The Luck of the Irish Runs Out 809
theodp writes "Looks like threatening to take their ball and leave paid off for US tech firms. The Irish government announced plans this week to tap the welfare state and working class for much of the $20B in savings they've pledged to find over the next four years, but the austerity measures will not touch large businesses like Microsoft, Intel, Google, HP, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pfizer, which created jobs and fueled exports in Ireland after being lured by low corporate tax rates. More than 100,000 Dubliners took to the streets to protest the bailout plan, calling for the Irish government to default on the country's debts, and demanding an immediate election. 'We should default,' said a retired union worker, 'the idea that the workers of this country should pay for the gambling of the billionaires is disgusting.'"
Re:People would protest against raising corp. tax (Score:3, Interesting)
Non-story (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's not the country's debts. (Score:1, Interesting)
Mod up. Exactly right.
Don't Guarantee ALL. Hand scrutinize all debts, and default on any that are over the size of the largest Irish one (meaning nobody in Ireland loose, ony foreigners).
And you CAN default on debts and keep local companies - the two arguments are not related.
Ony the Irish taxpayers are being stiffed.
Re:Why it won't affect the companies.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Marxist much?
Without capital there are no jobs, people with capital are the ones that do in fact provide jobs by using the capital to organize tools/land/labor into a system that adds value to the society in total.
Saying something to the tune of "importing cheap junk" is completely blind to the fact of how difficult it actually is to set up a working business, to meet the payroll every month, to keep the business afloat by somehow ensuring that business stays cash flow positive.
If you are not a gov't created/maintained/subsidized/bailed out monopoly, you are actually competing against such monopolies as well as you are competing against other legitimate businesses (and when I say 'legitimate', I do mean businesses that are not subsidized by the gov't.)
If it was a trivial matter - to "import cheap junk", to make it all work, to have a business that doesn't just run out of saved/borrowed money and die, something that actually works and employs people, while at the same time benefiting the society by providing it with wealth (and wealth IS the 'cheap junk', it's not money. People want 'cheap junk' and they are ready to part with their money to get it, because they it's this 'cheap junk' that gives them the quality of life they enjoy), it takes very hard work, very stressful hard work, very time consuming hard work, the kind of work that you do not do when you are on the clock, the kind of work, where you either really compete by innovating, by constantly working.
If it was as trivial as you make it out to be, then obviously there would have been many more companies doing it and there would have been much fewer people looking for just a 9-5 job.
Most people prefer not to work that hard, most people prefer the stability of a paycheck, most people do not in fact create wealth for their societies (and I mean wealth, as opposed to money.)
It's always easy to diss somebody who is taking this work and making it big while doing it, but this completely disregards the fact that most who try to do this - they fail. They lose money as opposed to making money. They end up losing time and capital and a calm sort of life, which most people have when they are working on a salary. Working for yourself, taking a risk, building a business, hiring people and ensuring they do get their paycheck at the end of the month, getting the business into the cash positive territory, growing a business, generating a profit and all of this, while providing the society with the wealth it is demanding, this is truly amazing anybody can even do it.
I put the regular businessmen much higher on the ladder of achievers than most other people, probably save for the most prominent scientists, who are at least at the same level if sometimes not more in terms of wealth generation for the society in total.
Indeed the highest ranking people AFAIC (and I really mean it) are those, who first invent/build something, some new idea, some new invention and then are even successful at bringing the idea to life in form of some useful product.
It's much harder to do that, than to be a pure scientist, but of-course we need pure scientists as well, it's not a or-or proposition.
Dissing businessmen who are there, making the society wealthy, that's easy. To understand what many of them actually do and how this increases the overall quality of life for all people, while HOPEFULLY making them rich, that's different.
AFAIC again, these people deserve much more respect than they actually get from the general public, but they are mostly hated I'd say due to the fact that SOME of them do end up much wealthier than any normal 9-5 worker and thus people are jealous of them and end up hating them, while not realizing even that they are benefiting from the dedicated and hard work of these very people through everything, from job creation, to wealth acquisition, to generally a basically working economy and stable and improving society, which depends on a working economy.
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:4, Interesting)
Going default will be a short-lived remedy. The country will go back to 1990 in terms of market appeal and productivity. And yes, if the big tech companies leave, the hope of reacquiring a high-tech knowledge industry will go away as well.
