Libertarian economies are accomplishing feats beyond America's ability. We can do the same, if we're willing to pay the price.
Maybe it was when my wife and I were getting our picture taken in front of the soon-to-open Lamborghini showroom here in Manila; and the fact that my nephew (who works as a programmer for Chevron here) told us that there was a Maserati showroom that would open up a little way down the street. Just three hours earlier, I was getting a haircut and pedicure (yes, pedicure) at a small barbershop a block from our family compound. And the cost of my haircut and pedicure? Just over four bucks.…
Article comments
— go to most recent comments26 - Jordan Richardson
Maurice, please read this.
27 - Maurice
Jordan, the study from UCLA was done in 2004. Your Salon article is from 2009 and and makes no substantive argument against it. In fact there is no mention of NIRA in your Salon blurb.
28 - Dr Dreadful
We can argue about the causes of the Great Depression and FDR's role till the cows come home, but what isn't in dispute is that both the Depression and the current recession (among numerous other economic downturns) originated in the United States.
Which would seem to demonstrate that the US can't be trusted with the world's money, and that everyone would be a lot better off if they just let y'all dig your own holes.
29 - Jordan Richardson
What difference do the years make, Maurice? It's a talking point and has been for quite some time, having emerged in various forms from the American right.
The NIRA, which was only in existence for two years, was one of many policies instituted by FDR. The UCLA study has been famously critiqued for oversimplification and for ignoring the prosperity of the 40s.
And what of this:
overall, the numbers prove it helped - rather than hurt - the macroeconomy. “Excepting 1937-1938, unemployment fell each year of Roosevelt’s first two terms [while] the U.S. economy grew at average annual growth rates of 9 percent to 10 percent,” writes University of California historian Eric Rauchway.
If that's not good enough, there's this article that you may reject because it's from 2009.
As I've said before, though, you've got your beliefs about how things ought to work. The only facts you seem interested in are the ones that support your faith in free markets.
30 - Maurice
Jordan - you are right - we are at an impasse.
Most of my beliefs come from "Free to choose" by Milton Friedman. He was one of the first to blame FDR and failed policies for the prolonged depression. The following is from an article about his work:
In the decades following Friedman and Schwartz’s work economists started examining other government-policy failures in the aftermath of the crash. They have found an abundant supply of them. Here are several key examples of these bad policies: 1) In response to a sharp decrease in tax revenues in 1930 and 1931 (caused by a slowdown of economic activities), the federal government passed the largest peacetime tax increase in the history of the United States, which clearly applied the brakes on any recovery that could have taken place; 2) the federal government also passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, substantially increasing tariffs and leading to retaliatory restrictions by trading partners, which resulted in a considerable decrease in demand for U.S. exports and a further slowdown in production (not to mention a loss of mutually advantageous division of labor); 3) the federal government also instituted all sorts of “public works” programs, beginning under Herbert Hoover and increasing dramatically under FDR; the programs removed hundreds of thousands of people from the labor market and engaged them in economically wasteful activities, such as carving faces of dead presidents into the sides of a mountain, preventing or delaying necessary labor-market adjustments; 4) another federal policy that prevented (labor and other) market adjustments was the price and wage controls enacted under the National Recovery Administration and in effect from 1933 until 1935 (when ruled unconstitutional); this policy massively distorted relative market prices, impairing their ability to function as guides to entrepreneurs; 5) the Fed was not blameless after 1933 either. It increased bank-reserve requirements in three steps in 1936 and 1937, leading to another significant decrease in the money supply. The result was the 1937"38 recession within the Depression, adding insult to injury.
31 - Jordan Richardson
And, see, I find Friedman and the Chicago school morally repugnant. As Krugman has said, Friedman's most basic error was in his unwavering faith in the free market, in the notion that "markets always work and that only markets work."
There are always going to be bad policies with regard to government. Government sucks in general, but so does the alternative of letting "free markets" thrash about without controls and regulations. The trick is in finding the balance.
