The problem here is that there are too few capitalists with capital being controlled by an elite selection ending with the same problems as in socialism. What Hayek talked about the Road to Serfdom, many people missed the point that he was trying to make, that a system where a few control the means of production will end in economic disaster due to decisions being made by a select few. Two decades after much of the west decided to dismantle their socialist model, capitalism now suffers the same problem.
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Fixing Capitalism - BBC Debate, Davos 2012
- Thread starter Fook Seng
- Start date
The problem here is that there are too few capitalists with capital being controlled by an elite selection ending with the same problems as in socialism. What Hayek talked about the Road to Serfdom, many people missed the point that he was trying to make, that a system where a few control the means of production will end in economic disaster due to decisions being made by a select few. Two decades after much of the west decided to dismantle their socialist model, capitalism now suffers the same problem.
I cant believe we have this fake capitalist quoting Hayek to me trying to discredit capitalism.... you are just as fake as ah Sam....
this good cop bad cop talking to each other is so disgusting
too few capitalists with capital being controlled ???? what pot are you smoking ??? credit have never been easier and rates have never ...
we have too much capital washing around and not enough dream chasers, innovators, entrepreneur, risk takers willing to take capital and turn ideas into reality.....
we even have micro finance for poor indian farmers... so dun give that 1848 communist crap about few control the means of production ....
did mark zuckerberg have anything more than an internet connection... we have spring singapore throwing $ at shit ideas...we just dun have enough good ideas...
means of production ??? do you know that a 14 year sec school gal can open a blogshop and make shitload of money, she doesnt even need to know how to sew, just need to know how to pick nice dress...
I never read a worst posting in this shit forum... "means of production" as if you put labour and cpaital together, you can create paradise by planning
no offence, I think you should quit this forum and get an education, cause I never feel so insulted in my life
i cant believe some1 is so stupid to post this communist crap and expect me to swallow it....
and dun give me shit about economic disaster .... capitalism mean boom and bust.... in socialist system, you cant even go bust cause you dun even have anything to go bust in the 1st place...
It was and is called feudalism which is still in operation
We have a big problems once we are able to create money out of thin air.
Debt issued on fiat money. Can we trust humans who are by nature greedy?
Banks allowing to use customers money to generate more money. Fundamentally wrong because fractional reserve banking should be classified as a breach of trust.
Crony capitalism is different from capitalism as it is intended. Mr Leong is wrong!
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Under Crony Capitalism, the grossly inferior are not starve to death, they are kept barely alive to further the cause of crony capitalism.
How did the Earth population managed to increase from 2.5 billion to 6 billion in less than a century? Socialism?
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The problem isn't capitalism. It's corporatism a corner stone of fascism. What is being bandied about is the term, crony capitalism. Crony capitalism is of course an euphemism for corporatism. Capitalism is the best way forward and capitalism needs democracy. COrporatism or crony capitalism occurs when a small group controls the country's imoprtant institutions and economic well-being to suit the needs of a small minority. It is controlled capitalism and not free-market capitalism. What is worse is that this form of controlled capitalism is based on corporatist ideals.
The most general definition of capitalism is "A free market and companies living by profit motive. They exist to make money. Prices, production, and the distribution of goods are determined by competition in a free market."
It is a perfect formula for most commodities except when applied to the labour market. Allowing free market access to cheap labour so that equilibrium price i.e. wage, will be determined by demand and supply is economically logical but is also destructive to the social fabric. Low-wage foreign workers are competing with local workers on unequal ground. Wage that is considered to be luxurious to a foreign worker may not meet the subsistence level required by a local. Foreign workers can survive in crammed dormitories, cheap food because they know that their sufferings are temporary. In the meantime, the balanced pay that they managed to remit to their families, which is considered to be next to nothing by the locals, is a big sum to them. For the locals, the same wage may be just enough to cover personal transportation and meals and there is nothing left for the family. In short, the basic needs of the foreign workers and the locals are unequal.
International trade and relocation of manufacturing bases to places with cheap labour is causing nightmare to developed countries. We are not spared. We managed to continue to keep some MNC with lucrative tax incentives, security and stability of infrastructure and most importantly, supply of cheap labour from foreign soil. It is fine if such jobs are confined to manufacturing industries because we have been employing foreigners all along. However, it soon eat into the service industries such as restaurants, even coffeeshops, retail trades ... Unfortunately, these are the main sources of employment for the low-income locals. Though measures have been taken to upgrade the skill of the locals but knowing their age and capabilities, success is limited.
Why then is there a need to allow cheap foreign labour to infiltrate the service industries? My guess is "high property price". A huge portion of our operation cost is rental. To remain viable, cutting labour cost is an easy option. However, it is a risky one.
