It’s enough to make the baby Jeebus cry.
Neal Lawson, George Galloway and Zac Goldsmith, all in one newspaper, all in one day?
Can someone nip down to Farringdon Road with a Hawking Radiation detector? Surely that concentration of inanity will have collapsed in upon itself and vanished to a singularity?
(Sample Neal Lawson: The price of a free market is the creation of a social recession of poverty and overwork. Err, free markets create value. How can they create poverty?)
In
[Err, free markets create value. How can they create poverty?) ]
was it you in Russia in the 1990s, or some other bloke called Tim Worstall?
Tim adds: As you know, me, and as you also know, I maintain that poverty decreased in Russia in the 90s.
Tim – It often amazes me that you can be bothered to wade through this rubbish, but I (for one) am very grateful for all your efforts!
dsquared: Your non sequiturs and ad hominems never cease to amuse!
Tim, on this, I respectfully disagree. First off, Moscow is not Russia. Secondly, out in the sticks, there was a measurable drop in income, social benefits and rights to various packages in medicine, transport and housing. Liquidity substantially dropped for incomes under 1800 roubles a month [at 6:1 before the crash].
Free market, in Russian terms, meant only Berezovsky style oligarchical skimming off of the nation’s wealth. On the street, grandmothers were reduced to buying broken eggs and dog food.
Don’t ry to speak of free market economics to any Russian under 8000 roubles a month or over fifty years of age.
Sorry, Tim, further to this – you’re the economist and I’m not. How does one explain this?
Free market economies have higher average incomes – but unequally distributed. Unless one supports a Reaganesque trickle down effect, there are going to be those who don’t benefit.
There’s a further aspect as well. Take the Walmart entry into the town of Port Elgin, in Ontario [you may have seen my post on this].
If free market forces are allowed to reign, they’ll snuff out Loblaw, as they undercut and snuff out all rivals and then the ground is laid bare around them. That’s free market. What’s the solution?
If you define poverty in relative terms, then yes, poverty is created by the free market. If you define povery in absolute terms, then no, it’s not.
Apropos of hee haw, I may be the only poster on this thread who can claim that George Galloway was their MP.
For nine years.
So there.
james higham,
“Don’t try to speak of free market economics to any Russian under 8000 roubles a month or over fifty years of age.”
And yet, plenty of people in the west have an OK living over the age of 50. The market seems to work there.
Spend decades creating a system where production, not consumption rules, and when you flip it over, you’re going to get problems.
Companies that made useless crap by the ton aren’t going to exist any more. With them go the jobs. People who had pointless penpusher jobs are going to find their jobs gone and not much demand for pointless penpushers.
Try instead this RIIA paper from 2003 by Linda Yueh on: China’s economic growth and WTO accession: Is it sustainable?
“China has been a remarkably successful economy since its adoption of market-oriented reforms in 1978. China’s real GDP growth has averaged 9% per annum from 1979 to the present. As a basis of comparison, the United States during its widely remarked successful era had growth rates averaging 2.9% in real GDP per annum during the late 1990s. . . ”
Don’t ry to speak of free market economics to any Russian under 8000 roubles a month or over fifty years of age.
Actually, I will do this in exactly two hours when my 55 year old soon-to-be Russian mother-in-law arrives at the airport. I’ll start by asking her how a holiday in Dubai measures up to those foreign places she visited during the Soviet times.
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