32 - Dr Dreadful
the largest peacetime tax increase in the history of the United States, which clearly applied the brakes on any recovery that could have taken place
How? By magic?
the programs removed hundreds of thousands of people from the labor market and engaged them in economically wasteful activities, such as carving faces of dead presidents into the sides of a mountain
Typical conservative shortsightedness. Considering that the whole thing cost less than a million dollars, and that Mount Rushmore is now South Dakota's top tourist destination, attracting more than 3 million visitors annually, I would hardly classify that project as wasteful.
33 - Maurice
Dr. Dreadful, please read:
In August 2009, on a visit to Elkhart, Indiana to tout his stimulus plan, Obama sat down for an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, and was conveyed a simple request from Elkhart resident Scott Ferguson: “Explain how raising taxes on anyone during a deep recession is going to help with the economy.”
Obama agreed with Ferguson’s premise " raising taxes in a recession is a bad idea. “First of all, he’s right. Normally, you don’t raise taxes in a recession, which is why we haven’t and why we’ve instead cut taxes. So I guess what I’d say to Scott is " his economics are right. You don’t raise taxes in a recession. We haven’t raised taxes in a recession.”
34 - Dr Dreadful
Maurice, appealing to authority doesn't answer my question.
35 - Cannonshop
I'm going to try and steer away from the more controversial issues brought up in the comments, and just address the 'choice' Glenn's brought up.
How do you pay for it, Glenn? Here's what I'm saying: we've had forty years of steadily increasing national debt. It occurs to me, that this may be a result of the 'high standard of living' you're discussing, and here's how:
If you're allowed to spend more than you take in (as, say, uncle sam, or better yet, any relative you know who's in massive debt), you can, for a time, live REALLY well.
Right up to where you've burned through your credit-card and your income won't cover the interest on your debt anymore.
Now, the U.S. has had an AMAZING standard of living, in part, I'll allow, due to the 'semi-socialism' you support. But what is the cost? Who's going to PAY FOR IT?
I'll submit that we KNOW who's paying for it, and it's not the people who grew up in an ever increasingly comfortable standard of living. It's the kids of those folks, and their kids and theirs after them...who will probably NOT have that high standard of living, but will still have to pay the bill on it.
Because it was already spent-years ago. For Socialism to work, you need a powerful economic engine-and ours is basically worn out, dying, and we have nothing to replace it with.
Wealth is a generated thing, not redistributive, and not something you can crank out of a mint or printing press, and frankly, the 'generators' of Wealth have been unwelcome in the United States for a long time now. Eventually you can't keep robbing peter (The Americans of Tomorrow) to pay Paul (the recipients of benefits from the government today).
That's where we're at-robbing the babies to care for the desires, not even needs, of the Boomers.
Keep running demand higher than supply and eventually, you run out.
Libertarian economies don't do that, because there's no "Higher power" with the bottomless ability to pretend to make up losses and jail anyone who says otherwise.
36 - Dr Dreadful
Cannon, I think you also need to blame, at least partially, the activities of the free market, and in particular the advertising and marketing that convinced consumers they needed and could afford all these luxuries in the first place.
37 - Clavos
the advertising and marketing that convinced consumers they needed and could afford all these luxuries in the first place.
Sigh.
So Americans are so stupid and gullible they can be manipulated into doing things that are harmful to them by those evil, scheming, conniving bastards on Madison Avenue?
Oh, puleeze.
You obviously think that Americans are sheep with no brains who can be manipulated at will.
Come to think of it, so thinks all the political class.
Actually, so do I.
38 - Dr Dreadful
Clav... exactly.
39 - Cannonshop
#36 Doc, part of the reason it's so successful, is that "We" keep making up excuses for it, covering bets that shouldn't be covered, and excusing ourselves (and those around us) for it.
If people are easily manipulated, maybe it's because they WANT to be, and because they rarely directly percieve any negative to allowing themselves to be manipulated by 'advertisers'.
It's not the fault of freedom that people will screw up, Doc, it's the fault of people for assuming there will always be someone else to clean up after they've screwed up-someone who WILL clean up after them, see?
I'm just in favour of letting people suffer the consequences of their own bad choices, without giving them the ability to compel others, whom have not screwed up in such a manner, to cover their losses and absorb their share of the damage.
You can't be free, if you won't be responsible.
