see that rise in inequality. So blaming capitalism, trying to fix capitalism so the inequality doesn’t occur, would be useless if our still increasing globalisation kept increasing that inequality."

PERHAPS IT IS A TERMINOLOGICAL DISTINCTION

Under slow growth, maybe it is better to phrase it this way:

capital is consolidated more rapidly, rather than being accumulated more rapidly. 

Capital is wiped out by war, depression, etc.

Slow, and especially negative, growth hinders capital accumulation, as economic downturns and depressions very well have attested. both serve the interests of consolidation, however, very well.

RE ZERO SUM FALLACY

This is actually an erroneous fallacy, so to speak.

It is actually a negative sum game, not a zero sum fallacy situation.

After NAFTA, and Perot's  giant sucking sound, China then was very quickly allowed to take over Mexico's newly created labor market.......and that of many others.

Americans had long since lost this share of work, first to Europe, then to Japan, and elsewhere, then to China and elsewhere.

re ASS ROAST PHYSICS

See Krugman's blog post: Abusing Relativity

RE SO CALLED SLOW GROWTH IN CAPITALIST NATIONAL ECONOMIES

"Piketty should explode that myth once and for all, although I am afraid that will not be possible.  To put it bluntly, the vast majority of those who accumulate capital do not create jobs.  Capital is accumulated more rapidly when economic growth is slow, and thus, it is in the interests of capitalists to keep it slow.  That is why, as I shall discuss in a later post, the nation grew more rapidly and shared income more fairly in the era when the federal government taxed its citizens more heavily and put the money into labor intensive enterprises such as dams, schools, the interstate highway system, and yes, even wars.  To allow capital to accumulate more rapidly will slow growth still further. That is exactly what has happened since the 1980s." 

Doubtless, re so called slow growth, one is talking, here, of so called national economies', and western economies' slow growths. This has not at all been the case regarding, especially, Asian national economies, notably Japan in the 50s through 80s and the Tigers, and later China after 1980.

Capital grew rapidly, and some salaries have risen quite rapidly, by rapid economic growth, but just selectively, and mostly elsewhere than in the West where there has been stagnation, wages declines, and stubborn globalized capital gains, largely for globalized (ie not strictly Western) companies and elites, and globalized command capital Asian and Russian national champions and their elites.

I would have thought that almost anyone, including even Piketty,  could see such things by now.

I guess that is rather what was meant, or what might be meant, by Thurow and others, by a zero sum game.

something you haven't got in Asia

Leverage. 

Why? Goes way back.

Wouldn't know what to do with it, if you had it, anyway.

Terms search: Kennan, China, etc.

Eastern Europe?

Ditto.

RE DOZENS CHINESE VIETNAMESE NAVAL VESSELS RAMMING EACH OTHER

What to call that?  Free trade? Oil market activity?

BLAST PAST

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-other-incalculable-blunder-bigger.html

RE DK POST

"...That's why virtually all our institutions, from the federal government on down, are so much weaker than they were a half century ago...."

I do not believe this to have been the case. 
Rather, the contrary.

I believe the federal is stronger, than either the stronger states, or locals.

Of course, they are relatively somewhat stronger, in a weaker, globalized, environment, where all entities are weaker than they might otherwise have been.

re Piketty DK POST

"Mark Blyth suggested that today's rich live in a privatized society featuring their own gated communities, private schools, and top-level colleges and universities, and therefore take no interest in how the rest of the population lives.  It would be even more damaging if they used their economic power to ensure macroeconomic policies that favored them at the expense of the rest of us.  I hope that this becomes part of the debate that Piketty has inspired."

Unfortunately, this happened long ago:  

"It would be even more damaging if they used their economic power to ensure macroeconomic policies that favored them at the expense of the rest of us." 

It happened starting in about 1930, and accelerated after 1945.

SOME ASTUTE OBSERVER NOTED THIS OLD POST

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2010/08/re-price-wars-post-situation-versus.html

and its footnote

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2010/08/re-re-price-wars-post-situation-versus.html

see also

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2010/08/re-jurors-comments-and-editorial.html

let me just put it this way

What Piketty says has been happening has been what I have characterized as what late post WWII globalization has been intended by its proponents to be.

CASTING AROUND FOR AN EXPLANATION FOR BESCHLOSS' ASSERTIONS IN CONQUERORS

I stumbled on this site, have not read it yet, but looks worth reviewing:

http://www.fdrheritage.org/fdr&holocaust.htm

Re Piketty comment

A nice thumbnail sketch.

Tructor:
"Yes, Piketty's book is important, but as your wife could clearly see, it states what the left have known since 1974: that the rich elite have been working the system to their advantage.
When you say, "It would be even more damaging if they used their economic power to ensure macroeconomic policies that favored them at the expense of the rest of us". I am baffled. Isn't that what they have been doing all along, and more so in the past 20 years of "off-shoring", robotics, mergers, etc, that have shrunk labor's share of productivity gains? Not to mention the past 6 years of "TARP", "QE 2, 3 & 4's", that have grossly bailed out banks & financial firms, rewarded the top 1% with $$ Billions at the expense of labor, home-owners, retirees and savers. 
During this period, Democrats have focused on peripheral issues set up by the right wing: gay rights, feminism, affirmative action, abortion, etc -- all Red-Herrings, important sub-issues, but not the main agenda: fair share of economic growth and GNP. Democrats have been marginalized in "defense" of what is already in the Constitution and recent legislation...
The real mystery is How & Why the working classes support all manner of right-wing propaganda and issues directly against their self-interest! 
Piketty has done us all a great service by revealing again why the "emperors" have no clothes."

Piketty wants globalized fairness, the unit of measure for the greatest good for the greatest numbers.

RE LORCH WAY TOO MUCH COVERAGE BOTCHED EXECUTION

Whatever sells to liberals.

re DK current topic

"...He belongs to the diplomatic tradition of John F. Kennedy, George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon and my own father, all of whom believed (yes, including Nixon) that diplomats were supposed to solve problems among nations.  (Hillary Clinton showed no sign of grasping this in her four years as Secretary of State.)..."  

I know Professor Kaiser is also a fan of Kennan. He introduced me to Kennan's work.  

Here is Kennan, re our Ambassadors, and also, I think, our diplomats, in general, here:

'FLASHBACKS'

"...ambassador to Moscow. The assignment has nothing to do with Soviet - American relations. The present ambassador, it seems, is leaving.  It is the election year of 1952. For purely domestic political reasons, the administration is afraid to leave the post vacant.  Foreign policy -- policy toward the Soviet Union -- plays no part in the decision.  It never occurs to people in the administration that the position of American ambassador to Moscow has anything to do with policy.  They don't really know, to tell the truth, what an ambassador is for...."  

"They don't really know, to tell the truth, what an ambassador is for." 

Without getting into the current Hillary matter, about which I know nothing, Kennan actually explained, in several works, echoing eg Tocqueville and others, at different places, why, structurally, the American political system does not do either diplomacy or foreign policy well at all.

The objections are, in some ways, similar to, and as valid as, those made by European emperors and their ministers to the European republics, especially Republican France, after 1815.  

He quotes Tocqueville in Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, "  a democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles."

RE DOLLAR

http://www.uncommonwisdomdaily.com/is-the-dollar-doomed-18228#.U2GCPuUhbZk.gmail