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?

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

Couldnt have said it better myself.

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?

"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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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".

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.

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.