Charles, take some lessons from Hartmann, and use your smarts so basic dropouts like me can understand, you're worse then George Will.

You don't have to be a dropout to recognize this as utter, non-sensical crap.

we already discussed this here and the fact is, while there needs to be rules and regulations in place, infant industries rely on good government and liberalized trade relations with other nations to actually improve GDP. Japan liberalized trade relations in the 1960s and they took off from there. same with Korea.

The biggest fallacy with thinking "government will solve all problems and boost the economy" is that you are looking at good governance being present when in africa and south america and parts of south eastern asia that is so obviously not the case. in the case where a multinational corp comes in, the exploitation of the people is not due to the company, it is the government failing to act accordingly to the rule of law that it supposedly should stand for.

Another fact he overlooks is the role of one sided trade, that is colonies, that allowed protectionism to happen. the bounds of resources force trade to occur. when you can simply pluck resources from "uncivilized" peoples in countries comprised of brown and black people from the 16th-20th century, you arent forced to trade with anyone. Every country that is listed either had colonies, had large swaths of resources to trade with, or had large capital infusions from other nations and a relatively stable and non plutocratic government.

How does an infant industry work in countries without any of the aformentioned factors? like bolivia? or the congo?

It's amazing to me that someone like Mudede can be both so absolutely confident that they have the world completely figured out yet also so obviously wrong about everything.

another thing to consider. how many of the nations that succeeded have oceanic ports?

good points charles, thx for the links. i never really thought of african economies as being left outside, but it certainly makes sense. i think is worth looking into the latest food riots in haiti, bangladesh, coite de ivory, indonesia, parts of the philipines and others to realize that goverments have become absolutely incapable of solving the most basic necessities of the vast majorities and that their only role is to provide a place where mature markets can come in and do what they want. it matters little if these are "democratic" goverments if their shattered economies are asked by the IMF to compete with super-subsidized economies. these countries are never getting out of poverty and the market is only interested in slave labor. i love the term "mature" economies. i wonder if that term will replace "Empire. the free market was never free except for those who were already doing well.

Without state support, corporate power would be nothing.

Actually, without state support, corporations would not even exist. They are a legal fiction that do not exist in nature. Since the people through their laws permit the creation and existence of corporations, there is nothing unnatural about writing the rules under which they are permitted to exist.

If all these right-wingers want free trade, well, let them act as individuals rather than corporations.

and the question of government being needed is obvious. the question isnt whether there should or should not be government, but to the degree in which they decide policy within the nation.

for instance, are you for or against immigration and is open immigration free trade or protectionist? We lose a lot of smart, talented individuals because of our immigration policies directed towards highly educated foreigners. in the world of protectionism we would disallow open immigration to protect "real american jobs". but one doesnt improve the output of the country be constraining one of the factors of production. one doesnt expand the tax base by preventing programmers, IT developers, Biomedical researchers from coming here. Venture capital doesnt result in a NCO if the researchers are in the united states.

there is nothing wrong with writing the rules for legal entities, but one must have an objective when writing the rules. what are the rules regarding corporations trying to achieve?

I just ordered a copy of Bad Samaritans.

Ha-Joon Chang's statements in no way support Mudede's statements.

Otherwise Mudede's statements are correct, only because he is not just describing capitalism, but every type of government economic strategy. Capitalism's only virtue over other types is that it leaves some breathing room on the fringes of the economy for innovators, at least until those innovators sell out and another industry becomes "mature".

Thanks Bellevue Ave, I usually enjoy your economy-speak.

If Ha-Joon Chang thinks that Britain's economy today resembles the early 1600s, America's the late 1700s, or Japan the 1800s, in any way, shape or form, he's even stupider than the rest of this clip makes him sound. Japan is WHOLLY a creation of the post-war era, and so are the other two, to an extent rarely understood by most of the people who live in them. And even taking his assumptions at face value, as structural underpinnings, he's wrong, wrong, wrong. The underpinning of the capitalist system is the Industrial Revolution, which did not fucking start in the early 1600s.

He is correct to see a governmental role in modern economies, a feature since Parliament and Congress authorized the creation of canals and railroads. But countries that let private enterprise direct the flow win, and countries that don't lose. The same is true for trade: trade makes modern economies go, period. Opposition to free trade is death, pure and simple.

The problem of Africa isn't that they've been shut out by capitalism; it's mostly that they've been failed by strongarm authoritarianism, of the type that Mudede oddly favors, seeing as how it's destroyed his own country.

The inherent problem with classical Socialism is that no planner, or planners, are capable of adequately appropriating capital in a manner which allows for the continued growth of an economy. Planners could not have predicted that kids would fall in love with beanie babies and big wheels, or indie kids would love pre-worn, and holy clothes. ONLY market conditions are capable of distributing capital to where it is needed. Socialism is nonsense. Friedrich Hayek already devastated Socialism in his book The Road to Serfdom.

Ah, but is Charles a Socialist? Or is he an Anarchist? I'm beginning to wonder...

Anarchism is an even bigger joke.

Or is he a visionary, who rejects both categories, and dreams of a far-distant society, where needs are met frictionlessly.

This is the whole problem with the "infant industry" angelic chorus. How does the central planning commission on economic affairs in Burma know what industry to devote resources to, where do they get capital to start the infant industry, and how much of a cut are they taking for themselves out of the worker's pockets?

You mean the Star Trek Universe TAFKASB?

In Hartmann's review he outlines the success of Toyota and concludes, "In fact, the success of Lexus(and the Prius and every other Toyota) is entirely traceable to massive government intervention in the markets by Japan over a fifty-year period that continues to this very day."

