Public Interest
A recent headline in the New York Times, “Health Insurers Making Record Profits as Many Postpone Care,” reveals the failings of a corporate capitalist economy. Let me first add the caveats that what we have in this country would be more accurately dubbed corporate socialism than corporate capitalism, and as with anything “failing” depends on [...]
Continue reading about The Failed Corporate Capitalism Model
Covered in the previous post was the concept that since capitalism involves production then the normative goal of profits should be to perpetuate production. Using profit for capital improvements or simply to buy stuff encourages production; so, too, does investment into research and development. Using profits to invest into futures trading or even into companies [...]
Capitalism in its pure, unadulterated form, its operational definition before laissez faire economists and free market libertarians make adjustments and excuses to fit actual practice to the meaning, is private production that generates profits. I have covered the problems with “private” and “production” in a laissez faire, corporate economy. Now let’s examine profit, the capital [...]
Sorry for the lag time in posts. I’m involved in a very ambitious project which I will share with you shortly. To recap this series on capitalism: capitalism is private production that generates profits. Capitalism has existed at a small scale, but not at a large scale, despite the adjustments/excuses that grand economic scholars make [...]
This is the second part of the “Why Capitalism Has Yet to Succeed” series. I added the caveat “at a large scale” because, in truth, capitalism can and has succeeded at a small scale. An example of that is where they use BerkShares, close by to where I live. BerkShares are local currency for the [...]
Few economists would agree with the title of this post. Yet, as I often proudly proclaim, I’m no economist. I’m an empiricist, and as such I take seriously the literal meanings of words, or the basic models of concepts. There is disagreement even among economists over the meaning of capitalism; some of that disagreement is [...]
The 2010 election draws near. Our mailboxes are stuffed and our phones are ringing. Every candidate indulges us with promises while the “other candidate” will raise taxes beyond what we earn, raise unemployment to 110% and claim our first borns for indentured servitude (OK, I made some of that up). What really distinguishes the candidates [...]
You can find a quote that supports almost any point of view. A new feature for this web log will be reviewing quotes made by famous people that relate to social balance. My source for quotes will usually be Quotationary by Leonard Roy Frank. “There is in human nature generally more of the fool than [...]
Any recommendations I make regarding patents should be taken as just a rough mold to work into shape. As covered last time, before any meaningful change can be done to patents themselves we likely would have to first reverse the damage done by the Supreme Court with their pro-corporate jurisprudence over the years. In particular [...]
Continue reading about Innovation: Indulgence or Philanthropy – Part 5
This series has revolved around the quote “innovation without protection is philanthropy.” Does philanthropy best disseminate innovations that people want to copy, or does preventing the natural tendency of humans to copy good ideas serve as a market stimulus for innovations by appealing to “natural” greed? Innovations happen independently of corporations and neither corporations nor [...]
Continue reading about Innovation: Indulgence or Philanthropy – Part 4