Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock of goods than a flow of ideas, the defining characteristic of which is surprise....Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises. -George Gilder, Unleash the Mind
When I was kid everything revolved around the docks. Everybody worked there and the trucks would pick up shipments and truck them through Brooklyn to the Battery Tunnel to the Holland Tunnel to the "mainland."
Now what would happen was a ship would pull up and the longshoreman had to "shape up" or join a "gang" just like you saw in "On the Waterfront." When a ship came in they might work for 48 hours straight unloading banana's from South America or fruit from Cuba and Florida (this was the sixties before Castro).
One of the neat tricks that they had was they would throw the crate off the ship to the dock so it would split open. Then they would take the broken crate to the "coopers" who would fill it up with rocks and fix it. Then it would be sent off the Kansas or Wisconsin or whatever and they would find out they were a case short when there was nothing they could do about it.
Later that afternoon they would sell the swag down on Henry St at cut right prices. "Hey I gotta this machine it copies the program offa the TV so you can watch like a tape recorder. Its some beta something. Jap shit but it is supposed to be pretty goods stuff."
Then in 1970 they started using the big containers you see in this photo. No matter how high you raised it and dropped it....it didn't crack open.
You see those big cranes in the photo? They are what the use to take this giant containers off the ships to put them on the dock. Then the whole thing is lifted onto a truck body and it is shipped off to market.
There was not enough room to set this up on the Brooklyn and Manhattan docks. So they built a container port at Howland Hook in Staten Island. But most of the business went right to Jersey. So the business on the docks died.
Now the neighborhood is filled with hipster douchebags of the ilk that would live in some shithole like ....I don't know....Madison Wisconsin.
I think this is a layman's view of it. I suspect that for the majority of entrepreneurial success and innovation the surprises are secrets that very few people ever hear about even if the products they enjoy owe their existence to them. Most advancements are unsung, either because the innovators don't want to draw attention or the advancements are not easy to buzz about. They may be obscure, technical, or too incremental, but this is where the real work gets done.
I have no doubt we could more than match China's growth if our people were in abject poverty and other nations were developing technology that we could just take and use without making the investment.
It's pretty easy to grow when you are starting out so far behind in wages and benefits, and you have a people striving for work rather than handouts.
"The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
And of course Google decides what's creepy or not. I think they regularly cross that line, and expecting them not to is just stupid. The problem with capitalism is the same one as with any democratic system - appetites outstrip wisdom.
Yes, I was aware of that fact even as I commented. But short of a total collapse of the bubble, China is still going to substantially out-grow us even at a reduced rate in the oncoming years. I'm especially worried about what that implies for their rapidly expanding defense budget and our rapidly contracting one. THEY are the rapidly innovative ones in this area, not us..
I don't think people who strive to build their dreams think "hey I'm a capitalist". They just do it.
Capitalism garners bad press by leftists because leftists are simplistic and naïve.
Certainly any system can be tainted by bad actors. Greed isn't always good and if the only goal is money, and you happen to be a sociopath, then capitalism can turn into Bernie Madoff. But then the system is no longer capitalism, it's just greed striped down to lawlessness.
The purest form of capitalism can be described as: I have a dollar and you have some milk. I want that milk more than I want to keep my dollar and you want my dollar more than you want the milk. Beautiful.
Socialism, communism and fascism never work because they are coercive, crony-ist, and they must survive off of capitalism's productivity and take that productivity for granted. Then, once the capitalist goose is picked clean to the bone, the communist/socialist tumor must seek and kill another host.
Paul Krugman celebrates this process. He's king of the cronies.
A problem that has gotten worse and worse is large corporations getting sweetheart deals and feeding off the public trough, corporate welfare. It's always been around, but the last two decades it has grown exponentially. More and more politicians become lobbyists. They protect the people who pay them and get them govt. contracts. I'm going to start a book called, This Town. It's a current bestseller and details just how corrupt it has gotten in DC.
I test launched a little business today and failed the first live market test. The venue is everything if you're doing face-to-face selling. My wise colleague told me afterwards that he predicted I wouldn't sell anything because "you're selling ice cream to Eskimos."
The problem with the current system is as old as economic systems - corruption.
