But I'm sure it is all a plot by the Americans and Germans to dominate your great and proud people.

' "Simple monetary wealth" is what keeps a roof over my head, food on my table, and a shirt on my back. Working for altruistic motives is a luxury those of us who aren't independently wealthy cannot afford.' - who said anythign about alturistic motives - if you don't work and pay taxes the government programmes will go broke - thus it is not alturistic at all to earn money to pay for things to work.

Now maybe i would question how things best work, and competition in capitalist societies works pretty well (when their is government regulation to prevent monopolies) There is some question over whether the privatisation of the british rail system lead to competition which improved things or if it was done badly - the consluion i come to is not all systems are the same, capitalism (and any other human behaviour) unwatched can lead to exploitation of the system - the banking system in america paying companies to rate their financial products as A* or whatever the highest, safest rating was, the greek government lying about how much money they had and how much they were spending, when communism feel in russia - the move to free market capitalism which converted ownership of the state apparatus to shares in these factories for the employees - which they promptly sold a rock bottom prices because they couldn't afford to feed their famalies (and a very smart people got very rich very quickly)

I am fairly sure it is entirely possible to f**k up any system if we really try hard enough.

If the US government didn't keep bailing out the Auto companies then they would fail, be bought over and replaced by successful companies (possibly foreign) if they were not profitable then they'd be gone - it was for political reasons, to save face for local politicians and to avoid losing an entire industry (and local jobs for the people who vote for certain senators) to foreign investors that the Americans intervened in their 'capitalist' system.

So in a complex system like this i don't think anything Krellin has said has convinced me that Greece is f**ked because of socialismn - you hear a lot about the government's social policies because the governemnt can't afford to KEEP spending on them.

Have you any figures to show the greece had above average social welfare spending? (of course people are complaining if they are getting less money, they are infact rioting because they were promised money, whether they are public service workers or social welfare recipients, but that doesn't mean they were spending a higher percentage of GDP on 'socialism')

The greeks have a very long history, i believe it was stated that 3500 people was the ideal size for a democracy (not a representative democracyy, the kind of real one greeks had in their city states, where everyone had an equal say) I don't doubt that history has had a huge impact on current cultural norms in greece (including corruption and social spending) especially the 20th century history of militrary dictatorship, and failed governments.

What led Greece to what we live now is
1) The people of Greece elected a bunch of idiots to lead them
2) They retire earlier, have more holidays, and generally work fewer hours than most other countries
3) They treat rioting as a national hobby
4) It's too bloody hot to think rationally

What I find the most amusing is that Germany has loaned them billions of Euros (earned by hard working German tax payers who work longer hours and retire a lot later then their Greek friends), and yet still Greece is managing to portray them as a bad guy! The cheek of it is astounding!

@dexter morgan----Standard Oil never raised prices in Rockefeller's lifetime and economies of scale in petroleum led to similar monopolies almost everywhere. The break up of Standard Oil did very little. Gulf and Texaco already existed and were better positioned than Standard. I was always brought up on the story that Exxon only became Exxon because the Humble Oil people took it over. For whatever reason, most of the innovation in the oil industry has come from Amoco and might have come from elsewhere if Burton had not ended up in charge there randomly after the break up.

Rockefeller was never as evil as he was portrayed. His monopoly was primarily based on the Erie Railroad in the beginning and besides he owned the infrastructure he should have been paid for its use. The rebate system stories are garbage. The Erie happened to owe the traffic in and out of Titusville by virtue of geography and could not afford to build oil infrastructure and Rockefeller paid to build it and that was the root of his infamous shipping cost advantage that gave him control of refining.

The Northeast probably would have gotten Natural Gas decades earlier had the government stuff not been put in place to "control" Standard Oil and ended up being used by the mine workers unions to keep NatGas out for decades. And electrification probably would have happened more swiftly without FDR's jihad against the utilities.

Also the Big Four (Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker) received the lowest subsidies of the major railroads and were the only major railroad to pay back all of their bonds at par. Plus Huntington then built the Chesapeake & Ohio on his own.

Socialism and Unions? - ok just to point out, if it is fine to have no regulation at all then you can't stop groups of workers from forming a union. They will then use their collective bargaining power to make the most money they can by sellling their labour.

This is the same as capitalism but the workers can be considered a seperate company with a monopoly on labour. Really i don't see the comparison to socialism.

@gopher27, You say that the breakup of Standard Oil did very little... yet Wikipedia tells me that the breakup caused the values of the resulting companies to grow five fold in ten years... creating even greater wealth for Mr. Rockefeller. I'm not sure what your objection is. ...and you threw out the entire issue of the rebates by simply calling them garbage... that seems to be at odds with at least the general knowledge on the issue.