Paul Krugman's latest column [nytimes.com] addresses this. The main point is that Iceland let the banks default, while Ireland took the banks debts as public debts and guaranteed it. In the end, Iceland has recovered while Ireland's people have to bear the burden due to austerity measures.
Iceland didn't let it's banks default as part of an act of clever crisis management even if that's what the members of the firmly right wing Icelandic independence party will confidently tell you. What happened was that a series of governments (dominated by the independence party) and stuffed full of free market fundamentalists sat around from the mid-nineties to 2008, deregulating everything, letting the banks grow at a fantastic pace and crippling the various organizations that were supposed to regulate the financial industry. For years they just held their ears shut singing: "lalalalalala... I can't hear you!" whenever somebody criticized the state of the icelandinc banks and the fact that they had become 12 times the size of the national GDP meaning that the state was therefore unable to back them up in a crisis. By the time the crisis finally hit the Icelandic government was completely bowled over. The Independence party had by now formed a coalition with the Social Democrats who proved just as useless as their right wing coalition partner and did little other than watch while the Independence party (who also dominated the central bank) fumbled about and caused things to fall apart. There were no emergency plans in place, nobody had anticipated this. After all, the infallible all-knowing free market should not act like this should it? They finally decided, at the climax of an epic panic attack, to nationalize the most endebted bank, Glitnir [glitnir.is], which caused the whole icelandic banking sector to collapse like a row of dominos. Krugman (probably unintentionally) gives you the impression that the Icelandic Government that presided over the 2008 collapse allowed the banks to default by clever design when in reality they simply "pulled a Homer" a phrase which wikipedia defines as: "to succeed despite idiocy". Like Mr. Krugman I pity the Irish for their successful efforts to postpone the pain by a couple of years because it made the problem exponentially worse.
Re:It's OK To Raise Taxes On Rich Corps. (Score:2, Interesting)
Nothing bad will happen if corporate tax rates are raised in Ireland! That's just fear-mongering by the poor-hating conservatives!
The US has been doing that, *and* heaping on all kinds of other taxes, *plus* tons of regulation on manufacturing and business, along with increasingly-heavy emphasis on unionization with incredible pension and healthcare costs for ages now, and our economy, trade balances, and employment levels are just...oh, wait.
Never mind. Carry on.
Strat
Ireland has been the European experiment in being extremely 'conservative' and corporation friendly, extremely low taxes, friendly regulation, etc. Look where it got them. Then take a look at fx Scandinavia.
Re:If you really want to know, from The Economist (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh, let's piss off the Germans . . .grand idea . . . in Europe, that always ends in tears.
Some people here in Germany would love if that were true (in the sense that people in Europe really would be polite or at least thankful for lending them a helping hand (in exchange for buying from German arms manufacturers in the case of Greece IIRC)). I for one am glad that the image of Germany had changed from something to be afraid of to something to at least respect, maybe even like in some instances. The image of Germany for all its helping fellow European nations (say what you will, even a selfish deed with selfish conditions that does good for the receiving end is good for both not only the giver) seems to be deteriorating again recently. I guess there will always be malcontents and chronically rebellious people everywhere who think that burning down banks is a way to change what they claim to care about. And then there are the tabloids who essentially do the same (sometimes worse), but purely in written form. It were great if the current crisis would teach people a little about how futile it is to just (want to) bash each others brains in and that talking and trying to put yourself in the other's shoes sometimes can go a long way.
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:3, Interesting)
How many of those tech companies do it about the "high tech knowledge" in Ireland in the first place ?
One of the random bits of work that I did a couple of years ago was a study for the Welsh Development Agency examining the Irish and Scottish strategies for promoting their technology industries and seeing which bits were relevant to Wales. This involved digging a bit under the bullshit that the Irish government spouts about how great it is to have companies like Dell, Apple, and Google there. It turns out that, for the most part, they weren't attracting high-tech jobs. They were attracting minimum wage jobs, answering telephones and reading from a script, or putting computers in boxes. Part of the point of encouraging this kind of industry was to build a local pool of workers with the skills and experience to develop local companies, but it completely failed there. Ireland spent a lot on some very impressive incubator units for high-tech startups. Most of them were still empty over a year after construction.
The biggest problem that Ireland has is transport. There aren't many customers for high-tech goods in Ireland (meaning corporate customers - the population isn't big enough to support much by way of consumer goods). To sell anything, they need to go to the UK or mainland Europe. This means flying (no Eurostar in Ireland), and that really means going from Dublin, which is about the most expensive place in Ireland to put a company. This means that it's hard for a company that doesn't already have an international distribution chain set up to have a base in Ireland.