As RHHardin said up top: "Capitalism puts the distributed decisions where the distributed knowledge is."
The current system separates too much capital from the people who created it, and thus put's it in hands less able to produce even more, which is growth. In short, capital gets squandered, wasted, and spent rather than invested. Even shorter, government spends too much. They don't produce it, mostly because they are unequipped, so they just take it and spend it poorly. This mis-allocation of resources is swamping everything else. It is however awesome great fun for the ones taking said money and spending as they see fit.
If you had some money and you wanted to grow it, would you really ask a Senator or any politician to do that for you? Yet that is exactly the thing you do with more of your money than anything else.
We are choosing poorly, and we are getting poor results. It's not complicated.
Personally, I think the current Ag bill is a great example of corruption. Capitalism itself I have no quarrel with, as competition is the best way to come up with better companies, distribution schemes, products, and, yes, ideas. It's so spontaneous and natural that to even call it a "system" is something I don't understand. It's all in the way we approach regulation.
I think we'll always argue over who does the most to create something, as economic success derives as much from talent and connections as it does from hard work - actually much moreso, even though the latter is the only one that we can completely control and should therefore seek to reward. The former is a gift that the government shouldn't detract from, but it's still a gift. The point is that once someone's rich enough, he'll be able to either legitimately argue or lawyer his way into the ownership rights that he feels he deserves.
Arguing over need is a better way to address subsidies. And I don't know why legislators still feel that big agribusiness needs more than the small farmer or hungry consumer... unless confusing success with deservedness of government attention is how they're approaching it.
"Guangdong’s electricity consumption — a key proxy measure of industrial activity — dropped 0.1 percent in the first five months of 2013 from the same period in 2012. This, the survey pointed out, was in marked contrast to reported provincial gross domestic product growth of 12.9 percent during that time. Representatives of the finance office, citing the discrepancy between their own findings and the provincial government’s figures, questioned whether the official statistics reflected real economic conditions…in this case, the gap between reported provincial GDP growth and the survey’s bleak assessment of power demand is unusually large. "
Clinton the Fellatio Fan (just to avoid confusion) once said that our problems were no different than other big, established countries' problems. So I think the issue from here on out is if we want to encourage a reward and spoils and taxation scheme that fits the model of third world countries whose need to grow like crazy makes sense, or if we don't. Maybe there is virtue in holding onto the third-world model, maybe it will continue to encourage needed growth and innovation of a kind that we wouldn't ordinarily have. But I think that's a legitimate debate to be had.
Ritmo, The only way to effectively reduce the drain of resources to corrupt government uses which include subsides, crony capitalism, lobbyists, and corporate welfare is to just give the politicians less of the money. That's primarily why they want it, and why they push for taxes. Lower taxes just keeps more of that money in the hands that can best use it. After that, we simply demand that what is left is used for the narrowly defined Constitutionally prescribed uses .
If you have ever had to reign in an organization that is bleeding money, you quickly find that every penny spent is absolutely necessary, until it's gone, then like magic it wasn't all that important.
I understand that approach for a business, but the problem with trying to put the government on a similar type of dietary regimen is that it doesn't seem to have worked over the last 30 years. The higher deficits and debts just led to borrowing from other countries, and printing more reserve currency, something that companies can't do. Our clout and position as a country allows us to, ironically enough, find help from other governments that probably wouldn't provide it if we were a weaker country. In any case, it makes buying the government-as-a-business argument more complicated.
Anyway, let's not make this Sunday night too political. Bags, do you ever do any SCUBA diving? I like this video of a diver in So Cal (San DIego?) finding a baby seal on his kayak before heading ashore. He's got some other cool videos of hunting for wild lobster and other cool stuff you can capture with a GoPro camera.
Of course you are right, Ritmo. Lower taxes won't work if we are going to vote to spend more anyway. Deficits is what you get, but that's regardless of tax levels. We've spent more than we bring in no matter what we tax. Borrowing is taxation by a different means. Spending is the cause of both the taxes being too high and the deficit. Lower taxes is the goal. In the long term you need both, but the reason for lower spending is to reduce taxes. That's the payoff for growth. So far we have only gotten one, lower taxes occasionally.
