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Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ahhaha who wrote (7959)	4/11/2006 2:44:15 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24758

Capital base against what liability? Against a much smaller liability. The earning power of US assets comes from foreign labor. At what point do they become Americans? The United States was founded on rebellion against property rights claimed by King George. I believe it was the absence of voting rights (especially when it came to taxation) that came along with their property rights that bothered the Colonists. The first two US settlements lost most of their members in the first three years because even while people were starving to death, others were playing in the streets instead of working the fields. They resented going to the fields to feed someone else's children. This all changed in Plymouth as well as Jamestown when people were allowed to own their own land and trade off what they grew, instead of that land they farmed being deemed communal and their output communal to the settlement. Instead they instituted a system of taxation (to pay back the original investors) not unlike what we have today. Eventually the Colonists resented the deals they made with those back in England and they resented paying for England's big military. When the Communists took away property rights for the farmers and made farms communal with centralized control, 10 million Chinese starved to death. It was such a disaster that the policy was changed to allow the small farmer to own their output but the land was never returned to them as something they could own outright. Even if they have the money they can't buy the land they farm. They have little to no say in what happens to their farms as China gets more and more industrialized. This will become increasingly troublesome in China. They are still serfs without the knights and lords. The only power they have is that the Communist bosses fear them, fears their numbers. All the past revolutions in China have started with the peasant farmers. How can you trade what you do not own except as agent of the government? People acting as agent for the government are never as good at making bargains as individuals acting in their own self interest. Capitalism thrives under a few conditions, which with no effort of their own, most Americans were born into: The rule of law, the idea that people are not ruled by men or committees but by fundamental laws ...and those laws have to be just in that they fall equally across everyone, that everyone is subject to the same laws. This was a novel notion when it arose in England, that the King was subject to the same laws as his lowly subjects. Do you really think the Communist political bosses are subject to the same laws as the peasant farmer in China? That those bosses waste any time discussing whether their actions violate the Constitutional rights of the ordinary Chinese? Personal property rights. Without property rights and the means to protect those rights, why would you save, someone (or the collective mob) could just take what you have for their own use. We have many laws protecting property, but those rights aren't always easy to enforce everywhere, in the ghetto for instance. You can see what it does to commerce in these areas. Without laws and a police force protecting your property how can you save? No saving, no capital to be a capitalist with. I guess you could just bribe someone in the government to throw capital your way to start a biz like they do in China. We tried to bring business to places without secure property, with enterprise zones in the cities. Ha! If you look at the poorest nations you find a deficiency of those two things, the rule of law and property rights. Now in the last 50 years, as we became more Socialist, the US has gone in the opposite direction passing laws that are only imposed on red heads and not brunettes and there have been some of the worst attacks on the bundle of rights we call private property rights but we still have the basis for these two things thoroughly woven into our laws, they are embodied in our Constitution as well as our local laws. Most Americans don't see their importance because they've always been there. It is those just arriving who value them the most.