Without Change Us Will Almost Certainly Become A Socialist Nation

[interestrateripoff]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8248108/Dambisa-Moyo-without-change-US-will-almost-certainly-become-a-socialist-nation.html

Dambisa Moyo is that rare type of person – an economist who makes waves. Her first book, Dead Aid, angered many in the charity sector by arguing that foreign aid has harmed Africa and should be phased out.

Her second, which is published in London on Thursday, accuses America and other Western powers of squandering their world economic dominance through a sustained catalogue of fundamentally flawed policies.

How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead goes so far as to predict that the US will be a “bona fide socialist welfare state” by the latter part of this century.

“Indeed, if nothing else changes it from its current path,” writes Moyo, “it is almost certain that America will move from a fully-fledged capitalist society of entrepreneurs to a socialist nation in just a few decades.

“The trouble is, it won’t be just any socialist welfare state... the US is on a path to creating the worst and most venal form of welfare state [poorly developed and designed] – one born of desperation from many years of flawed economic policies and a society that rapaciously feeds on itself.”

There’s plenty more. If current trends continue unabated, Moyo goes much further than the usual surveys predicting when China will surpass the US in GDP – she suggests China’s new hegemony could include the “redback” renminbi replacing the “greenback” dollar as the world’s favourite currency.

“Think about it,” she urges Americans. “Foreign exchange share prices, the price of copper, the price of oil, all in Chinese renminbi.”

The US and other Western powers will be reduced to second division players and the new global powerhouses will not just be China. Forget East versus West. It’s now the Rest versus the old West.

If Dead Aid was labelled “provocative and incendiary”, How the West Was Lost will likely see reviewers’ lexicons raided for even more emotive language. However, Zambian-born Moyo, 41, is not afraid of being a pioneer. The London-based former Goldman Sachs economist is arguably one of the most powerful women in British business, sitting on the boards of FTSE 100 constituents Barclays and brewing giant SAB Miller.

Obviously if you ignore how the US govt supports the big corporations the US is heading towards socialism....

The US isn't a capitalist state, it's a corporatist state which is all about big business, America hasn't been remotely capitalist for decades.

[shipbuilder]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8248108/Dambisa-Moyo-without-change-US-will-almost-certainly-become-a-socialist-nation.html

Obviously if you ignore how the US govt supports the big corporations the US is heading towards socialism....

The US isn't a capitalist state, it's a corporatist state which is all about big business, America hasn't been remotely capitalist for decades.

Attacking sacred cows is always good publicity.....

[LJAR]

fundamentally true,

when the government spends 50% of GDP you are effectively 50% socialist like the USSR.

It seems there is a groundswell of opinion against it though.

[SHERWICK]

McCarthy got it right all those years ago, yet they made him out to be the monster and killed him off.

So did J Edgar Hoover

We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them. ... The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.

Calm down dear. I've lived in both the USA and Sweden - I much prefer Sweden. Are the Swedes 'evil'?

[J-Hi]

I fear the West is finished. Mass immigration and declining birth rates amongst people of European descent are a huge ticking time bomb. Add to this multiculturalism, welfarism, socialism, apathy, obesity and the fact the Left has covertly taken control of the state and education system and I can see nothing but a slow painful decline.

It is a hugely depressing state of affairs. For 500 years we have been the driving force of the world and humanity. Soon the West as we knew it will be finished and yet the European people are so complacent they cannot see they are commiting the biggest, slowest and most unnecessary mass suicide the world has ever known.

[Guest The Relaxation Suite]

1. Renminbi will never become global currency because of justified fears of other nations about internal Chinese instability.

2. Welfare state has been growing steadily in West for nearly 150 years, since its inception at a meeting of Peelites, radicals and Whigs in London in 1859. Since then it has grown rapidly across Europe and other states. This has had important benefits in terms of things like healthcare subsidies by general taxation, but many more problems, the main one being the development of a "something for nothing" attitude across the general population.

3. The US has become steadily more dependent on welfare since the New Deal brought in by FDR, but when one looks at healthcare and unemployment benefits there one can see they have a long way to go before becoming a "socialist state", but they might just pull it off in the time frame the author mentions.