Re:Default? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Debt is intrinsically bad when it's gov't debt, because gov't is not supposed to be a business.
A business can invest money to generate some positive cash flow and then maybe even some revenue, gov't does not and shouldn't be expected to.
When gov't borrows to finance its programs, it means the same thing as taxes, only this is taxes + interest forwarded to the future generations of voters, which is theft, because those future generations didn't agree to any of it, and it would be best for those future generations to get their belongings and leave the country, rather than stay repaying the debts of their parents/grandparents.
Taxing consumption is the only true and honest way to fund a gov't, and gov't shouldn't be spending much on anything beyond basic protection against military invasion and a justice system *(and probably cops/prisons, to give teeth to the justice system.)
Gov't IS consumption, any citizens benefits from gov't only as much, as he benefits from any other consumption. Gov't is consumption, and thus its income (taxes) should be proportional to other consumption that people are willing to spend on.
When gov't taxes production, it cannot be controlled, the only feedback mechanism, by which a growing gov't system can be stopped (if it's taxing production) is basically loss of jobs and of productivity, which implies reduction in production and wealth and destruction of economy. In that case the gov't usually switches to acquiring debts, which shouldn't be allowed.
Gov't with a debt, is a gov't that cannot be afforded by its country current and especially future.
Consumption based taxes would provide gov't with enough money to finance the minimum required spending, while also creating a feed-back mechanism, necessary to control the size (budget) of gov't, because if people spend less on everything, they end up spending less on gov't, and this basically reduces gov't consumption just like all other consumption, and it is a good thing, needed to restructure a slowing economy.
Obviously all Keynesian shamans' brains explode at this very moment, but that's also a positive thing, we need their brains to explode, they have done enough damage.
The only way to get out of a recession is the way it was always done: stop spending, save money, rebuild savings, have a deflation by reduction of money supply, see prices for products and labor fall, use the saved capital to start new businesses, rehire people, start production.
The gov't wants to do it like so: print/borrow money, prop up spending on consumer goods produced in different economies, OK, so support economies of other countries while destroying the currency itself, and robbing everybody who holds it of purchasing power, do not allow the savings to be rebuild by low interest rates. Somehow hope that this will inflate another bubble that economy will somehow use to float on, but this new bubble obviously needs to be bigger than the previous one, that caused the last recession.
Every new bubble is bigger and will cause a bigger explosion, until the very bubble that will end up taking out the currency itself, as well as bankrupting the country and sending interest rates into the skies. Good luck with restructuring then, the pain will be enormous.
Oh, the next bubble to blow - US bonds. Then it's probably hyper-inflationary depression, because the gov't still relies on Keynesians like Krugman.
Re:Why it won't affect the companies.. (Score:3, Interesting)
And I am not talking about the gov't created financial monopolies, that are subsidized and stimulated and maintained and bailed out by the gov't, the monopolies protected by the gov't, gov't who kills the competition by everything in their arsenal, including the regulations such as the 'Patriot Act' (many don't understand what this means, but that regulation is killing a lot of competition to the financials, it forces the hedge funds/banks/insurance companies to be CIA/IRS spies, it costs a lot of money to do that.)
I said in my comment, I consider the businesses to be legitimate only if they are not sponsored/protected by gov'ts, who make monopolies out of preferred businesses.
PS.
I usually comment on stories where economics are discussed and usually people take it the wrong way [slashdot.org] by moderating my comments as 'troll', that's unfortunate.
Re:Why it won't affect the companies.. (Score:1, Interesting)
People at the bottom also tend to forget how much they need people at the top. If you were to erase a billionaire like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or the guys who invented facebook from the history books, you'd also erase all of the jobs and wealth that their creativity had created for society. In addition, society would arguably lose technology or cheap resources that have been great benefit to it.
Let me put it another way, if the boards of GE or IBM or any of these companies that pay their CEOs tens of millions of dollars were looking to replace their CEO, why don't they choose cheap labor over costly labor? Like me. I'll work for only a million a year instead of tens of millions, and I'm sure there are people out there who would work for free as CEO, just to get "CEO, GE" on their resume. Well companies don't hire the cheapest workers because they'd be unqualified -- a CEO who makes 100 million a year should create value for the company of many times that. And looking at the choice of hiring a CEO who will create a billion in value and cost the company 100 million, or me, who will cost only a million but probably destroy value, the company makes the rational choice.