40 - S.T.M
*STM lobs accidentally on another hugely exciting BC thread while trawling the universe in search of the answer to the meaning of life and why anyone in their right mind would want to move permanently from Sydney to Adelaide* The story continues ...
"Hang on, how did I end up in this joint. Where is this place anyway?
Hello, anyone home? Anyone with three quarters of a brain cell will do.
Is anything real? Where the fuck are we? No, that's not a tribe in Africa.
Is it?"
Gee that STM bloke asks a lot of fucken useless questions, don't 'e?
Oh, I know what the problem is. He must have taken a wrong turning a ways back ...
Left turn, instead of a right.
Shee-it! It was the endless bombardment by commercial advertising that got him in the end. Man never stood a chance.
Went mad in the noodles aisle at Woolworths.
41 - S.T.M
*last seen in an alternative universe rolling down the hill in a supermarket trolley, yelling "yee-hah" American-style at the top of his lungs while trying to stuff a pack of dried tonkatsu-flavour instant noodles down his gob*
42 - Cannonshop
LOL...STM, dude...In keeping with the philosophy of our left-leaning brethren, you owe me a keyboard for that.
43 - S.T.M
G'day Cannon,
Sorry about the keyboard champ :) I'll ask the union to fix you up with a brand newie.
44 - S.T.M
"the programs removed hundreds of thousands of people from the labor market and engaged them in economically wasteful activities, such as carving faces of dead presidents into the sides of a mountain"
At least they got paid. A man will do almost anything for three squares.
George Washingmachine's nose would've taken two blokes working round the clock.
No doubt old George would've been the first to suggest they get paid weekend and night penalty rates for missing out on leise time regarded as normal by most others, and not spending any time with their families.
This is probably why a libertarian economy wouldn't work. Those guys would've been paid market rates, ie remuneration commensurate with the scale and importance of the job they were doing.
In other words, they'd probably have got diddly squat.
Mt Rushmore is only one of a million lunatic government schemes over the years all over the world, but then a job's a job, and it's a good way of making the money go round again and creating work for others.
Every extra person who can afford to buy a sandwich in a diner creates a bit more work for a waitress, a delivery driver, a meatworker ... and a bit more profit for a diner owner. And so on and so forth ...
Am I on the right track yet?
45 - One American's Rant
Glenn, comment #9 - I don't think that the SAME kind of stimulus can work today. Then it was aircraft and automobile manufacturing that drove the war effort. Now the US is the number one manufacturer in both areas. What we need is a new industry that we can pour billions of dollars, and millions of people, into, and i don't know what that could be...well maybe space industry.
46 - Dr Dreadful
Long time no see, Stan... ADELAIDE? I thought you were going to move to Hobart and live happily ever after? Did you take a wrong turn in the Bass Strait?
Nothing against Adelaide especially. My wife's former roommate is from there: delightful girl. And they grow some decent grape juice round there.
47 - Dr Dreadful
I'm just in favour of letting people suffer the consequences of their own bad choices, without giving them the ability to compel others, whom have not screwed up in such a manner, to cover their losses and absorb their share of the damage.
Cannon, I'm not at all comfortable with your willingness to absolve the market of ALL responsibility for the mess, as if it were some perfect system which only fails to work because humans interfere with it. You forget that it's a system created BY humans.
Yes, people make crappy choices, but they'll do that anyway. Your "free" market, though, deliberately encourages those bad choices. This is no accident. It's set up in such a way. It does NOT say: "Here's Product A (which is useful) and Product B (which is completely frivolous). Your choice." It says, "You'll buy Product A anyway but you should also buy Product B because look, it's shiny." It then quietly engineers Product A in such a way that it's designed to fail, or be rendered obsolete, within a short period of time so that you have to buy a new one.
48 - Igor
The so-called "free market" is relentlessly screwed with by the corporations (through the politicians who serve them) to tilt the field in their favor. Thus the constant and united wars against any kind of consumer protection, even product transparency. Thus the lack of prosecution of anti-trust laws, the constant growth of monopolies, and the weak civil penalties against corps as well as the almost non-existent criminal prosecutions against blatant criminals.
