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Ruthless Capitalism Open Thread

Posted: October 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: open thread, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , |17 Comments

From News Hounds, where they watch Fox News so we don’t have to:

Here’s some of the transcript, also from News Hounds:

Regular panelist Gary B. Smith argued for ruthlessness. “Most of the great successes of this country – product wise, service wise – came from not only business people unfettered by the government but ruthless businesspeople.” He cited Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and Disney. Then, noting the success of our defense industry, he added, “Why? Because we have ruthless contractors out there that are coming up with this innovative product so they can make millions of dollars. It has nothing to do with government mandates.”

“More ruthless capitalism!” said brother Tobin Smith.

Guest Todd Schoenberger said this:

“Here was a man (Jobs) who was hungry. Here was a guy who actually grew up poor. He would have to take sodas to soda bottlers to take the deposit money to go feed himself. This was a guy that clearly, when he had a government out of the way, but he had to take that innovation because he was hungry. Edison, the Wright brothers, everybody that Gary B. was talking about, that’s because people are hungry. In America, people are not hungry anymore because the government is subsidizing them…that’s the problem.”

Wow! And they even left out the part about those Chinese torture chambers factories where they make the products that made Steve Jobs wealthy.

17 Comments on “Ruthless Capitalism Open Thread”

  1. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    October 9, 2011 at 3:09 pm

    Herman Cain is really freaked out by the “Occupy” protesters.

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/09/ftn/main20117819.shtml

    According to an intervew on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show last week, Cain was also freaked out by the Civil Rights protesters back in his college days.

    • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
      October 9, 2011 at 3:15 pm

      I was just thinking about doing some research on him. Just how crazy is this man? He just seems to spit conspiracy theories out of his mouth.

      • mablue2's avatar mablue2 says:
        October 9, 2011 at 3:22 pm

        Either Herman Cain is serioulsy dumb, or he’s playing dumb because that’s the constituency Republican cadidates have to cater to these days.

        He just aggravates the hell out of me.

      • bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
        October 9, 2011 at 3:30 pm

        MABlue! Hi there, how are things?

      • mablue2's avatar mablue2 says:
        October 9, 2011 at 3:40 pm

        Hey BB,

        I’m hanging in there, just watching the world go mad. At least you guys have been able to keep your equanimit.

      • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
        October 9, 2011 at 4:52 pm

        Hi MABlue!!! Good to read you!!!

      • minkoffminx's avatar Minkoff Minx says:
        October 9, 2011 at 5:07 pm

        He just seems to spit conspiracy theories out of his mouth.

        I prefer the other orifice…you know the one next to his black walnuts… sorry I’m a bit loopy at the moment…

        Herman Cain I don’t get either…he actually is getting support from some of my Jewish friends who I always thought were strong liberals.

  2. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    October 9, 2011 at 3:14 pm

    This isn’t what they think it is. We’re protecting monopolies and not doing any kind of thing that looks like perfectly competitive markets. Old but still good link:
    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1003.lynn-longman.html

    The problem of weak job creation certainly can’t be due to increased business taxes and regulation, since both were slashed during the Bush years. Nor can the explanation be insufficient consumer demand; throughout most of the last decade, consumers and the federal government engaged in a consumption binge of world-historical proportions.

    Other, more plausible explanations have been floated for why the rate of job creation seems to have fallen. One is that the federal government made too few investments in the 1980s and ’90s in things like basic R&D, so the pipeline of technological innovation on which new jobs depend began to run dry in the 2000s. Another is that a basic shift in competitiveness has taken place—that countries like India, with educated but relatively low-cost workforces, have become more natural homes for jobs-producing sectors like IT.

    But while the mystery of what killed the great American jobs machine has yielded no shortage of debatable answers, one of the more compelling potential explanations has been conspicuously absent from the national conversation: monopolization. The word itself feels anachronistic, a relic from the age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. But the fact that the term has faded from our daily discourse doesn’t mean the thing itself has vanished—in fact, the opposite is true. In nearly every sector of our economy, far fewer firms control far greater shares of their markets than they did a generation ago.

    Indeed, in the years after officials in the Reagan administration radically altered how our government enforces our antimonopoly laws, the American economy underwent a truly revolutionary restructuring. Four great waves of mergers and acquisitions—in the mid-1980s, early ’90s, late ’90s, and between 2003 and 2007—transformed America’s industrial landscape at least as much as globalization. Over the same two decades, meanwhile, the spread of mega-retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot and agricultural behemoths like Smithfield and Tyson’s resulted in a more piecemeal approach to consolidation, through the destruction or displacement of countless independent family-owned businesses.

    • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
      October 9, 2011 at 3:39 pm

      How Long Will It Take for the Labor Market to Recover?

      To state the obvious, we need to create a lot more jobs per month than we have so far. If we continue at present rates, the unemployment rate will stay constant or increase even further. Even if we duplicate the performance of the economy prior to the recession, it will take four years to reach an unemployment rate of 7%. Thus, to get out of this in a reasonable amount of time we need job creation to accelerate considerably, and it’s hard to see that happening without help from Congress. Unfortunately, Congress pretends to “feel your pain,” but they don’t seem to really understand how hard it is for those who are struggling with unemployment — that this is a crisis requiring immediate, aggressive action — and it’s hard to imagine that Congress will give labor markets the amount of help they need. So no need to hold on to your hats, it looks like we’re headed for a very slow ride:

      http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/10/how-long-will-it-take-for-the-labor-market-to-recover.html

  3. propertius's avatar propertius says:
    October 9, 2011 at 4:17 pm

    To be fair: Steve Jobs became wealthy when Apple products were still made in the U.S.

    The outsourcing just made him wealthier

    • bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
      October 9, 2011 at 7:16 pm

      It’s hard for me to forgive him for using a factory where people committed suicide to escape their jobs and where people were locked inside and burned up.

  4. minkoffminx's avatar Minkoff Minx says:
    October 9, 2011 at 6:00 pm

    And yet another reason to dislike Obama…I saw this over at TaylorMarsh…in a post by Stacyx: Congress strikes back against Obama’s child soldiers’ waivers | The Cable

    The Cable reported yesterday that President Barack Obama waived penalties on several countries that recruit child soldiers for the second year in a row. Today, lawmakers moved to ensure that the administration won’t keep funding governments that use child soldiers next year.

    The administration waived penalties mandated under the Child Soldiers Protection Act (CSPA) against Yemen, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The administration didn’t provide a justification for not penalizing South Sudan, because the 2011 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, which was released on June 27 and triggers the penalties, names “Sudan,” not “South Sudan,” as an abuser. South Sudan was declared independent on July 9, 12 days after the report came out.

    “South Sudan wasn’t a country during the reporting period and isn’t subject to the CSPA; there are no penalties to waive under the law,” National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told The Cable.

    That explanation struck several congressional aides and human rights activists we spoke with today as too clever by half. After all, the TIP report was referring to use of child soldiers by the government of “Southern Sudan” and the Southern People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which hasn’t stopped the practice and will receive $100 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money this year.

  5. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    October 9, 2011 at 6:47 pm

    I keep calling Ron Paul a neconfederate and some folks have thought I’m over the top with that label ..

    Ron Paul’s some of his strongest supporters are neo nazi movements

    White Supremacists Rallying Around Ron Paul’s Presidential Campaign

    http://michiganmessenger.com/402/white-supremacists-rallying-around-ron-pauls-presidential-campaign

    http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/08/17/is-ron-paul-a-white-supremacist-absolutely/

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