Some of your comments I cannot respond to without serious research - but I do find your comment about FDR delaying electrification rather amusing... and, to my mind, that puts doubt on your credibility on the other issues.

@orathaic, I love your comment about labor monopoly. How can the true believers in favor of "unregulated" capitalism not be in favor of that? Answer: they are hypocrites ...and class warriors. The true believers are not for such equality... their interest in having the "efficiency" of business monopolies yet ridding the world of "oppressive" "anti-competitive" unions is all about exploitation. If they are truly for a free-for-all with no regulation they should be cheering on unions as being bastions of freedom and profit for their members. ...just like any company.

I'd say the ramping up of production at Ford had a little more to do with it than the break up. Plus Walter Sharp and Howard Hughes, Sr. invented the double bore rotary drillbit and Walter Burton introduced thermal cracking. The most significant government response to Standard Oil was Jim Hogg baring Standard Oil from operating refineries in Texas after the Corsicana oilfield was discovered and they were then beaten to the mark in Southeast Texas by the Mellons and the Hill interests, which is kind of how unfettered Capitalism is supposed to work. But basically the Standard refineries could not even process the amounts of oil that were then available and their monopoly was crushed.

My point was that the rebate system stemmed from his having built and owning the infrastructure in question. The Erie and then the Pennsylvania Railroads did not build the holding tanks or the tanker cars. Rockefeller even owned the barrels. He paid for them and that was the source of the rebate system. Collier's intentionally left that part of the story out and the great scandal became the history.

Wendel Wilkie ran for president because he was a utilities company owner. Insull was found not guilty and the American Superpower guys were forced to massively restructure. A great many people lost money in utilities stocks because, well, they were the internet stocks of their day. FDR then passed a bunch of reforms. Key among them was that utilities had to be geographically contiguous, which none of them were. This forced a massive restructuring above and beyond what the Depression was forcing upon capital intensive, capital structure dependent companies. FDR crippled a lot of them for decades. For example Goldman Sachs became a major firm to certain degree because of their utilities department that was still untangling a great deal of this mess into the mid-50s.

As for unions, I never said I was in favor of monopolies. I just said Rockefeller was in the beginning a natural monopoly by virtue of economies of scale. Once he lost those economies of scale advantages by virtue of the industry becoming big enough to support multiple massive firm, his monopoly died pretty quickly. And the big losers from the UAW are the car buying public. And it was the UAW that created monopoly like behavior in the oligopolistic car industry with standardized labor contracts. Unions should have been left subject to anti-trust laws as they were before the Wilson Administration.

Most economists' outrage at FDR during the Depression was over his catellization of American Industry to support prices. Most of the pain of the Depression was felt by small firms that were crushed by massive firms who formed government sanctioned cartels. That is precisely what Hayek was decrying in The Road to Serfdom. And most corporations will quite gladly join with the government to destroy market based competition. Adam Smith warned of it in 1776.

@gopher: my comments about unions were a responce to this: "the Unions - which are the epitome of socialism"

I'm not saying they should or should not be allowed, or how best to regulate them, just that they are closer to a labour monopoly than a socialism - i'm not saying i favour monopolys either, complete government centralised control of an economy is essentially a government monopoly of all bussiness - or communist.

Regulation is the position of government (ie their place within any society, to regulate behaviour with laws, that's what we elect them for) - now too much regulation tends to strangle an economy with limitations, and too little allows uncompetative monopolys to form (whether as unions of workers or capitalist 'captains of industry')

@gopher
I do not believe that is true. It depends on the market...any market with a high barrier to entry can become a monopoly fairly easily. I will say it is amusing that you say monopolies can only exist with government help and then cite circumstances where the government felt there was a monopoly and removed it. And in one case created competition just out of the fear.

How did I just post a reply to a post before the original post happened?

@gopher27, so... you're against cartels and trusts... unless they involve Standard Oil? Or is it that you are only against trusts if they involve unions? I am also confused that you say that Standard Oil's monopoly "died pretty quickly"... when exactly did that happen? Until their breakup they dominated both production and sales... so I'm not sure what you are referring to. The anti-trust case against Standard was pretty solid from what I understand and the government identified "numerous and flagrant" violations by them (and successfully argued so up to the Supreme Court)... but you are saying that they (Standard) wore the white hat in all this and have been unfairly treated?