When MBT said that if we lowered the property price, we are robbing the reserve. He is honest. A big portion of the values of companies, personal ... comes from properties. So depressing the property price is a big no. Till a great compromise can be found to dismount, we will have big trouble to continue riding on the back of the property tiger. Thank you for your patience if you managed to read till here. Just a GP essay that I thought of writing if I have the chance to take A level again.
It is a perfect formula for most commodities except when applied to the labour market. Allowing free market access to cheap labour so that equilibrium price i.e. wage, will be determined by demand and supply is economically logical but is also destructive to the social fabric. Low-wage foreign workers are competing with local workers on unequal ground. Wage that is considered to be luxurious to a foreign worker may not meet the subsistence level required by a local. Foreign workers can survive in crammed dormitories, cheap food because they know that their sufferings are temporary. In the meantime, the balanced pay that they managed to remit to their families, which is considered to be next to nothing by the locals, is a big sum to them. For the locals, the same wage may be just enough to cover personal transportation and meals and there is nothing left for the family. In short, the basic needs of the foreign workers and the locals are unequal.
International trade and relocation of manufacturing bases to places with cheap labour is causing nightmare to developed countries. We are not spared. We managed to continue to keep some MNC with lucrative tax incentives, security and stability of infrastructure and most importantly, supply of cheap labour from foreign soil. It is fine if such jobs are confined to manufacturing industries because we have been employing foreigners all along. However, it soon eat into the service industries such as restaurants, even coffeeshops, retail trades ... Unfortunately, these are the main sources of employment for the low-income locals. Though measures have been taken to upgrade the skill of the locals but knowing their age and capabilities, success is limited.
Why then is there a need to allow cheap foreign labour to infiltrate the service industries? My guess is "high property price". A huge portion of our operation cost is rental. To remain viable, cutting labour cost is an easy option. However, it is a risky one.
When MBT said that if we lowered the property price, we are robbing the reserve. He is honest. A big portion of the values of companies, personal ... comes from properties. So depressing the property price is a big no. Till a great compromise can be found to dismount, we will have big trouble to continue riding on the back of the property tiger. Thank you for your patience if you managed to read till here. Just a GP essay that I thought of writing if I have the chance to take A level again.
Seee3 said:
What people are now saying and this has been discussed in more than a few sessions of the World Economic Forum, is that optimizing profit is only short-term. For a company to survive in the long term, for a country for that matter, the interest of all stakeholders, not just shareholders, must be considered and this includes labour.
A good example is Foxcon factory in China. The large number of suicides quoting poor working condition as the reason caused Management to take stock of things. If things were left unchecked, it could eventually end up in a total strike, stopping production for long periods, even cancellation of orders.
You will very likely fail in your GP paper if you were to take it again.
International trade has been happening for hundreds of years without the repercussions that we are now facing in the job market. Take note, the Singaporeans are the hardest hit. The truth is that the PAPpies have pawned Singaporeans by allowing almost free-access to FTs. You can try getting a work permit to other first world countries or even Malaysia and see how far you get.
As for the property prices, this is actually what causes our economy to be so fragile. It is an important cause of our economic problem and not a symptom.
Capitalism rewards risks with profits. The property market here has been rewarded relentlessly and handsomely such that ricks are almost non-existent for the government, developers and rich investors/speculators. The increase in rents has hurt businesses and hence workers. Expanding an SME within Singapore is a highly risky and expensive venture. SME's, given the luxury to hire FTs to cut costs and increase profits will certainly look at hiring FTs as a way of increasing profits instead of increasing operations or even expanding operations by opening up a new location.
The PAPpies are largely clueless about creating economic wealth, hence the do not know how to set forth an environment and the people that will be able to create economic wealth. Property assets inflation is the worse indicator of creating economic wealth. What it actually does is to enslave the lower and middle income workers while stifling entrepreneurs and businessmen from partaking in more true economic activity.
One of the ways to actually re-set the economy is to reduce property prices by at least 25% in the resale market and by 150% in the HDB first-time buyer prices. Once rentals are more competitive and FTs are properly and strictly regulated, we will see productivity gains as well as an increase risk-taking. The successful ones can be assisted to venture overseas as well as to xpand locally to take advantage of economies of scale.
Profits can be similar or increased for those who know how to run a business properly without the need to hire cheap foreign labour.
Davos is a conjob of those that are behind the corporatist state of affairs that is driving the world economy for the past 40 years. The mainstream media is largely behind the hoodwinking and blaming capitalism is part of the charade to hide the fact that it is indeed corporatism or crony capitalism that is the fault.
