Capitalism will save this world

C

Cliffy

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Nov 19, 2008
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"As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome."
~Noam Chomsky





Artwork by Alex Gross
 
pgs

pgs

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Nov 29, 2008
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Cliffy said:
"As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome."
~Noam Chomsky





Artwork by Alex Gross
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How Gross .
 
petros

petros

The Central Scrutinizer
Nov 21, 2008
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Another person with no job, no money and nothing to do all day complaining about people who make and have money.

Poor bastard.
 
darkbeaver

darkbeaver

the universe is electric
Jan 26, 2006
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RR1 Distopia 666 Discordia
National Socialism will save this world from capitalism/fukkin bankers. Hitler will be back to finish the job he started, his crime was in thirty-six months elevating Germany from rags to riches highest standard of living on the planet at that time without the bankers. This is why he had to be crushed. He was a nice guy.
 
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Twin_Moose

Twin_Moose

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Apr 17, 2017
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darkbeaver said:
National Socialism will save this world from capitalism/fukkin bankers. Hitler will be back to finish the job he started, his crime was in thirty-six months elevating Germany from rags to riches highest standard of living on the planet at that time without the bankers. This is why he had to be crushed. He was a nice guy.
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He borrowed like a Liberal to get the people back to work, when he started funnelling it into the Military he started using slave labour on infrastructure and printing his own money to pay for it.

How did Germany rebuild so quickly after World War I?

Germany's economic rebuilding came mostly between 1924 to 1929. The economic policies that made this happen was the following:
A return to the gold standard
Up to 1924 the German government would simply print more money to pay its debts and this led to hyperinflation. A return to the gold-standard stopped this.
Welfare capitalism
A liberal business-friendly market economy made industry prosper, and a liberal tax-financed social security prevented the worst forms of poverty.
Foreign loans
Since the German economy had collapsed, the Dawes Plan was put into place to save Germany and lessen the impact of the war reparations. As a part of this Germany would borrow quite large amounts of money from American banks.
These three parts worked together to stop the German economic collapse and rebuild it during what has been called "The Golden Era".
Hitler continued the last policy of borrowing large amounts of money after 1933 as well and used it to finance the German re-armament.
What can current governments learn from this?
Having a gold standard has other drawbacks, but it's better than hyper-inflation. However, an even better policy is to not have a gold standard, but have a politically independent central bank whose job it is to keep inflation within reasonable limits. The Euro already has this, so nothing can be learnt from that.
A liberal capitalist welfare state is a good idea, and this is also indeed the most common type of economic policy in Europe, so this lesson has been learnt as well.
The current crisis simply has its basis in related but slightly different problems. Many states in Europe have paid their debts by borrowing money instead of printing more.
Borrowing large amounts of money to kick-start your economy is a common political policy and inter-war Germany is a good example of this, so this lesson has been learned. The lesson that has not been learned is that you need to pay it back.
When the depression hit the United States in 1929, the banks would retract the money from Germany, making Germany one of the worst hit countries in Europe (arguably paving the way for Hitler). Hitler never paid back his loans (it has even been argued that the massive loans he took was one major reason for him to start WWII as Germany couldn't actually pay them back).
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Hitler's Economics

In the 1930s, Hitler was widely viewed as just another protectionist central planner who recognized the supposed failure of the free market and the need for nationally guided economic development. Proto-Keynesian socialist economist Joan Robinson wrote that "Hitler found a cure against unemployment before Keynes was finished explaining it."
What were those economic policies? He suspended the gold standard, embarked on huge public-works programs like autobahns, protected industry from foreign competition, expanded credit, instituted jobs programs, bullied the private sector on prices and production decisions, vastly expanded the military, enforced capital controls, instituted family planning, penalized smoking, brought about national healthcare and unemployment insurance, imposed education standards, and eventually ran huge deficits. The Nazi interventionist program was essential to the regime's rejection of the market economy and its embrace of socialism in one country.
Such programs remain widely praised today, even given their failures. They are features of every "capitalist" democracy. Keynes himself admired the Nazi economic program, writing in the foreword to the German edition to the General Theory: "[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire."
Keynes's comment, which may shock many, did not come out of the blue. Hitler's economists rejected laissez-faire, and admired Keynes, even foreshadowing him in many ways. Similarly, the Keynesians admired Hitler (see George Garvy, "Keynes and the Economic Activists of Pre-Hitler Germany," The Journal of Political Economy, Volume 83, Issue 2, April 1975, pp. 391–405).
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