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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Real Man who wrote (16415)	1/18/2009 8:50:48 AM
From: axial	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71475

There's an area between the ideological and economic extremes being discussed. Broadly speaking, it's social democracy. A nation can still embrace capitalism, and competition by defining the rules - the economic construct - as opposed to making the assumption that the market will always define and respond adequately to national and public needs. There's no such thing as a free market anywhere in this world, or between any players in this world. There have always been favored and protected industries, restricted or encouraged trade, economic blocs and so on. Within states, from time immemorial efforts have been made to create and preserve economic constructs viewed as advantageous. Perhaps the first step in addressing the matter is to openly acknowledge that the free market is a myth - but that capitalism and competition are not myths and can be effectively harnessed, consistent with definitions of the national and public interest. Government and capitalist forces should exist in balance, because government is the only agent that can speak for the people: only government, by democratic process. Government has the ability to create the economic construct in which industry and commerce act; in so doing, it can mediate affairs in the interests of the electorate by which it is empowered. Government is the cop on the beat, and when the regulatory and constructive force of good democratic government is removed, it's not deregulation, its abdication of responsibility to act in the broad interests of the people. On the question of health care, if we recognize that the so-called free market doesn't exist, then we might be able to redefine health care in terms of what people want for their country, as opposed to what the health-care industry is prepared to give them at a profit. We should also recognize that neither privately-funded nor publicly-funded health care programs emerge as clear winners: both have inefficiencies and strengths. So why not work towards creating the best publicly-funded health care system in the world, efficient, and utilizing the best available practices, including private-sector practices? Reagan said, "...government is the problem." Wrong. Excessive government is the problem. In the presence of good government and good regulation it's doubtful that the current economic and financial crisis would ever have grown into the global monster it's become. Jim

To: Real Man who wrote (16415)	1/18/2009 12:58:04 PM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 71475

I didn't study the first years of USSR well enough to discuss it, but one thing is the meaning of a word in a theoretical sense, and another thing is what is means if implemented in real life. Any society has structures, that grow old and need to be replaced. A free market economy does this easily by reducing the money flow to failed organizations, and some democracies are quite good at restructuring based on efficiency. I guess most western style governments have introduced mechanisms in the public sector, that reduces the flow of money to inefficient parts of the government. The key element in a democracy is, that voters can replace the government, so that's also good. USSR did not generally implement mechanisms that let inefficient organizations get replaced by new organizations, and that was the primary cause of its demise, and it is still the primary cause for inefficiencies in former USSR countries. "Universal state medical care" as it was designed in USSR is not a success. However, a totally free market economy in health care also doesn't provide the best results. Everything seems to indicate, that the optimum is somewhere in between.