Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails

Re:Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails by adventured on Monday November 03, 2014 @01:21AM (#8549567)

Hong Kong and Singapore are the two freest economies. They have very minimal welfare states, with relatively light regulation and taxation. Their wealth creation and economic growth have been astounding over the last ten years.

Meanwhile, most of Europe has seen zero GDP growth in real terms since 2004/05. France has seen an average of sub 1% nominal GDP growth for a decade; negative in real terms. Japan, which is a massive welfare state, has seen zero GDP growth for 20 years; their State spending dug such a deep hole, a quarter of their revenues go to just paying interest on debt, and they've taken to debasing their currency as the last step available to them to hold off further collapse. Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, et al. are welfare state disasters, rapidly imploding. The US has seen zero standard of living improvement for 40 years, and that's before accounting for the massive increase in debt that has yet to exact its full toll.

You can count the number of welfare states in the world that are doing well on one hand, with one of them being a temporary oil empire named Norway.

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Re:Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails by vinhboy on Monday November 03, 2014 @01:50AM (#8549653)

"Freest Economies"? You mean the biggest leach in modern history. They send all of their children to be educated abroad. The rely on the security provided by our military. And they provide safe harbor for all the rich tax evaders who made their money off the innovation created by countries that actually invest in research. Then there's also all the poor as dirt neighboring countries who does all the work for them and live in the pollution byproducts.

We shouldn't measure how well the kingdom is doing by the gloss of the marbles at the king's court.

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Re:Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails by bildung on Monday November 03, 2014 @04:31AM (#8549999)

Hong Kong and Singapore had an astounding growth of 2.9% and 3.9%, while socialist China had a miserable 7.7%? I don't get the impression you looked at the numbers at all, or did you?

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Re:Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails by maratd on Monday November 03, 2014 @09:49AM (#8550991)

In what way is China socialist? It's a kleptocracy and an aggressively capitalist one at that.

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Re:Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails by bildung on Tuesday November 04, 2014 @03:30AM (#8555595)

Whether or not China is socialist or capitalist doesn't really matter: GP said "freer" economies have higher growth. Is China freer than Hong Kong or Singapore?

(BTW: China sure has a market economy, but OTOH it lacks multiple specifics of contemporary Western capitalist economies, e.g. it's not primarily driven by the financial markets, a significant portion of the workforce still works at state owned enterprises, much deeper planned macro economical development than in the West, ...)

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Re:Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails by mercurial on Monday November 03, 2014 @04:35AM (#8550013)

> Hong Kong and Singapore are the two freest economies. They have very minimal welfare states, with relatively light regulation and taxation. Their wealth creation and economic growth have been astounding over the last ten years.

I don't know about Singapore, but the last echo I had about Honk Kong was "we have too many poor people, you can't seriously consider letting them vote".

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Re:Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails by rmah on Monday November 03, 2014 @01:40PM (#8552580)

Singapore is a not a "minimal welfare state". As an example, some 40% of the population lives in government subsidized or public housing. Singapore has universal public healthcare. Generous unemployment and government pension benefits. There is free primary and secondary education as well as multiple state-run universities with free/highly subsidized tuition. In short, there are lots of social safety nets there.

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