The peasants have almost no resources in the economy. If you want to buy a house you are presented with a take-it-or-leave-it contract: you cannot negotiate one word of it. All of the judicial system will enforce the banks will against yours, even when they are palpably in the wrong, witness "robo-signing".
Our vaunted "free markets" are simply rigged by the strongest party, and that is somebody other than the consumer or employee.
49 - Glenn Contrarian
Cannonshop -
Here's what I'm saying: we've had forty years of steadily increasing national debt.
...and you go from there saying that our debt and our high standard of living caused all our ills.
WRONG. Your whole premise is WRONG. Why? Our deficit began ballooning THIRTY years ago with Reaganomics after he slashed the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 25%. For the thirty years that we had 70+% taxes on the wealthy, we had a few recessions, but we had NOTHING like the 1982-83 recession, the S&L crash, and the Great Recession...and let's not forget that when we had those REALLY HIGH JOB-KILLING TAXES, in ONE decade we nearly paid off a HIGHER relative debt than we have now even with the Korean War and the Cold War AND had high employment the entire time!
And very, very few of those poor, abused multimillionaires wound up in the soup line. Most of them profited quite well...just not at the obscene levels of profit you see now.
Conservatives are SO afraid of high taxes and think that tax cuts are the cure for all that ails us, but you're all ignoring our fiscal history.
Worst of all is the conservative habit of "if a liberal supports a position then it MUST be wrong and it's my patriotic duty to oppose it". Think about it, Cannonshop - what liberal position has the GOP agreed with since Reagan left office? Where is the bipartisanship?
Where's the bipartisanship on the liberal side? There's the Individual Mandate (a Republican idea first popularized by Newt Gingrich), Cap-and-Trade (also a Republican idea), tax cuts (ONE-THIRD of Obama's stimulus was tax cuts and under Obama we've the lowest tax burden in FIFTY YEARS)...
...so you can't say that we haven't been trying to be bipartisan.
Again, Cannonshop - your entire PREMISE is wrong, you're ignoring fiscal history, and the reason you're doing so is that conservatives in general simply cannot conceive that liberals are right about anything...even when liberals are pushing ideas that were first popularized by Republicans.
50 - Igor
"Most of my beliefs come from "Free to choose...".
Beliefs? That implies that your Econ is basically religious.
51 - Cannonshop
The ideas might've been popularized by Republicans, (let's face it, everyone screws up once in a while), but they're still bad ideas, Glenn. It doesn't matter WHO proposed them first, it doesn't legitimize the concepts floated out. The truly amazing thing, is that Libs latch on to these ideas as if they're going to solve ANYTHING.
Cap-and-Trade is essentially the selling of indulgences updated to the modern world.
The Individual Mandate is proof that a lot of Republican Politicos who proposed it were owned by teh same insurance giants that own the Democrats-it's a forced market situation feeding an oligopoly.
It's just an example of how LITTLE the actions of "Liberal" and so-called, self-styled "Conservative" politicians are in going after and suppressing the Citizenry for their mutual cronies.
52 - Cannonshop
#47 which happens in an UNFREE market as well-if you want an example, the Zil comes to mind, or the Lauda.
Fact: People make bad choices and bad decisions. I present to you, that when you buffer them against the painful consequences of those bad choices and bad decisions, they're going to keep making the same ones, similar ones, etc.
Witness "Party Loyalty" as a glaring example in politics (which is, perhaps, the biggest game of "hide the consequences" being played currently.)
Built in Obselecense, (the system you're describing in your item "a" example) very nearly killed Detroit in the Seventies and eighties-because competitors showed up with cars that were fairly durable, more efficient, and less expensive than the Detroit models. There's a lesson there about what the Market will do to you, if you're too unethical to survive.
And Ethics is, in a free market, a survival mechanism. In a Regulated market, on the other hand, you can pay off the oversight and buy forgiveness (and bailouts) from the Government when you're big enough AND screw up badly enough-as demonstrated quite recently with both AIG and General Motors (Inventors of built-in-obselecense.)
53 - Cannonshop
Remember, in a FREE MARKET (which we don't have) you're FREE to suffer the consequences of your mistakes, as well as enjoying the fruit of your successes.