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The problem with words like capitalism, socialism, communism, mercantilism and feudalism is no one has tried to put it on a ranking spectrum and the dimensions that affect
their position on the spectrum in a more tangible mahjong like manner. Capitalism in its extreme form is blowing up the neighboring restaurant to beat the competition literally. This was and is still done in China. That is why it is said the China today is far more a Capitalist in its mechanism operating than the United States - welcome to the real wild west. There is also the extreme end of socialism we see in Nordic countries, where the working man who breaks his back cannot make much more, sometimes equals or less than the bar bum who takes social security. Then we have the long gone planned economy of the Soviet Union era which was still not equal either, when viewed closely. What can be said is recent access to more energy sources with energy powered man made tools has given us leverage to exploit natural and human resources at great speeds than before for the real economy and the financial economy was supposed to motivate people to grow the real economy even more. However, assholes found that just leveraging on the leveraging tool grew virtual wealth faster which(money) we treat as a universal medium of transaction, which creates inflationary pressures as the products generated in the real economy are not commensurate to the real economy growth. Given many fake and useless service industries used as sorry excuses to pump up the financial economy with lies of the promise land and more people moving away from the work of the real economy, we all get fucked with more paper bidding over less caviar. Just one dimension of the ramblings in this arty farty discussion on the subject matter. We need variables and figures to run simulations of what it could like to better understand these stupid word labellings. It is not as if there is equality of wealth distribution in socialism nor is there total inequality in Capitalism. There are issues of the stickiness towards the desired equilibrium of each label. Put things is numbers with certain limits over the function of time for some variables and look at the different labels and what they entail, we might get something good out of it. Ceterus Paribus is an exercise in deconstructionism to help identify what a single mechanism does. However, thinking and simulating the world in Ceterus Paribus is totally not meaningful and is just masturbation.
allowing only sale of hdb new and resale to citizens only. even more drastic, cpf goes back to roots and cannot be used for housing, or maybe lower the proportion for housing. but need political will to do that. so far the pap has no will, want to please everybody but in the end displease everybody.
bro, paragraphs man! lol
capitalism, socialism, communism, mercantilism and feudalism - that is all rolled into one in china, and they don't give a shit as long as survive and make money in that order.
If you do that, marking HDB land to market must be reversed out. Otherwise who can afford even a HDB flat. I see such a change has to be carried out over several years if not decades, so that nobody suffers negative equity on the properties they are already holding.captainxerox said:
agree it would certainly take years if negative equity is a taboo. and that is the thing. we made to think that hdb flats like cannot suffer negative equity. what should we do with that sacred cow and how many people would be affected e.g. those who bough flats esp resale in the past 5 years, compared to how many people would benefit. i dont know the answer.
We have a stock and flow issue. If reverse mortgage works effectively, and we control stock supply but maintain and upgrade stock value and quality, we may have something interesting going on. Property value is after all notional and collateralized in Singapore for government cookie jar use. No one eats building.
I am not sure which tree you are barking up against me, since I am not throwing stones at the concept, just at what has happened in reality. I apologize if you misunderstood due to the grammar and spelling mistakes in my post.
I am not a supporter of state socialism and am puzzled by your rant. However I do recognize the alarming need to increase the negotiating power of labour on a global scale, but since that is not possible, in a local context, the setting up of an adjustable social safety net which will help people when they are down on their backs and assist them to get into the economy again. Or have you been brainwashed by four decades of PAP rule is that labour regulations and unions are evil? I can assure you, there are not evil. After you learn what American capitalists did during the 1920's to cause the rise of the first labour unions, you will learn that capitalists are not some higher beings, they will and have done things that are pure evil for the almighty dollar.
You will very likely fail in your GP paper if you were to take it again.
....One of the ways to actually re-set the economy is to reduce property prices ....
Thank you for being honest and frank. Yes, my essay will fail miserably as there is no focus - starting with capitalism, moving to labour but ending with property price. I will put in more practice and hope to improve.
Your suggestion in resetting the economy by reducing property prices is ideal. However, it will be difficult to implement, which is why I equate the current high property price to riding a tiger. When price collapsed, damage will be confined to property owners if everybody has already fully paid up for their properties. However, in reality, many have borrowed for their purchases. Some have used their properties as collateral to borrow more. Banks will be directly affected and the collateral damage propagates. As such, depressing the property price in the current situation is a no no especially because of the uncertainty in the economic outlook. Perhaps the only way to reset the economy is for a depression to strike and everybody will be in the same shit.
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There is a need to look at lifetime incomes and lifetime working years to do this calculation. Banks and insurance companies have already calculate how to squeeze more toothpaste out of you by even including the possibility of acquiring you appreciating assets that you bought earlier in life.
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