What he fails to acknowledge is that Toyota's success is more directly tied to consumers choosing their products over the competition. Government intervention does not guarantee quality product. Every heard of the Yugo??? That was a car heavily supported by the state. Toyota has succeeded because they've produced better product than their competitors, not because of the Japanese government.

CA, some will argue that the government gave them the direction to pursue those more popular designs. how did the government know these things though? also, what about toyota and japanese car manufacturers exporting labor costs to non-unionized southern states in the U.S. while U.S. car companies continue to hemorrhage money due to detroit unions?

Toyota is successful because they have superior business vision and adaptability (which is what the market required), not because the government mandated them to pursue specific product oriented goals.

also, say what you will about japan being the awesome; they werent shit until they liberalized their markets, and they currently arent exceeding their 1980s glory because of government protection and loan shell games.

"Toyota is successful because they have superior business vision and adaptability (which is what the market required), not because the government mandated them to pursue specific product oriented goals."

Couldnt have said it better myself.

Charles:

I like to imagine that you actually know the difference between Capitalism and Corporatism, and your ongoing habit of confusing the one with the other is just some kind of wry editorial trolling.

Am I right?

eric, the transition cheney made from Haliburton to the White House was smooth because the institutions are in essence the same. capitalism is an ideology for a system of wealth control that has the state as its base.

indivdual's property rights are a system of wealth control that has the state at its base. are you seriously contemplating that because something is either allowed or dissallowed by the state, the state is infallible in application of power?

Charles, your writing is almost incomprehensible. You completely muddle through the topic at hand because you confuse terms. For example:

"Capitalism is not really about free and open markets."

What are you talking about? What do you mean in that sentence when you say "capitalism"? You mean the form of capitalism we have here in the state? Or as it is described in textbooks? Or what?

How on earth did you get to become a professor at a university?

Bob, he might be very good at what he teaches, but he is very poor at talking about what he hasnt learned about.

What and where does he teach?

His Stranger bio says he's an adjunct prof at PLU, but I'm guessing he doesn't teach economics courses. He probably teaches some bullcrap class where you can get away with dim insights such as: "The real condition of an open market negates capitalism".

Charles Mudede says: When lacking profundity, go for vagueness.

According to his Wikipedia (!) entry he is a lecturer in English Humanities at PLU.

I'm so glad that I'm not the only one that has trouble processing Charles' posts. I'm college educated, I consider myself reasonably intelligent, and yet the only things Charles writes that I understand are his weird Amanda Knox posts.

economist @7 and Bellevue Ave @9 talk about the rules that create and control corporations.

The same is true for money.
Our dominant currency is based on specific rules that humans have created.

And those rules lead to:
(1) liquidation of objects into money,
(2) hoarding money, and
(3) exploitational behaviour due to the "Money = Debt + Interest" mechanism of positive interest.

This forces people (& corps) to compete against each other for a finite supply of money, in order to pay back an increasing amount of debt. This ever-widening debt-hole cannot be filled unless some people/companies "lose out" by going bankrupt.

We need other monies written with different rules that help us avoid those behaviours.

Specifically negative-interest currencies, or mututal-credit (zero-interest) currencies, which facilitate less exploitative trade and decision making.

We cannot cure the problems created by positive-interest currency simply with better State rules and management of corporations and economic trade.

Charles @24: I disagree.
The institutions aren't basically the same (expect insofar that they are hierarchically organized). Cheney's transition from state to corp to state was easy because America has facilitated the emergence of the classic definition of fascism, which is the combining of state and corporate power. US corporations have used their wealth power to successfully insinuate themselves into the halls of state power -- essentially merging the interests of the two into a largely neo-fascist power structure. I hate to use that word because people have a strong emotional reaction to it, but it is technically the most correct one.

Charles@24:

This system of ours, in which profits accumulate privately, as risks and loss are borne publicly, is not capitalism.

But its masters call it capitalism, if only when they speak of its virtues, and so by calling it capitalism when you speak of its vices, you reinforce the lie they tell, that to benefit from our economy is to benefit from capitalism.

Now combine this with King George issuing "food aid" to Haiti that consists of underpriced subsidized American food to kill off the local Haitian food supply ...

The rich get richer and the poor need to learn to use guns when they riot. Soon.

Will @34
I totally disagree that using guns is a good idea. If you study popular protest actions you will see that as soon as the people use violence, it legitimizes the State using violence. And the State ALWAYS has more and better violence than the people. It's a loser's gambit.

The poor and allies need to learn to organize and strengthen cooperative trust culture to defend against the splittist tactics of the dominant, power-money culture.

Ultimately, peaceful protest will be the most successful -- especially if we want to end up with a peaceful society. It just takes longer and is less immediately "thrilling".

"Now combine this with King George issuing "food aid" to Haiti that consists of underpriced subsidized American food to kill off the local Haitian food supply ..."

Yes. It's better if they just starve to death, so that they dont allow themselves to be used by the capitalist pigs who only care about money. And all the people whose lives were devastated by the Tsunami should have told their American rescuers to turn around and take their bourgeois asses home. Yep.

CA:
The options aren't "subsized American food" or "starve to death".

Local Haitian farmers will survive and thrive if we don't dump underpriced food on their markets and run them out of business.

Food Aid needs to consist of temporary food supplies ALONG WITH local farm rehab and repair.

Strengthen the local economy, don't destroy it for the benefit of Archer Daniels Midland.corp, which is typically what happens.