It goes right on back to the definitions:
You can't be FREE, if someone else takes your consequences for you.
54 - Jordan Richardson
in a FREE MARKET (which we don't have) you're FREE to suffer the consequences of your mistakes, as well as enjoying the fruit of your successes.
I call bullshit on the second half of this notion.
55 - Cannonshop
#54 Please elaborate, Jordan. How is that bullshit-clearly you agree that if someone takes a bad risk, they ought to take the consequences, so you're saying that they should not have the positive outcomes when they take a chance and something positive is created?
I almost wonder if you're saying "Punish for Stealing, but no pay for working"?
56 - Cannonshop
Probably the wrong example, Jordan, let's try this agian...
Person X creates something, that other people want and/or need. Are you saying that it's immoral for person X to want something in exchange for their effort, time, call it 'life energy'? ('cause that's what it is.)
57 - S.T.M
OK, person X is an employee, creating something that other people, namely person X's employer, because he can then take the thing and flog it off at a tiday profit. My view is that if person X makes enough of these and they of such good price and quality that every bastard wants one, the employee should be entitled to a decent share of the profit (with eating into the employer's profits, which continue to grow as more of the fucken things are made).
This is whare the whole things falls on its arse in places like America, where employers get a bit greedy (because they can) and see an opening for even MORE profits by squeezing and screwing the worker - the person who is actally doing all the work in the first place.
I believe in productivity agreements between workers and employers, of the type that in Australia give wage and salary earners one of the best standrads of living in the developed world.
This can only be achieved by arbitration - in other words, the law/courts/regulation stepping in to help strike a deal when employers and employees fail to reach agreement and BEFORE the shit hits the fan.
Left to their own devives, employers MAY become greedy and employees MAY become more militant, which is lose-lose for everyone.
Australia seems to strike a good balance between rening in the power of employers - through such things as workers rights and decent wages written into law and government ordered arbitration in industrial disputes - and putting a lid on the ower of unions by having powers to order an end to industrial action and a return to negotiated agreement.
This sytem has been in existence for over 100 years in this country and has worked well except in cases where different governments have failed to strike the right balance and have shifted the balance of power either back to employers or in favour of workers.
One recent example, the previous conservative government's Orwellian-sound WorkChoices legislation, which in one fell swoop basically ended the power of collective emplyee bargaining and forced many Australians on to indivualy workplace contracts. What we saw was young people, for instance, losing their (pretty meagre) night and weekend penalty rates, which meant they worked for the same wage whatever hour of the day or day of the week they worked. Other people lost casual work that they'd had for decades, while others lost entitelments they'd previously negotiated, such as taxi fares home after 10pm, etc.
That move bizarrely ended up targeting "aspirational" workers mostly (let's say blue-collar workers on big disposable incomes living in nice mortgage belt homes bought through working overtime, extra shifts and decent night/weekend penalty rates, the people the previous conservative government had depended upon to remain in power, hence their quick exit at the ballot box in 2007.
The current government might have swung a bit too far back the other way. I am not a fan, for instance, of imposing unfair dismissal laws on small businesses who might want to lose an employee because they are plain unproductive and now have to prove their case in the courts or statutory bodies in doing so.
All up, though, it's important for people in favour of this "accord model" (striking the right balance between decent profit and workers' right to share in it) to understand that it's a wholly symbiotic relationship that cannot function if one side decides to upset the apple cart. Throwing a couple of apples is OK, but there's a limit.
Free-market capitalism can't function without workers, and in a society like Australia (or even in the US for that matter), the free market can't function without business both large and small that help create wealth, jobs, a stable society where wealth is shared by everyone in varying degrees, and therefore also a decent standard of living.
Getting everyone to accept and understand this on both sides is key.
I sometimes get the feeling in the US that no matter how beneficial this approach might be to all concerned, any mention of government rules and regulations (laws) on one side and the notion of business making decent profits causes of a lot jumping up and down and far too much navel gazing, rather than actual doing.
I fear this is where the US is now .... at an impasse on this stuff because it didn't strike the right balance in the past when things were going good and is simply paying lip service to it now while things are going down the toilet.