And no. "Most of the pain of the Depression" was *not* felt by small firms. It was felt by the common man... the unemployed man (and families). Labor, skilled and unskilled, bore the brunt of the Depression. On the scale of things, small firms is not my biggest concern... starving families is. These subsidies to support large projects were a source of jobs and created great improvements in the infrastructure. The result was much more positive than negative.

It is pretty hard to sustain an uncompetitive monopoly (one not based on a real productivity advantage) without government help.

Interesting little fact: AT&T promiscuously licensed the transistor for fear of having Western Electric hived off by the government. As a result, AT&T basically had to outsource their transistor production to Texas Instruments in the absence of patent protection. I had known that United Airlines used to be part of Boeing, but I did not realize that Untied Technology was too. The feds broke them up into an airline, a manufacturer and a parts supplier.

People were made better off by the existence of Standard Oil as consumers. Ida Tarbell attacked Rockefeller because her dad had been a competitor put out of business. In the end she said that she had done an injustice to Rockefeller. I'd say that by 1902 Standard Oil as a monopoly was dead. And the Standard monopoly never existed during the modern oil industry. They were a kerosene company. That is one of the reasons that the Rockefeller interests began buying up copper mining companies, because they realized that electricity was coming. Henry Ford just happened to came along and saved them.

The period when Standard was a monopoly they were a natural monopoly possessing a huge competitive advantage by virtue of size and the economies that came with that. Gulf and Texaco emerged rather quickly as serious competitors once the "modern" oil industry began and Shell and Anglo-Persian were forming and the Rothschild and Nobel interests were carving up Russia. The period of Standard's monopoly was quite short and never existed in the fuel oil era. Rockefeller kept getting richer because of the expanding fuel oil business.

Big business across the board got much bigger during the Depression. Most big companies made more money in 1937 than they had in 1929 and they employed more people. The disappearing jobs (as unemployment went from 3% to 15%) were from small firms, such as mom and pop stores put out of business by A&P, etc. And no wage laborers were not hit as hard as small farmers and small shopkeepers and small scale craftsmen. If one worked for a large corporation or the government, the Depression was an age of falling prices and slightly rising living standards as those unfortunate enough to be outside the system had their wages crushed. You may be misunderstanding my definition of small firms. I mean quite small. And independent businessmen and farmers were the one who lost their homes and ended up starving in the streets as their living standards collapsed.

@tantris - You dub me troll? I dub thee unable to grasp a concept. I never SAID unions were government - but of course you know that and intentionally misrepresented me, you silly TROLL. If you can not grasp the concept the a Union is a fantastic representation of Socialism, then you are either completely ignorant of Socialism or of American Unions.

GM, Ford, Chrysler all suffered in this country becuase they were FORCED to work under a labor monopoly, while their competitors largely built vehicle overseas with competitive labor rates. US auto industries could not break the unions because if any one company denied the union their excessive wages, they would target the company with a few selective strikes and shut down their operations. The result? Lost profits, lost market share in an increasingly competitive world where market share is not easily regained. Thus, the union had a monopoly, backed by the strong hand of the government. In Michigan I can NOT work at a shop that is union unless I join the union. FORCE unionization.

As for the unions themselves, when I worked in the staffing industry, I could put out the EXACT same worker in terms of skills - say a hi-lo operator, at 1/3 the cost of a union employee. And those union employees? Ever walk through a Union-run auto assembly plant? I have - lots of them - and what do you see? A guy making $70 k in wages and benefits pushing a broom. Guys stacking boxes and creating nooks to sleep in. I have a great deal of experience with union and non-union labor. In general, union workers (NOT ALL, but a hell of a lot of them) know that because their wages and raises are guaranteed (each according to his need) their work effort in MINIMAL. How much innovation has come from the UAW? Next to none.

So, Tantris - go ahead, be a troll now and dismiss my argument. and I do NOT dismiss everyone's arguments. At the time of my last post, nobody had made a decent argument. All the socialists just point a finger and say "it's capitalism's fault" without proving it, without separating wasteful government spending on social programs (socialism) from capitalism - where I start a company and keep what I earn, as mch as I can earn....and thereby employ more people and create more wealth.

YOU dismiss my arguments and call me a name (how childish...) with addressing anything I said. You, sir, are a troll. Oh...you pretended to adress something I said...but as I pointed out above, you purposely misrepresented what i said in order to dismiss my argument. Shame, shame. It's not that easy, son.