What BaghoH20 said at 8:36 PM above..."corruption" is the foremost flaw in the system, IMO. What we think we know of government corruption and crony capitalism is only the iceberg's tip. Just what I could tell you about the corruption in the Iraqi adventure from day f'ing one is outright awesome. I doubt you would believe it. Suffice to say the perpetrators remain no matter who is elected.
Have you ever wondered how the government can promptly fire executive "whistle-blowers" but seem to find it impossible to fire otherwise ordinary executives for malfeasance? The ones that aren't fired know too much. Period.
I have done some scuba, got my certificate years ago, but haven't done it for many years. It's too much work for 20 minutes of fun. Just like for sky diving, with even a shorter payoff. Here in Southern CA, the water is pretty cold, and only a few places are good for scuba. We do have lots of sea lions, and sharks, and whales, but it's so hard to look good in scuba gear.
So in that case why not just go along with O's proposal to set a strict gov't to GDP ratio (19% - 23% is the typical range), and argue over specific spending (and taxing?) priorities later? At least that way you'd have a fixed framework for the total budget itself and removed a significant obstacle for spending consensus, first.
Ritmo, not that you were talking to me. But I got my open water cert three years ago, at age 63. Wonderful, should have done so at 23. Then, in a stroke, after the last dive, walking back to the dive office from the boat, slipped and fractured all the major bones just above my right ankle. So, two years later went back for several more dives. All this in San Carlos, MX.
A nice small town with minimal hype and interesting dive locations.
It was such an experience, gained wherever they are I suppose, to have the sea lions circle your sunk self with such grace, as if only to point out what clods we humans are in the water.
Hey, anyone can join in XRay, AFAIC. I could stand to learn as much as I can about SCUBA and other related stuff, given how surprised I am to have still not done it. Sorry to hear about your injury, but I'm glad things have gotten better since, and thanks for mentioning the name of another place for me to keep in mind for visiting. Cheers and glad to hear about your recovery.
Just 23 miles of the cost of L.A. is Catalina Island. You can boat or helicopter your way out there, zip line down from the mountains to the beach where there is a bar right on the sand just a short walk from great scuba diving in kelp forests where the ocean floor drops down precipitously. Fun play, good drinks, great climate, and amazing diving all from a golf cart. There are no cars on Catalina. It also has a one of a kind airstrip for pilots that's on top of a mountain with sea cliffs at each end of the single runway. When taking off or landing you can't see the end of the runaway. You just hope the plane lands or flies before you get there. When I was learning to fly, it was one of the training flights I took. Very exciting. You take off from mainland and climb as fast as you can to get as high as possible by midway across the straight which ends up about 5,000 feet high in a Cessna 172. This is so you might have enough altitude to glide to land either one way or the other in case of engine failure. Life jackets are mandatory on the flight.
Most government regulations cause more negative consequences than the sins they were attempting to cure.
I can think of specific instances where local controls are really just graft for local government pocket shovelers. Local governments have turned into the mob in some cases.
By coincedence, I recently sailed into Catalina Island... via the big boat Carnival. No time for anything other than the golf cart. Not true no cars. Those were aplenty. Just that there is a 15 or more waiting year to bring more on.
Learning to fly in Northern California, seems much like learning on Catalina. Pressure Altitude is the key, ignore it at your risk.
44 comments:
This may be what the Lefties don't get.
Great quote.
Capitalism is not, as so many Darwinians think, the "survival of the fittest," rather it's the "survival of the fastest."
(Note: Compare China's growth rate to ours)
When I was kid everything revolved around the docks. Everybody worked there and the trucks would pick up shipments and truck them through Brooklyn to the Battery Tunnel to the Holland Tunnel to the "mainland."
Now what would happen was a ship would pull up and the longshoreman had to "shape up" or join a "gang" just like you saw in "On the Waterfront." When a ship came in they might work for 48 hours straight unloading banana's from South America or fruit from Cuba and Florida (this was the sixties before Castro).
One of the neat tricks that they had was they would throw the crate off the ship to the dock so it would split open. Then they would take the broken crate to the "coopers" who would fill it up with rocks and fix it. Then it would be sent off the Kansas or Wisconsin or whatever and they would find out they were a case short when there was nothing they could do about it.