Just remember this, dudes, living as you do in that can-do place: America is really good at something, one thing in particular ... making (or growing, or producing) and selling quality stuff and flogging it off at a profit to others smart enough to want it.
Making money because shysters in places like Wall Street know they can rack up a squillion in a day by shuffling virtual bits of paper around is illusory wealth at best.
Someone gets rich, and usually not average Joes or Joannes like you and me. In fact, we pay the price for their monumental free-market stuff ups and pocket lining.
Fair-minded bosses paying decent wages = Happy employees = loyal employees = productive employees = profits = wealth creation = workforce/employers working hand in hand = equals more and better jobs, etc
If it takes such clever measures as fair and uniform workplace laws, court-ordered arbitration to solve strikes and industrial action, and sensible prudential regulation, then it's all good.
I live in a place where it DOES work, so I can speak for it.
I'd hate to see this place descendinto the kind of chaos we know comes from libertarian-style ideas, or too-far-too the left militancy wielded by big and powerful unions getting greedy because they know they can hold employers to ransoms.
It's not about ransoms, it's about sharing and making everyone a winner.
58 - S.T.M
Geez, I must be getting rusty. That post is full of lits. I hope every bastard can work out what I'm banging on about.
And yes Doc, I'm off to Adelaide. Having trouble selling my bloody house, though. There are a lot of Asian buyers in the Sydney market and I'm told they "like new, not old". Since my house was built in the 1930s and has been attacked over the years by termites and borers (the insect kind, not the drunk bloke at the pub, although there's a bit of that too), I'm a bit restricted in who I can sell to. Native-born Aussies understand the historical context of a California bungalow and what to expect when you live in a tranquil place on the edge of the bush, but many new Australians and first-home buyers don't. They just want new-builds.
If I can't sell over the next month or so at a reasonable return for what I've put into it, I'm going to rent it out and becom a landlord. Either way, even if I'm still paying the crippling mortgage, I'll be better off than I am now as an owner-occupier given Sydney's outrageous house prices and the stress of servicing massive mortgages and huge rents in this god-forsaken rat race of a city.
I'll keep you posted Doc. I've already been down there and it's all happening. Maybe a bit too fast for my liking, but you know what they say: who dares, wins.
Cheers
59 - S.T.M
You know what really swung me into action Doc? $7 a fucking hour parking in the city and the beaches on the WEEKENDS. Everytime you put one foot in front of the other in Sydney you're reaching for your wallet. It's become ludicrous.
How can some officious chardonnay socialist bugger sitting in an office think it's OK to rent me a piece of fresh air at $7 an hour because they'd prefer people riding pushbikes (hardly anyone does that, though). That's their claim, but I suspect it's more to do with cash-cow gouging of ordinary working Aussies.
Can you believe the city council banned Tim Tam choccy biscuits, the great Aussie icon, at council meetings because they thought the company might not be engagement in fairtrade practices in the third world with their cocolate buying? Seriously ...
Councils should stick to the four Rs - rates, rubbish, roads and recreation/sports grounds.
I hope all the wriggly critters in their worm farms escape into the Town Hall, and they all choke on their lentil burgers and organic cucumber sandwiches.
Time to vote with my feet!
60 - Dr Dreadful
Stan, I know where you're coming from with regard to the house. We just moved from Fresno to San Diego, and selling our place wasn't even an option since it's currently worth a bit more than half what we paid for it.
So we rented it out. Even that took months: the rental market is depressed too because people are saying to themselves, why should we fork out thousands of bucks in rent for no return when we can buy something for a song?
There are, and I'm not making this up, foreclosed 3-bedroom condos like ours selling for $30K in our old neighbourhood.
Far as parking fees go, mate, from my recollection Sydney has a pretty damn good public transport system. Sounds like it would have been more cost-effective for you to buy a monthly pass. The buses, trains and ferries can get you pretty much anywhere you need to go. (Of course, trying to get a surfboard on the bus isn't going to make you too many friends. Do they not let you stow it in those bike racks on the front?)
61 - Dr Dreadful
Stan's narrative actually brings up a good example of how the free market should, but doesn't, work according to Cannon's ideals.
