How would you guys respond to the following article?

Economics Economics Questions
1

http://www.onepennysheet.com./2011/03/23-things-they-don%E2%80%99t-tell-you-about-capitalism/

Thought people might like to take a point or two… stimulate discussion if you will.

2

Funny how advocates of slavery always say that.

3

Ian Fletcher is a corporate lobbyist, and Ha Joon Chang is a Cambridge economist of the Joan Robinson school of thought.

Oh wait, this discussion is already over.

4

I will take the first 10.

  1. Who is we? If we are consumers then I disagree. If we are everyone else then I would agree.

  2. Disagree. Companies should be run to keep current and future sharehold value. If the keeping of future sharehold value entails making “green” stuff or being nice to some government regulators then that is the best way to go.

  3. Nope. I earn what I can negotiate with my employer. Of course my employer is better off with me having a job than without. I can not help it if people in foreign countries do not have the negotiating power that I do.

  4. Nope. The internet has dramatically reduced the price of information and transactions costs. The only 3 inventions that MIGHT be greater in effects are:1. Television, 2. Automobile, 3. Telephone. My opinion is that the only one that I can say certainly has had a greater effect on society than the internet is 2 the automobile. But this is not true for India and China and other heavily populated areas where the internet would be number 1.

  5. Nope. Companies that satisfy and keep customers do better than those that don’t.

  6. Completely wrong. Macroeconomic stability has caused so much destruction and malinvestment that whole countries have had to adopt draconian policies to correct previous stupid macroeconomic policy. The bust or the draconian measures are the results of previous inflation.

  7. Nope. Look at the index of economic freedom. The countries near the top are the wealthiest while the ones at the bottom are the least wealthy. Of course no index is perfect but look at the wealth of Hong Kong and Singapore vs Indonesia, Cambodia, North Korea, etc.

  8. Absolutely NOT. Capital flow is not the issue. Inflation caused by bad macoreconomic policy is. The business cycles across the world have nothing to do with investment and trade and have everying to do with inflation. In fact capital controls are the product of trying to prevent corrections due to malinvestments from previous inflation.

  9. True. The parts of the USA economy that look like post industrial are from government subsidies and central bank policies.

  10. Absolutely. Lichenstein, Switzerland, Norway, Luxembourg, Monaco, etc all have higher incomes and standards of living.

5

Bogart

  1. no

What is a “version” of capitalism? There’s capitalism and then there’s not capitalism, so what is this “version of capitalism” crap?

6

This is just a laundry list of the usual economic, policy, legal and moral fallacies all wrapped up in one big spitwad. The only points that are unequivocally true are 9,10,11,14,15,17,18,19 and 20 but these true points range from the unremarkable to the inconsequential. The rest is just a regurgitation of every economic propaganda talking point coming out of Washington, DC (or Beijing, as the case may be). It’s not even worth debunking.

Clayton -