4. This would create an interesting new dynamic in world affairs, whereby the main players were a post-liberal democratic collection of bankrupt welfare states and a booming mercantilist totalitarian state controlled by quasi-communists in Beijing.

[MarkG]

Calm down dear. I've lived in both the USA and Sweden - I much prefer Sweden. Are the Swedes 'evil'?

Sweden... isn't that the country where politicians talk about how they have to be nice to Muslim immigrants so that once Muslims are a majority they'll be nice to the indigenous minority?

If so, 'evil' would hardly be a strong enough word.

[Stars]

post deleted....Iresponded to the wrong post (somehow)

Edited January 9, 2011 by Stars

[Stars]

McCarthy got it right all those years ago, yet they made him out to be the monster and killed him off.

So did J Edgar Hoover

We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them. ... The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.

Yep. the failure of rentier 'capitalism', / landlordism, is due to monstrous a conspiracy between dead people and large bronze statues, organised into secret mind-reading network by a non-existent soviet union

Try your best to believe it. It will probably be less painfull for you than the truth

[Guest The Relaxation Suite]

MarkG

Sweden has an Islamic population, yes. I believe the heaviest concentration is Malmo in the south wherein 25% of the general population is Islamic. There have been race riots in the city and murders related to racism in both directions.

[Harry Monk]

It's time to face it.

Karl Marx was 100% right.

[tallguy]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8248108/Dambisa-Moyo-without-change-US-will-almost-certainly-become-a-socialist-nation.html

Obviously if you ignore how the US govt supports the big corporations the US is heading towards socialism....

The US isn't a capitalist state, it's a corporatist state which is all about big business, America hasn't been remotely capitalist for decades.

The USA is not leaving capitalism behind for some kind of socialist "hell" (or "Nirvana", depending on your political turn of mind). This is because "free market capitalism" is a delusion. It never existed in the first place. It was never anything more than a false-consciousness inflicted on the happless minds of the US people in order to justify the rule of the many by the few. These kinds of fairy-stories have been used by ruling elites since the dawn of civilisation. They have gone under various guises including "the word of God", "the divinity of kings" and, more lattery, under the heading of a variety of "isms". "Socialism", "capitalism", they're all the same. All of them bullsh*t designed to keep you all in your place.

All that is happening in the USA is that the most recent steaming great pile of bullsh*t has run its course and a new one is forming to take its place.

Different bullsh*t, same smell.

Edited January 9, 2011 by tallguy

[Guest The Relaxation Suite]

It's time to face it.

Karl Marx was 100% right.

This really depends on what part of his writings you refer to. If you mean his concept of capitalism turning into communism then I would still argue against it because when he said communism he meant a sort of utopia, whereas what might happen in the West would be collapse and conflict.

Marx, and of course Hegel, in my view, have done an immense amount of damage to the political infrastructure of the West. This might seem unfair as their intention, at least that of Hegel, was simply to posit various ontological questions (although Hegel did write about political philosophy), but the way their concepts were interpreted by modern and post-modern political thinkers has caused the damage, in my view.

Edited January 9, 2011 by Tecumseh

[tallguy]

Feminism and Environmentalism are some modern scourges with the same objectives as the rest

If, by the above, you mean that there are people at the top of such isms with their own agendas to push, I wouldn't argue with that

Edited January 9, 2011 by tallguy

[tallguy]

There's little socialist about the US, or the UK for that matter. Self-obsessed politicians and corporates own and run the country. The rest pay for it yet have no say in decision-making. On the theme of -isms, this is corparatism or plutocracy or even moves towards fascism, but I can't see much socialism going on.

Neither can I

Edited January 9, 2011 by tallguy

[(Blizzard)]

If, by the above, you mean that there are people at the top of such isms with their own agendas to push, I wouldn't argue with that

Socialism means rule by socialists - union leaders and the working class. That would mean the defeat of the current rulers of America, the capitalists.

They don't seem to be going anywhere, in fact their power seems to be increasing.

Of course, they won't be doing anything that looks like capitalism or free-trade or whatever, but that was just the lie they told you to keep you quiet. Probably, for most people it won't much matter which bunch of lunatics is running the place.

That was certainly how it panned out in Russia, and I see many parallels.