We've got people driving into downtown Sydney in ever-increasing numbers, farting out millions of tons of exhaust until the windows turn black and the kookaburras start dropping out of the sky. Parking fees aside, public transit is a bit more expensive than driving (actually, considering the price of gasoline in Australia it might not be), but has the advantages of speed and the removal of traffic-related stress. In Cannon's purely market-driven world, this in itself would eventually be enough to inspire commuters to leave their cars at home and take the train to work.
But they don't. They continue to make the irrational choice to spend hours fretting and fuming and crawling in traffic jams every single day. Even artificial forces like $7 an hour parking (not to mention tolls for the Harbour Bridge and the Harbour Tunnel), designed to make the car a less attractive option, don't work. Why? Because the market has trained these consumers that the automobile's door-to-door convenience trumps absolutely everything.
62 - S.T.M
Doc, I live five minutes' walk from the railway and the trip into the city is 35 minutes on the train. All-stations or limited-stops trains leave every 5-10 minutes, and there's an express every half hour, which I catch to Central rather than go on the suburban line. My office is five minutes' walk from Central Station. That all works, especially when I start at 10 or 11am.
However, most of the time I start at 1pm, which means I'm walking over to Central at 9pm. Now, I'm a big boy and I can look after myself, but it CAN be freaky. Lots of shady characters hanging around the railway concourses, and I've been hassled quite a bit on the train. Nothing worse than being stuck on a train for half an hour with someone you'd like to strangle or, worse, who is acting like they'd like to strangle you. My strategy of late has been to drive down the Pacific Highway, park at Killara in a $5 all-day carpark and catch the north shore line train into town. Better class of lunatic on that line. So yes, I'm lucky ... our public transport system is amazing. However, this city has grown madly and with all the bad stuff that brings, so driving the car, especially when you finish late, often seems a far more attractive option.
My missus recently crashed her car into the baxk of a 4WD on the approach to the Harbour Tunnel and has been catching the train into the city at 5,30am. She, and I quote, doesn't "do public transport", except when we're going to the airport. However, she's now a convert. She makes a cup of tea before she leaves and walks to the railway with it and drinks it on the train. And only twice in the past week and a half has she got on the wrong train!!
She's a big girl now.
63 - S.T.M
Doc, hang in there on the house. The market will come back at some point. We're not going to be in a mini-depression forever. I believe things are looking up, although if the Tea Party gets in over there (or the loony left starts to dictate Democrat policy), all bets are off.
This is the era of the centrist government ... when the voice of the great area between loony right and loony left actually gets heard. There are certainly signs of that happening everywhere in the developed world.
Although, like I said, expect America to be a little different.
Everywhere else gets the rise of people with sensible everyday concerns in the centre of the political spectrum, America gets the Tea Party that can't see the nexus between the US and global economies and the pointless, aimless Occupy movement that can't see the nexus between Ipods, mobile phones and that god-awful capitalism thing.
Hmm, what's all that tell ya?
And yes, we've got 'em all here too.
64 - Jordan Richardson
Are you saying that it's immoral for person X to want something in exchange for their effort, time, call it 'life energy'?
Absolutely not. I'm saying the "free market" doesn't allow a person to get the right amount or a fair amount of "something" for their effort, time and life energy. The "fruit" of one's successes is determined not by output of "life energy" but by the invisible and allegedly "fair" hands of the "free market," a misnomer if there ever was one.
65 - Clavos
Beliefs? That implies that your Econ is basically religious.
Stretch much, Igor?
66 - Dr Dreadful
Based on Maurice's comments to this point, no, I don't think it is much of a stretch.
67 - Dr Dreadful
America gets the Tea Party that can't see the nexus between the US and global economies and the pointless, aimless Occupy movement that can't see the nexus between Ipods, mobile phones and that god-awful capitalism thing.
I see the Tea Party movement as basically dishonest. They claimed it was about Big Government and tax hikes, but the folks I saw demonstrating were mostly ag students, retirees and middle class moms and pops: not the classes of people who were going to be affected by any of the proposed tax increases. So I reckon the Tea Partiers are motivated more by a desire not to have to pay any taxes at all.