Later that afternoon they would sell the swag down on Henry St at cut right prices. "Hey I gotta this machine it copies the program offa the TV so you can watch like a tape recorder. Its some beta something. Jap shit but it is supposed to be pretty goods stuff."
Then in 1970 they started using the big containers you see in this photo. No matter how high you raised it and dropped it....it didn't crack open.
That destroyed the Port of New York.
You see those big cranes in the photo? They are what the use to take this giant containers off the ships to put them on the dock. Then the whole thing is lifted onto a truck body and it is shipped off to market.
There was not enough room to set this up on the Brooklyn and Manhattan docks. So they built a container port at Howland Hook in Staten Island. But most of the business went right to Jersey. So the business on the docks died.
Now the neighborhood is filled with hipster douchebags of the ilk that would live in some shithole like ....I don't know....Madison Wisconsin.
Change sucks.
virgil xenophon said...
Capitalism is not, as so many Darwinians think, the "survival of the fittest," rather it's the "survival of the fastest."
(Note: Compare China's growth rate to ours)
And the Red Chinese are having trouble sustaining that growth.
Much of it having come from building Potemkin villages in the Chinese countryside and places as far-flung as Africa.
And people across the world are getting nervous.
I think this is a layman's view of it. I suspect that for the majority of entrepreneurial success and innovation the surprises are secrets that very few people ever hear about even if the products they enjoy owe their existence to them. Most advancements are unsung, either because the innovators don't want to draw attention or the advancements are not easy to buzz about. They may be obscure, technical, or too incremental, but this is where the real work gets done.
I have no doubt we could more than match China's growth if our people were in abject poverty and other nations were developing technology that we could just take and use without making the investment.
It's pretty easy to grow when you are starting out so far behind in wages and benefits, and you have a people striving for work rather than handouts.
Capitalism puts the distributed decisions where the distributed knowledge is.
Top-down moves them away.
"Capitalism is surely the worst economic system, except for all the others.
Winston Churchill
Trooper, The season of The Wire on the docks was superb. I didn't know Baltimore had so many Pollacks.
Really I thought "Capitalism" was like a box of chocolates.
Well the Wire illustrated what the union was like.
I remember the strike when the containers were first coming in.
It was brutal.
When a union believes they can stop technology that takes away jobs they are more than quixotic, they're blind.
"The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
And of course Google decides what's creepy or not. I think they regularly cross that line, and expecting them not to is just stupid. The problem with capitalism is the same one as with any democratic system - appetites outstrip wisdom.
@edutcher/
Yes, I was aware of that fact even as I commented. But short of a total collapse of the bubble, China is still going to substantially out-grow us even at a reduced rate in the oncoming years. I'm especially worried about what that implies for their rapidly expanding defense budget and our rapidly contracting one. THEY are the rapidly innovative ones in this area, not us..
I don't think people who strive to build their dreams think "hey I'm a capitalist". They just do it.
Capitalism garners bad press by leftists because leftists are simplistic and naïve.
Certainly any system can be tainted by bad actors. Greed isn't always good and if the only goal is money, and you happen to be a sociopath, then capitalism can turn into Bernie Madoff. But then the system is no longer capitalism, it's just greed striped down to lawlessness.
The purest form of capitalism can be described as: I have a dollar and you have some milk. I want that milk more than I want to keep my dollar and you want my dollar more than you want the milk. Beautiful.
Socialism, communism and fascism never work because they are coercive, crony-ist, and they must survive off of capitalism's productivity and take that productivity for granted.
Then, once the capitalist goose is picked clean to the bone, the communist/socialist tumor must seek and kill another host.
Paul Krugman celebrates this process. He's king of the cronies.
China's big advantage in defense is that they can keep a secret.
A problem that has gotten worse and worse is large corporations getting sweetheart deals and feeding off the public trough, corporate welfare. It's always been around, but the last two decades it has grown exponentially. More and more politicians become lobbyists. They protect the people who pay them and get them govt. contracts. I'm going to start a book called, This Town. It's a current bestseller and details just how corrupt it has gotten in DC.