Edited January 9, 2011 by (Blizzard)

[tallguy]

It's time to face it.

Karl Marx was 100% right.

In terms of his diagnosis of the problem, I completely agree.

In terms of his prognosis for recovery, I'm sorry to say I do not agree.

I fear there is no "recovery". The problem isn't systems.

It's humans.

Edited January 9, 2011 by tallguy

[aa3]

Its something I had to painfully admit to myself around 7 years ago. The end run of capitalism, is machines producing everything, so it must require a social welfare state. Some argue the creation of the modern welfare state we know was neccessary to keep capitalism going. Pensions, health care, welfare, social housing, education, workers insurance, etc..

Of course those people who own the capital and the most brilliant engineers who for now cannot be automated, they are going to keep getting richer, even while paying higher taxes. (the pretty smart but not the most brilliant engineers.. you just replicate the work of the most brilliant guy)

The market at one time directed the capital and was a darwinian process of advancement with consumers deciding what they liked and what not, and the market distributed money to the masses for working in the marketplace.. which those masses used to consume.

But today that last part doesn't work. Already in Britain by far the backbone of the consumer of economy is the 8 million government workers, and perhaps 6-7 million more 'contractors' to the government. And of course the transfer payments of the state, to old and poor.

Its why the Tories have stopped talking about cutting the deficit, once they realized the free market was not going to create millions of new good paying jobs.

[(Blizzard)]

Oh, and of course, the bogeyman of socialism is a really important propaganda tool in the US. It allows capitalists to weaken their only real rivals, the politicians.

All government intervention is socialism, and we all know that socialism is very bad.

There is more socialism in the Margaret Thatcher appreciation society than there is in the USA.

[Stars]

I wasn’t taking a capitalist stance.

Just stating that the infiltration that went on in the US particularly post Second World War by those with controlling agenda, and it didn’t start then, was huge and was identified by some individuals at the time. Yet they were the ones that were made out to look like the extremists.

The US Progressives were off course very left of centre in their views many years before.

They made the same mistake you are making

The threat of socialism doesn't come from infiltration, secret conspiracies and hypnotism, it comes from the failure to install an alternative that works well enough for most people that socialism isn't wanted by most people.

Edited January 9, 2011 by Stars

[Hyperduck Quack Quack]

I just don't get this 'threat of socialism'. A bit more socialism in western societies would be a good thing. And before anyone shouts me down about the late unlamented Labour government, New Labour was not socialist, Blair's 'Third Way' was no more than a feelgood catchphrase and Brown's period in office was one of unparalled incompetence**. No, I mean looking back to the days of Harold Wilson, when there was a proper social-democratic vision for the country.

**and the current Torylition is intent on punishing US, the British public, for the stupidity of the last government.

Edited January 9, 2011 by Hyperduck Quack Quack

[needsleep]

Modern welfare state = evil commie regime.

German government expenditure 45% of GDP. Germany second biggest exporter in the world. I can see why the Americans are so terrified.

[indirectapproach]

Ooooh cute, brainy babe Dambisa turns a buck by worrying us about reds under the bed and the yellow peril.

She's got two birds in one with that shot, well done her,

Absolute cobblers but fun nonetheless.

[scepticus]

We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them. ... The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.

Well I never had you down as a conspiracy theorist!

You shouldn't act so shocked, back in the 1920s forward thinking economists of the truest capitalist credentials (Josef Schumpeter, and many others) could see that lassyfare capitalism contained the seeds of its own eventual socialisation.

Its simply a question of economies of scale - all capitalist enterprises seek economy of scale and eventually the successful ones become so large they ARE society, and hence too big to fail.

Ikea socialism, a later pundit called it.

More fundamentally, capitalist growth depends on two things - population growth and increasing specialistaion. The former is a ponzi scheme and the latter lends itself to a rise in state dependancy because specialists are vulnerable to economic shocks.

However the socialism that is coming down the pike is not your grandfather's socialism, or even Shumpeters socialism, its far more interesting (and deeply non comunisst).

[Wahoo]

Socialism is inevitable once the natural resources are used up.

The current system is based on exploitation. When all the oil, coal, gas, timber, metals have gone, a new socialist order is inescapable.