This is not to say that workers are not important. It's a two way street: a fat cat should not be allowed to exploit their workers (slave labor / sweat shops / etc). But to create value for a company and economy you need to pay people for the services they're doing (for lack of a better word, for their minds).
There was another poster somewhere who hit it spot on: the problem with the crisis is not all businessmen, its the ones who created a cesspool of toxic debt and banks ready to crash. Those people are criminals, and should be prosecuted as the con-artists that they are. However, punishing all business for the acts of a few con men will create a reactionary response -- and hurt the irish more then it'll help it
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:3, Interesting)
Not at all. When you "bail out" a car company, a lot of people's jobs are saved and a lot of products get manufactured. When you bail out a bank, nothing gets produced and a lot of money goes into the pockets of a small number of people.
Re:Why it won't affect the companies.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The implied claim high taxes destroy the economy is yet to be proven.
That, my friends, is the one truth that the millionaires and billionaires want to keep out of the public debate at any and all cost. Roosevelt called these people "economic royalists" and he was right. Every country that has high marginal taxes on large profits and large incomes and sticks to it has a strong and stable economy. When you embrace the insanity that Reagan and Thatcher brought to the world, you get bubbles followed by crashes. It happens every single time it's been tried, but it's wildly profitable for the uber-rich and the hell with everyone else, right? Then they go around and spend some of that money convincing all you free market libertarian or conservative types to vote against your own economic interests. Religion, marginalizing certain groups or points of view, extreme nationalism all get trotted out to make the uneducated or the delusional vote for policies that directly hurt them. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:2, Interesting)
When the banks and other business interests have the government
in their pockets the government tends to pass what the banksters want.
Mussolini was a prophet.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/benitomuss388775.html [brainyquote.com]
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
~Benito Mussolini
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:5, Interesting)
another G. W. Bush or Obama
I'd say the chances of this are pretty likely. Barring a major upset, Obama will get the Dem nomination and the GOP will likely pick someone that makes GWB look like Einstien. I wouldn't be suprised to see "we must stand by our North Korean allies" Palin get the nod from the GOP.
Re:Why it won't affect the companies.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes even the Danes that don't use the Euro have pledged a substantial guarantee.
We may not use the euro, but our currency is still closely tied to it, being a small country with a lot of euro-neighboors and all.
In the mean time two of the countries with the highest taxes, Denmark and The Netherlands, have the lowest unemployment of the Union, around or even below 5%.
In Denmark we have quite a notorious unemployment-regime in place. Basically you're eligible for social security the moment you loose your job here, however, you need to send about 4 job-applications a week to stay eligible for social security, and willingly accept any and all jobs that comes your way (shrimp-picker, anyone?), otherwise you loose the right to social security. It works but it sucks, but then again unemployment is not supposed to be nice.
The implied claim high taxes destroy the economy is yet to be proven.
High taxes bolster the country's ability to deal with stuff like the recent crisis. Yes to an "outsider" it may seem like an outrageous thing to have your paycheck cut in half each month, but we're used to it, and it's not like we're struggling for subsistence because of it; my guess is, on the luxury-scale, the median of Denmark exceeds the median of the US.
Re:This is why (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, that's already outlawed. So your argument is that we need more cops then ? I don't understand.
You're purposefully misunderstanding. Anyone living in 2010 knows very well that regulation has been essentially shredded in favor of exactly the kind of practices that grandparent described. Where it's still outlawed, the regulator monitoring is usually crippled by legislation purchased by Big'n'Big Co.
Cases to point: microsoft, banking system.
Well fuck, if it's not the middle class or the lower class, who the hell is left? :P
Oh, right, the bourgeois. Well, as long as they're doing all right, everything is just peachy! Hurray for Capitalism!
And since this mobility first started, we moved from 1950's to 2010. Are you seriously claiming either the lower class or the middle class is worse off ?
This is just blatant trolling. The reason why standard of living has moved up is because science has progressed to the point where we can produce things needed to raise standard of living far more efficiently. If Big'n'Big collusion and significant income variance had been shrunk to reasonable size, average standard of living would be MUCH HIGHER.
So yes, in comparison of 2010 without flaws, and 2010 with flaws is indeed obvious. If you want to argue that 1950 vs 2010, we can just as well start praising benevolent North Korean leaders, who made sure that their standard of living of their people is better then in 1800.