@jamie - If you think there is a hell of lot of research and design going on just for the hell of it, just for good feelings, by people that have no profit motive -- point me to this research, please. And don't point to universities, because those professors get plenty for what they do, and the universities get patents, grants, etc. (Money motives) So tell me WHERE exactly is all the non-financially motivated research being done? Medical? No...patents come from that....And in your socialist societies, there is no equality. The big brains doing to the big work...they live better than the rest...which is why the whole system is such a sham to begin with. It claims to be equal (each according to his need....well how much more house do the party big-wigs "NEED")


Ahhh....now I will sit back and wait for the angry insult to fly my way...

SOCIALISM BLOWS! Sorry, needed to get that off my chest. OK, my real question is how can presumably intelligent adults (I associate Diplomacy with intelligence) think that Socialism/Marxism/Communism (their proponents claim there's a distinction, but I've never seen it) is a workable thing? I realized that years ago, and take it for granted now, despite never having taken an economics class. I know it because I love history, and I know from that interest that every experiment with S/C/M ends in either a poorly run ostensibly S/C/M totalitarian state where there's very little equality (e.g. the entire Soviet Bloc) or in a poorly run ostensibly S/C/M totalitarian state that functions very much like a capitalist state (e.g. China). Defenders of S/C/M say that you can't look at those because they weren't truly S/C/M states. However, if every S/C/M entity ever attempted on a national level has ended in something entirely different, doesn't it stand to reason that a truly S/C/M is unattainable? It seems to me more like an alchemist saying that you can transform lead into gold, but anytime anyone fails at it, it's because they said the wrong magic words, rather than admitting his formula doesn't work. While S/C/M theories may have merits they are unattainable in the real work. Marx may have had good points in a well-thought-out plan, with the caveat that he didn't take the fallibilities of human nature into account. Essentially, S/C/M works if and only if people don't act like people

@ Krellin - +1. My dad's a Health & Wellfare Actuary, and he works alomst exclusively with Taft-Hartley Trusts and big unions. At his old company, every year the Japanese car-makers would pay his company to figure out how much more per car American companies spent because of pension & retiree benefits. Turns out to upwards of $2,500 per car. The Japanese don't have to pay this but the Americans do because of the Unions. The unions are just as much at fault for the peoblems with Detroit as the management is. Also, on your point about Union work effort. My uncle worked for a summer at WasteManagement. One day his crew on the truck was all non-union summer workers like him. They comleted three trash routes in about seven hours of their 8-hour shift and the management told them to jsut go home for the day. The average number of routes done by an all union-staffed truck in an 8-hour shift? Two. A goup of part-time workers were 50% more efficent at a job than guys who'd been doing it for years. I think tha speaks for itself.

@ LJ TYLER, is capitalism much better? It is a class system where the rich hold the power, and it is hard for a common person to break the barrier. As for your comment "Defenders of S/C/M say that you can't look at those because they weren't truly S/C/M states. However, if every S/C/M entity ever attempted on a national level has ended in something entirely different, doesn't it stand to reason that a truly S/C/M is unattainable?", The Russian Revolution was influenced badly because (I believe, others will disagree)
1: 14 different Western nations invaded and prolonged the Civil War,
2: I think that Lenin deviated partly from general Marxist views of a 'vanguard' party helping to support the people and spread ideas, by putting too much emphasis on the party,
3: The Revolution happened through almost a coup d'etat, though there was large support to get rid of the Kerensky gov. not many normal people were involved, and there wasn't enough industrial action (strikes, sit-downs, protests, etc).

As for the problems for unions in Detroit, it is because of unions that workers now have many rights that are being chipped away by both government and business: the 8 hour working day, the right to strike protest for higher wages, minimum wage, equal opportunity pay, an end to child labour (which persisted until the 20's in America) and many other things.

RAWR SOCIALISM.

whatever man. just because full-on socialism doesnt always work doesnt mean you get to oppose any increase in government. its not the same thing.

anyone for perfectly laissez faire capitalism in here? or were you okay with the pollution and false advertising and monopolies and stuff.

@hellat:

what, you mean you won't let us just buy greece? what's it worth per acre to ya.... $50/acre? $100?

I mean... as the 51st state you're talking about a whole bunch of electoral votes for the democrats. and two extra democratic senators! what's not to like???

@krellin: Your first statement is completely off, since the current 'Socialist' party in the Greek government was elected 6 months before the outbreak of loan crisis. The previous 'Capitalistic' party managed to TRIPLE the dept within 6 years of its ruling.

Of course, the 'Capitalistic' party says that the dept they inherited from the 'Socialists' was feeding on itself and got where it was (just like moving a credit card to another). Noone believes them other than their fans.

