Social Chaos Looms Ahead, No Way Back To A Well Ordered Past

[cronus]

U.S. crude fell 0.9% to $37.16 a barrel, sounds like good news doesn't it?

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

[pErvinalia]

I read some analysis recently (from BIS) that was making the point of how perilous the world economy is. Western debt is at record levels after the GFC (from badly designed attempts at priming the economy) but we havent seen anywhere near the same response in growth/productivity/wage-growth or employment. Apparently all set up for another crash.

[Seth]

U.S. crude fell 0.9% to $37.16 a barrel, sounds like good news doesn't it?

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Not for domestic shale-oil production. We need to impose stiff tariffs on imported Saudi oil till they quit their predatory actions.

The good news is that the shale-oil is still there, and will remain there, and the oil and gas industry knows where it is and how to get it and can switch it back on at a moment's notice, relatively speaking.

There's no putting that genie back in the bottle.

[pErvinalia]

In short, as the BIS economists put it, this is “a world in which debt levels are too high, productivity growth too weak and financial risks too threatening”. It’s impossible to extrapolate from all this the date the crash will happen, or the form it will take. All we know is there is a mismatch between rising credit, falling growth, trade and prices, and a febrile financial market, which, at present, keeps switchback riding as money flows from one sector, or geographic region, to another.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... MP=soc_567

[mistermack]

Can't we invent a type of crash where it's RICH people who lose all their money?
Have a property tax.
You have to declare every item of property. If you don't declare something, the state can take it.
And you pay tax on the value of your property, till the economy stabilises.

I volunteer to assess David Cameron. And Alan Sugar. And the Queen.
Ken Livingston can do Prince Charles.

[Seth]

Can't we invent a type of crash where it's RICH people who lose all their money?
Have a property tax.
You have to declare every item of property. If you don't declare something, the state can take it.
And you pay tax on the value of your property, till the economy stabilises.

I volunteer to assess David Cameron. And Alan Sugar. And the Queen.
Ken Livingston can do Prince Charles.

And you said you're not a Marxist. That's the very epitome of Marxism by the way, except they don't bother with the tax part, they just seize the property and kill the owner, which I suspect is next on your agenda.

By the way, the "rich" pay almost all of the taxes already because the non-rich don't pay any taxes and have to be supported by the rich to begin with.

[mistermack]

And you said you're not a Marxist. That's the very epitome of Marxism by the way, except they don't bother with the tax part, they just seize the property and kill the owner, which I suspect is next on your agenda.

By the way, the "rich" pay almost all of the taxes already because the non-rich don't pay any taxes and have to be supported by the rich to begin with.

The rich pay more tax, because they have more of the money than ever before.
The non-rich are not supported by the rich. The rich are supported by the non-rich, who do all the work, to get in return a tiny bit of the world's wealth.
The rich make money out of capital. The poor make money out of working.
I'm saying, tax capital when there is no work available, due to the rich having too much of the money.

When the rich have all the money, the work will dry up. Because there's a limit to how much the rich can or will buy.
If the non-rich have more of the money, more of it gets spent, and people can get jobs again.

[Seth]

And you said you're not a Marxist. That's the very epitome of Marxism by the way, except they don't bother with the tax part, they just seize the property and kill the owner, which I suspect is next on your agenda.

By the way, the "rich" pay almost all of the taxes already because the non-rich don't pay any taxes and have to be supported by the rich to begin with.

The rich pay more tax, because they have more of the money than ever before.

Yeah, they do. You got a problem with that?

The non-rich are not supported by the rich.

Oh yes they are. The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers pays only 3% of taxes, while the top 50% pays 97% of taxes, and the top 1% pays more than 40%.

The rich are supported by the non-rich, who do all the work, to get in return a tiny bit of the world's wealth.

They get what they earn, nothing more, nothing less.

The rich make money out of capital.

Which is used to employ the poor, thus giving them a means of earning money by inputting labor.

]The poor make money out of working.

Well, many of them. Many others, however, make money by taking it from other taxpayers more or less directly, either with their own guns or with the proxy guns of the jackbooted thugs of socialism who do it for them.

I'm saying, tax capital when there is no work available, due to the rich having too much of the money.

Zero-sum fallacy. Capital is not a limited resource that requires that it be taken from one person in order for another to have it. It is an endless pool of actualized labor.

When the rich have all the money, the work will dry up.

No it won't because the rich will never have "all the money." First, they cannot physically "have all the money" and second, capital doesn't sit in a vault like Scrooge McDuck's, it's in constant circulation building companies, products and jobs.

Because there's a limit to how much the rich can or will buy.

But there's no limit to how much the rest of society can or will buy if it's available to them and they have jobs with which to earn money to buy stuff. That's how capitalism and free markets work, you see...or evidently you don't see. Anyway, that's how economies actually function.

If the non-rich have more of the money, more of it gets spent, and people can get jobs again.

Not if they steal it from the rich and make it impossible for the rich to invest their capital in building companies that provide work and wages as well as products for the non-rich to buy.