Which is the whole bloody point, and to miss it, you have to make a real effort.
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:4, Interesting)
another G. W. Bush or Obama
I'd say the chances of this are pretty likely. Barring a major upset, Obama will get the Dem nomination and the GOP will likely pick someone that makes GWB look like Einstien. I wouldn't be suprised to see "we must stand by our North Korean allies" Palin get the nod from the GOP.
Modded troll by some wingnut, but you're definitely right. Who thinks Obama is not going to get the Dem nomination? And, looking at the current crop of GOP candidates, we are likely going to wind up with someone like Palin. Gingrich thinks he is a serious candidate, but he would now be considered too "rational" and "nuanced" for the GOP. The current two-party plan is to keep the nation divided into two camps and have each side scared shitless of the incompetent fucker on the other side so that they feel like they have to vote for the least of two evils "just this one more time".
In short, we are doomed.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
Definitely sounds like the 2012 elections. ;_;
Re:Annexation (Score:3, Interesting)
China made a really bad mistake in that regard. They bought bonds issued by the US government rather than hard assets with their piles of USD from their trade imbalance. Now everyone knows that in the long run you are better off buying the the business (i.e. stock) rather than loaning the business money for operations. Not to mention in the case of dollars the US is running the printing presses overtime and full on right now. Holding a lot of dollars just doesn't make a lot of sense right now.
I think now they have learned their lesson and are gradually liquidating in favor of hard assets like land, raw materials etc.
Re:It's OK To Raise Taxes On Rich Corps. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sweden and the rest of the Nordics. Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland.
Some of it may be cultural and come from having pretty homogenous societies as far as social norms go, but IMO I've always considered our societies to be proof positive that many neoliberal claims of why "Socialism" won't and can't work are overhyped.
It's certainly not paradise and has its issues, but I wouldn't want to switch -- and it seems to me that the people who are most ideologically bothered by how we do things up here to be those ones who feel that social stratification is desirable and that they are the übermensch who is being oppressed by the unwashed masses...
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:5, Interesting)
Except our mess very much isn't just the GWBs/Obamas of the US. We're in what, 13T(rillion) of debt right now?
The problem is that the baby boomer generation promised itself SO MUCH, we're going to go bankrupt from entitlements. Social Security is a small part of it. The real meat is Medicare. And that's not all LBJ. For instance, after Bush barred seniors from going to Canada/Mexico to appease the drug industry, he and Ted Kennedy (I think) pushed Medicare Part D to appease the huge senior lobby. This was called the single most financially irresponsible piece of legislation in history and will cost $10 Trillion dollars looking forward. The debacle shows how much the dear leaders here are really for free market, how dare people shop for cheaper drugs! /s
Looking forward, at current tax rates, we'll have a total of $50 Trillion dollar gap between revenue coming in and revenue going out. By 2030, the Federal Government will have little more revenue than to pay entitlements and interest on debt, nothing for it's official functions.
And is this surprising in a country where most government workers (including Army, USPS, many suburban Teachers depending on their local contracts, etc) work 20-25 years and can then retire on half pay and full health insurance the rest of their lives. How many private sector jobs let you start at 18 and quit with by 43? Yeah.
Most of my numbers came from David Walker, former US Comptroller General from 1998 to 2008, America's head accountant, appointed by both parties to various positions. Many of them came before the 2008 disaster although he was warning of a bubble iirc. It's probably worse now.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7461407498377956300# [google.com]
Anyway, I don't blame politicians except for bending to their constituencies. I blame following our democratic tendencies instead of our republican (small r) one starting with the 17th amendment. The People wanted entitlements, they got them.
It depends. (Score:3, Interesting)
The capital deployed into a productive venture is a good thing. Speculative hot money pushed around various parts of the world does not accomplish anything except causing mayhem everywhere and enriching hot money pushers. And this is THE problem we suffer today. Too much hot money bumping around and too little capital willing to go into productive businesses (maybe except China).
Back to Ireland. They are now forced to do draconian austerity measures on everyone except the banksters and to accept "bailout" loan that will propably have ~7% interest attached to it (and it doesn't matter that they don't need any money until mid-2011 - "bailout" has been pushed down their throat anyway).