Yet, the 'Socialistic' party is only by name, in truth it's a capitalistic party with a Socialistic cloak. It gives more crumbs than the Capitalistic party to the working class, then takes measures to benefit their friendly companies just like all other capitalists.

Greece got where it is because we have been spending more than we were making for many years now, with loans granted due to high GDP growth (powered by fake logistics). Now that the growth has dropped, the previous lenders want their money back but the new loans are more expensive so we can't postpone them anymore, like all other countries.

Of course, there were dirty games played over the lending rate. Financial Times has an open war with us, each of its articles attacking us. Standard and Poor's followed. The greek loans have reached statistically impossible heights (11%) not depicting the true problem. All these were done because there are capitalists investing on Greek bankruptcy, which lowers euro's strength and makes the dollar a strong currency again.

@Tantris: There are of course huge internal issues, corruption being the greatest. I won't extend to that problem in this post. Right now, I'm showing that Greeks try to do what they always did (and what all countries do), get loans in order to pay previous loans. Yet there is no trust to that end anymore, for real and artificial reasons.

LJ Tyler, Do you know why the Japanese companies dont have to pay pension & retiree benefits like the American companies? BECAUSE Japan has a Universal National Health and Pension system!

Capitalism today = private owned companies that pays wages to labor.
Socialism today = government funded health and pension plan, education, other social benefits, infrastructure (all funded by taxes).

So I would say that capitalism is creating the wealth, and socialism is there to distribute wealth more fairly.

As Moonleaf stated, the problem in Greece is not socialism, it is corruption and greed of those in power, similar to the corruption and greed of banks in US that started the depression.
So what currently needed is more regulation against corruption and exploitation.

@Thucydides, this isn't a debate on whether socialism would work, though if you want to start a thread on that, I'm more than happy to contribute. And why 'full-on socialism doesnt always work doesnt mean you get to oppose any increase in government.'? Why can't I argue against an increase in government when it is at the detriment of the working-class and people in general.

I sorta feel sorry for Germany (the problem is neither the German nor Greek taxpayers fault, but they'll pay the most, in more than just money), but the conditions the IMF will place on Greece will destroy the country.

The conditions the IMF and World Bank would place on the US would destroy us. That seems to be the point of the IMF and World Bank...to give loans, and attach policy requirements that destroy countries.

Oh, and of course, making people in debt to them...

Ok, I'm sorry, but this is just stupid:

A) The 'Socialists' in Greece came into power to clean up the mess left by the previous (non-Socialist) government, who was cooking the books among other things. Blaming the 'Socialists' for the current economic woes is like blaming Obama for the mortgage crisis.

B) The cause of the current crisis is basically that investors fear that Greece will not be able to service their debt, and are therefore asking for higher interest rates to compensate for the risk. Now, you can call them whatever you want, but throwing names like 'speculators' and various other four letter words at them doesn't change the fact that you're asking for their money, and if they're going to invest in Euros, Germany is a much safer bet - so why *should* they buy Greek debt - out of the goodness of their hearts? If you do, why don't *you* go loan your savings to Greece, and accept the risk you may not get paid back?

C) If you think this is just a Europe-thing, I suggest you look at the forecasted deficit for the United States. The problem with the Euro is that Greece lacks control over their own currency, so they can't just print money to pay the bills, and accept the higher inflation levels. Greece is hardly the only country living outside their means, which is...

D) ... a democracy thing. People want shiny things, but they don't want to pay for them. Sooner or later the bill comes due, and it *hurts* when it does - not only because you've become *accustomed* to the shiny things, but because not only do you have to dial back your consumption to match your production, you're stuck servicing the debt you piled up in your gluttony years, which forces the cuts to be even worse than if people had just not run up such staggering bills to begin with.

E) re: "the conditions the IMF will place on Greece will destroy the country". First, the IMF is *supposed* to be a crappy deal that no one wants to call in - that's so people take it as the last resort it is meant to be. Secondly, as bad as the IMF is going to be, a Greek default - irrespective of what happens to the rest of the Euro nations - is going to be *even worse*, as *no one* is going to loan to them then. Instead of a reduction to a 4% deficit over a few years, they're going to be stuck with a 0% deficit *immediately*, as no one is going to loan them *squat*, and they'll have absolutely no way to pay for all the things their citizens have recently been given.

. It's going to be even worse for them when you count the ripple effects, since tourism is 15% or so of their GDP, and people don't tend to visit other countries when their own economies are in the crapper.

aaaand I'm an idiot - I'm sitting for dj bent and didn't log back in as myself. The above rant is by me