I test launched a little business today and failed the first live market test. The venue is everything if you're doing face-to-face selling. My wise colleague told me afterwards that he predicted I wouldn't sell anything because "you're selling ice cream to Eskimos."
I think the problem with the current system is we mistake the strength of spontaneous order as a shield against conflicts of public interest.
The problem with the current system is as old as economic systems - corruption.
As RHHardin said up top: "Capitalism puts the distributed decisions where the distributed knowledge is."
The current system separates too much capital from the people who created it, and thus put's it in hands less able to produce even more, which is growth. In short, capital gets squandered, wasted, and spent rather than invested. Even shorter, government spends too much. They don't produce it, mostly because they are unequipped, so they just take it and spend it poorly. This mis-allocation of resources is swamping everything else. It is however awesome great fun for the ones taking said money and spending as they see fit.
If you had some money and you wanted to grow it, would you really ask a Senator or any politician to do that for you? Yet that is exactly the thing you do with more of your money than anything else.
We are choosing poorly, and we are getting poor results. It's not complicated.
Personally, I think the current Ag bill is a great example of corruption. Capitalism itself I have no quarrel with, as competition is the best way to come up with better companies, distribution schemes, products, and, yes, ideas. It's so spontaneous and natural that to even call it a "system" is something I don't understand. It's all in the way we approach regulation.
I think we'll always argue over who does the most to create something, as economic success derives as much from talent and connections as it does from hard work - actually much moreso, even though the latter is the only one that we can completely control and should therefore seek to reward. The former is a gift that the government shouldn't detract from, but it's still a gift. The point is that once someone's rich enough, he'll be able to either legitimately argue or lawyer his way into the ownership rights that he feels he deserves.
Arguing over need is a better way to address subsidies. And I don't know why legislators still feel that big agribusiness needs more than the small farmer or hungry consumer... unless confusing success with deservedness of government attention is how they're approaching it.
Who can you believe?
"Guangdong’s electricity consumption — a key proxy measure of industrial activity — dropped 0.1 percent in the first five months of 2013 from the same period in 2012. This, the survey pointed out, was in marked contrast to reported provincial gross domestic product growth of 12.9 percent during that time. Representatives of the finance office, citing the discrepancy between their own findings and the provincial government’s figures, questioned whether the official statistics reflected real economic conditions…in this case, the gap between reported provincial GDP growth and the survey’s bleak assessment of power demand is unusually large. "
~ http://www.stratfor.com/sample/analysis/interpreting-discrepancies-chinas-statistics
Clinton the Fellatio Fan (just to avoid confusion) once said that our problems were no different than other big, established countries' problems. So I think the issue from here on out is if we want to encourage a reward and spoils and taxation scheme that fits the model of third world countries whose need to grow like crazy makes sense, or if we don't. Maybe there is virtue in holding onto the third-world model, maybe it will continue to encourage needed growth and innovation of a kind that we wouldn't ordinarily have. But I think that's a legitimate debate to be had.
Ritmo, The only way to effectively reduce the drain of resources to corrupt government uses which include subsides, crony capitalism, lobbyists, and corporate welfare is to just give the politicians less of the money. That's primarily why they want it, and why they push for taxes. Lower taxes just keeps more of that money in the hands that can best use it. After that, we simply demand that what is left is used for the narrowly defined Constitutionally prescribed uses .
If you have ever had to reign in an organization that is bleeding money, you quickly find that every penny spent is absolutely necessary, until it's gone, then like magic it wasn't all that important.
Trooper, The season of The Wire on the docks was superb. I didn't know Baltimore had so many Pollacks
The Wire seems more like a documentary with each passing year.
I understand that approach for a business, but the problem with trying to put the government on a similar type of dietary regimen is that it doesn't seem to have worked over the last 30 years. The higher deficits and debts just led to borrowing from other countries, and printing more reserve currency, something that companies can't do. Our clout and position as a country allows us to, ironically enough, find help from other governments that probably wouldn't provide it if we were a weaker country. In any case, it makes buying the government-as-a-business argument more complicated.
Anyway, let's not make this Sunday night too political. Bags, do you ever do any SCUBA diving? I like this video of a diver in So Cal (San DIego?) finding a baby seal on his kayak before heading ashore. He's got some other cool videos of hunting for wild lobster and other cool stuff you can capture with a GoPro camera.