Over the course of this financial meltdown that has started in 2008 I see the same people that caused massive suffering of so many now 3-rd world countries (G. Soros, etc.) and it scares a hell of me. It seems that they are doing to as the same they did to so many other countries over the decades - just in a more outrageous way. In the past it was bankers pushing a country into massive debt by corrupting politicians into doing some, say, infrastructure projects that are far too expensive for such country (see most of South America, Indonesia etc.). Now I see some strange kind of "suicide bankers" bullying politicians using "whole economy will collapse if you won't bail us out" bullshit. So we end up giving outrageous sums of taxpayer money to those banks and then paying interest on it to the same bankers who got that money !! And then IMF comes in and forces crushing austerity measures on everyone except the bankers. This is the same kind of financial warfare they used in so many countries - just more sophiscated and effective.
In short: Bankers are doing the same thing to us they did to 3-rd world countries in prior decades. Expect life conditions worsening soon as we'll get "demodernized" by those corporate scumbags.
Re:Never default (Score:3, Interesting)
That's funny because if it's so bad how do you explain that after Argentina defaulted that it now has the second highest per capita GDP in Latin America?
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a fallacy: the total public debt went up under Clinton. The only reason the debt appeared to shrink was an influx of 'surplus' Social Security funds which increased intragovernmental debt holdings but eased the publicly held debt burden. The net effect was an overall increase in our national debt.
The US Treasury, which is responsible for the debt, breaks it down:
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np
Re:Why it won't affect the companies.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there any actual evidence that the world needs these executives, or that they need to be paid what they are? The ratio between the pay of CEOs and their workers has sky-rocketed in recent decades, but in that same period the economy has stagnated and most people are worse off. They get paid what they do because they've convinced people that they're worth it, not for what they actually do.
There were operating systems before Bill Gates, his accumulated wealth is merely at the expense of everyone else. A failed executive can run his company into the ground, jeopardising the livelihoods of thousands of workers, and still walk away with more money than a normal, hard-working individual will make in several lifetimes.
I don't see how anyone not blinded by wealth-worship can possible justify these people.
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:3, Interesting)
So what part of that list of woes is due to "free markets"?
"huge masses of working poor" would be the main one you missed.
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:4, Interesting)
The back and forth in this thread really just shows that a "free market" is an illusory concept. It is useful to a limited degree, but you have to keep in mind that it is not possible in real life.
I see the usual disagreement, but I don't see the "back and forth". The free market is an asymptotic idea. Here's how I see it. I consider a market "free", if it is close enough that the market and its participants behave as if the market were free. For example, if one trader gets a very slight tax break (say 0.1% less taxes paid than its competitors), then a market is still free (that is, there's no significant change in the market from this advantage). But suppose a trader pays 50% less of a very substantial tax load. Then that's a significant advantage which can lead to things like persistent monopolies or great wealth concentrations. The market is no longer free due to this substantial distortion.
Once you throw government into the mix, you necessarily limit the freedom of the market. But, without a government, you don't have the structure to set up anything resembling a "free market".
The presence of a government does not in itself limit the freedom of a market, especially if the market wouldn't exist without the government.
The other point that seems to have been missed is that, although you are right in saying that the Irish situation is not due to a real "free market", the term "free market" is what is thrown about to keep the proles in line.
As I said before, I don't care about such rationalizations past the consumption of my time in listening to them.
Re:Moral Hazard (Score:3, Interesting)
You say the government created the Great Depression as some kind of argument that "paying people to dig ditches" didn't get us out of it. The government did create the Great Depression by letting people borrow unlimited amounts to spend on credit-inflated stock and the rest of an inflated economy (including hugely inflated liquor during the concurrent Prohibition). But that is totally irrelevant to the fact that "the" government got us out of the Great Depression. You tacitly concede that the government got us out of it, but you talk as if you've somehow proved something. BTW, there were two extremely different governments, not just "the" government: Republicans controlled the House, Senate and White House the entire 1920s that created the Great Depression, and Democrats controlled that elected trifecta during the entire 1930s-1940s that got us out of it.
You're also wrong about "cheap labor in the form of the soldier". The returning soldiers did not work cheap. They were largely unionized and were well paid, which is a big part of what they fought to protect from Fascists (and from Communists, too, as well as slavers before that and lords before that). It's the organization and consequent power of American workers that could demand high pay, despite the organization and consequent power of capital owners that would (and does) insist on paying low despite any other fact, that made America's postwar economy "the envy of the world".