The Occupy movement is neither pointless nor aimless. Their agenda is actually quite clear, and it's largely the mainstream media (ahem - that's you, Stan) that portrays them as having no demands or aims.
It's not corporations per se that they're angry about, but the excessive influence of corporations in government. In a nutshell, the grievance of Occupiers is that government no longer acts in the interest of the people, but of big business.
And there are Occupy protests all over the globe - including your neck of the woods - so it isn't only an American thing.
An international Tea Party movement never materialized for the very reason you identify, though: the TPers tend to have trouble remembering that there is an outside world.
68 - Cannonshop
#67 It could just be also, Doc, that the TP isn't in the business of Exporting the Revolution.
Just sayin'.
69 - Jordan Richardson
Yes, and the reason for that isn't because they're modest.
70 - Cannonshop
#69 damn, I thought you'd catch the reference, Jordan. I'm surprised you missed it, I guess there aren't that many of we who remember the Cold war left.
"Exporting the Revolution" was one of the stated goals of the ComInten (Communist International) meetings in the 1920's and 1930's, and a stated objective of the Soviet Union from the end of the Russian Civil War to the end of the Soviet State.
It's one of the main reasons that the most common firearm encountered in the Third World is the AK-47 and clones, and why most of the military equipment American troops have faced since 1950 is of soviet design, it drove the Russian effort to alter the Geneva Conventions in the 1970s to protect non-uniformed irregular combatants and non-uniformed 'advisors' then common in the brush-war eras of the 1960's, 70's, and 80's.
The Soviets generated megatons of military hardware annually that were exported at below-cost or even for free, to ideological 'allies', provided safe-houses for groups like Baader-Meinhoff and the various European "Red Brigades" (as well as funding, arms, and technical support).
"Exporting the Revolution" is BAD.
71 - Jordan Richardson
Cannonshop, I'm 32 and Canadian. I'm honestly surprised I know as much as I do. :)
72 - Igor
Both sides "Exported the Revolution" during the cold war. The USA was an enthusiastic supporter of the arms race throughout world, and our ideological exporting of the American revolution was vigorous and only decreased as others became adept at holding us to our own principles (which principles seem to have finally ceased upon the ascendancy of Bush 2 to the American throne.) Besides such obvious ideological exports as Voice Of America we pursued popular cultural exports with enthusiasm and facility never before seen in history.
73 - Dr Dreadful
I certainly remember the Cold War. There was a fire station across the street from my high school and occasionally they would test their AEW siren without prior notification (no Internet in those days to spread the word).
These were the same air raid warning sirens that had been used in World War II and never decommissioned, so the sound was bone-chilling enough even without knowing that what might be coming had the potential to wipe out all life on the planet and not just make a big crater filled with rubble and body parts.
The teachers would usually keep plodding on with the lesson as if nothing had happened, but we would be sitting there counting to 240* in our heads.
* The popular notion at the time was that you'd have a four-minute warning of a nuclear strike, although in actual fact, depending on where the missile had been launched from it could have been anything from a few seconds to half an hour.
74 - Cannonshop
#73 that's right, you're a Brit. Over on this side of the pond, it was thirty minutes that was the average everyone kind of halfway believed in.
#72 ...and did either one really make things better, Igor? I mean, if Communism worked as-advertised, wouldn't China still be relying on it for their economic planning? Wouldn't the PRVN still want to collectivize agriculture, and wouldn't they be more prosperous than, say, Thailand or the Phillipines?
"Exporting" utopia is BAD. Exporting products people want is good.
75 - S.T.M
The Cold War.
Aaah, brings back memories/
Oh for a simpler time.
Air raid drills under school desks and the marvellous philosophy of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Loved it.
Even went to visit the Russkies for a while at one point. I thinky they'd lost interest by then.
Even the bloke who was tailing me used to nod his head in the mornings at the metro station.
Now we've all come in from the cold, it's not nearly as much fun.
That's why Occupy is boring as batshit.
They can't do without their iPhones, the poor little possums. Or their porta-loos (paid for by the local council).
We had PROPER protests in my day. Proper I tell you ... none of this nambi-pamby hiding in tents stuff.