Of course you are right, Ritmo. Lower taxes won't work if we are going to vote to spend more anyway. Deficits is what you get, but that's regardless of tax levels. We've spent more than we bring in no matter what we tax. Borrowing is taxation by a different means. Spending is the cause of both the taxes being too high and the deficit. Lower taxes is the goal. In the long term you need both, but the reason for lower spending is to reduce taxes. That's the payoff for growth. So far we have only gotten one, lower taxes occasionally.
What BaghoH20 said at 8:36 PM above..."corruption" is the foremost flaw in the system, IMO. What we think we know of government corruption and crony capitalism is only the iceberg's tip. Just what I could tell you about the corruption in the Iraqi adventure from day f'ing one is outright awesome. I doubt you would believe it. Suffice to say the perpetrators remain no matter who is elected.
Have you ever wondered how the government can promptly fire executive "whistle-blowers" but seem to find it impossible to fire otherwise ordinary executives for malfeasance? The ones that aren't fired know too much. Period.
WC: 102
I have done some scuba, got my certificate years ago, but haven't done it for many years. It's too much work for 20 minutes of fun. Just like for sky diving, with even a shorter payoff. Here in Southern CA, the water is pretty cold, and only a few places are good for scuba. We do have lots of sea lions, and sharks, and whales, but it's so hard to look good in scuba gear.
So in that case why not just go along with O's proposal to set a strict gov't to GDP ratio (19% - 23% is the typical range), and argue over specific spending (and taxing?) priorities later? At least that way you'd have a fixed framework for the total budget itself and removed a significant obstacle for spending consensus, first.
Ritmo, not that you were talking to me. But I got my open water cert three years ago, at age 63. Wonderful, should have done so at 23. Then, in a stroke, after the last dive, walking back to the dive office from the boat, slipped and fractured all the major bones just above my right ankle. So, two years later went back for several more dives. All this in San Carlos, MX.
A nice small town with minimal hype and interesting dive locations.
It was such an experience, gained wherever they are I suppose, to have the sea lions circle your sunk self with such grace, as if only to point out what clods we humans are in the water.
Don't like the idea of fixed GDP ratio. Gives no incentive to make it smaller, sets up only more interest group bickering.
Hey, anyone can join in XRay, AFAIC. I could stand to learn as much as I can about SCUBA and other related stuff, given how surprised I am to have still not done it. Sorry to hear about your injury, but I'm glad things have gotten better since, and thanks for mentioning the name of another place for me to keep in mind for visiting. Cheers and glad to hear about your recovery.
Just 23 miles of the cost of L.A. is Catalina Island. You can boat or helicopter your way out there, zip line down from the mountains to the beach where there is a bar right on the sand just a short walk from great scuba diving in kelp forests where the ocean floor drops down precipitously. Fun play, good drinks, great climate, and amazing diving all from a golf cart. There are no cars on Catalina. It also has a one of a kind airstrip for pilots that's on top of a mountain with sea cliffs at each end of the single runway. When taking off or landing you can't see the end of the runaway. You just hope the plane lands or flies before you get there. When I was learning to fly, it was one of the training flights I took. Very exciting. You take off from mainland and climb as fast as you can to get as high as possible by midway across the straight which ends up about 5,000 feet high in a Cessna 172. This is so you might have enough altitude to glide to land either one way or the other in case of engine failure. Life jackets are mandatory on the flight.
Most government regulations cause more negative consequences than the sins they were attempting to cure.
I can think of specific instances where local controls are really just graft for local government pocket shovelers. Local governments have turned into the mob in some cases.
Personally, I think the current Ag bill is a great example of corruption.
Now, there's something we can agree on.
Hey Bags - would you ever trade in a Cessna for an ICON A5 if they ever commercialize enough of them?
By coincedence, I recently sailed into Catalina Island... via the big boat Carnival. No time for anything other than the golf cart. Not true no cars. Those were aplenty. Just that there is a 15 or more waiting year to bring more on.
Learning to fly in Northern California, seems much like learning on Catalina. Pressure Altitude is the key, ignore it at your risk.
That's a cool plane, Ritmo. Love the spin resistance.
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