Indeed, the main postwar benefit to America's economy was its large working industrial capacity paired to the rest of the world's destroyed production capital (and consequent huge demand for new production, including production of productive capital). Coupled with the Bretton Woods system of global finance that uses the dollar as the global trade reserve currency, requiring foreign stockpiles of dollars they buy from us. But without Americans getting paid a good share of that new income, America's economy wouldn't have been the envy of anyone in the world - except the various tyrannies that we either created in former colonies of our WWII allies or opposed in the clutches of our new Communist enemies. Without locking the Soviet Union into a box, the Soviet industrial capacity (and its - literally - rocketlike growth) would have resupplied Europe instead of the US doing so. Which points at the last major feature of managing the global economy that we did right but which is now lacking: we used global politics to direct global economics to prefer American exports instead of our "Communist" rival's. The US didn't export nearly as much inflation (the world's homegrown inflation from destroyed and wasted assets dwarfed what the US spilled abroad) as it did assets, which is the opposite of inflation.
Plus Krugman certainly understands inflation better than you do. Reading what you've written here, against what he's written elsewhere, I can see that he understands it better than you do.
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:5, Interesting)
People always seem to drag this one out, but fail to understand what Mussolini meant by corporatism. Fascism is at its core a merging of Nationalism and Syndicalism. The corporation is a syndicate, which is a vertical trade union in which binds management and labor together. Its more like a guild.
Each "corporation"/syndicate/guild elects deputies to the Chamber of Deputies, who are there to represent the interests of the industry as well as to speak on its behalf as experts in the field. Thus members of the transportation syndicate, who would include workers from railroads, airlines and the shipping industry, would be responsible for crafting the legislation that the executive committee, and ultimately the dictator, would be responsible for signing off on. This avoids the problem of having lawyers with no concept of how things work writing laws with regards to agriculture, communications, etc.
Under Fascism there would have been no Ted "series of tubes" Stevens. The election for telecommunications representatives to the chamber of deputies would have been democratic through all levels of membership, from cable monkey to executive. The best people would be chosen to represent the interests of the guild and people with no clue get no say.
Honestly, having read extensively treatments on various political ideologies in the left, right and center, by those who adhere to them as well as by those who critique them, the picture I got of fascism honestly doesn't sound half bad compared to some of the other harebrained bullshit people have come up with in the past.
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, first remember that National Socialism isn't Fascism. It's just similar. Italian Fascism was an attempt to regain the prestige of the Roman Empire combined with an odd form of Syndicalism which was influenced by the fact that Mussolini grew up in a Communist household, his father being an active party member. Mussolini's paper, Il Popolo, began as a Socialist paper that went more Syndicalist and finally, after WWI, became the nucleus for Fascist ideology.
The Nazis are almost irrelevant to a discussion of Fascism in Italy. Mussolini was in charge of Parliament by 1922, while Hitler was in prison after the attempted rising in Munich. In Rome at least, possibly other cities in Italy as well and I just didn't notice, manhole covers and other public infrastructure items bare the SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romani) marking, which was re-introduced by Mussolini, iirc, as part of his bid to draw a link between himself and his movement and old Rome. Even the fasces themselves were the Roman symbol of authority, identifying the consuls at the time, being carried before them in procession by their retinue of lictors.
Fascism isn't just a synonym for "really bad right-wing thing" which many, in some sort of post-Trotskiest mindset, want to believe. Hitler wasn't a fascist, neither was Francisco Franco. just saying.
Re:Defaulting is worse! (Score:1, Interesting)
Holy shit, you think the current debt had nothing to do with Bush? What about lowing taxes, increasing spending, starting two wars, buffing defense spending for Cold War era technologies that don't help with the wars he started such as the joint strike fighter, creating several new government agencies including Homeland Security, ODNI, expanding the Department of Education, giving people $500 tax rebates just for the hell of it, etc, etc.
Re:Corporations are Assholes. (Score:3, Interesting)
You assume that the irish government is opposed to the tech companies. I doubt that. For some reason, this feels like on of the cases where a secret meeting ran roughly like this: "Hey, corporate guys. We here in the government would prefer to leverage the whole cost on the dumb sheeple, but we need a reason. The press is asking for corporate taxes to rise. Could you issue a press statement like the one we prepared here, so we can justify our actions? If you don't, we may actually have to raise corporate taxes, and that would suck, wouldn't it?"
Corporations this size and local governments do not usually communicate via the press with each other. If they have something to discuss, they meet and discuss it, they don't post it in the newspapers.