JayB

"Democracy, human rights, and freedom are all but hollow illusions, with which they tranquilize inhabitants of the human farms which they control." Word. We would have been, like, way better off The WWII generation could have saved themselves the trouble of dying by the millions to prop-up these transparent falsehoods. Now we're like, all slaves of the, like, corporate state and have to sit around listening to all of these, like, sheep, drinking their corporate slave coffee, and playing their homogenized corporate music while they're like, commuting in their little, like, commuting en masse in their corporate lemming vessels while trying to fulfill their little corporate dreams, maaan. Weak.

You make the call... "Oh people of the West, don’t be fooled by the lies of Blair and Bush that you are free nations, for the only freedom that you have is the freedom to be slaves of your whims and desires. Your children are free to be deprived of their childhood and their innocence. Your women are free to be used as tools of business and entertainment, and all of you as a whole are the slaves of con men and women who rule you. They are your real enemies. If you only knew – they are the ones who drag your countries to the pit of America’s group of scavengers, who seek to ravage the entire globe for the interests of a handful of gangsters and corporate companies. Democracy, human rights, and freedom are all but hollow illusions, with which they tranquilize inhabitants of the human farms which they control."

Funny as hell Murray. Good to hear that you can escape from the shop every now and then, eh.

Nice TR and pics Bill! You ever miss Colorado?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1545306,00.html

"The perspectives that I was shown in school were those of men. I am not sure that they are "warped", but they are indeed one person's way of looking at the situation." Looks like the folks in the Women's Studies/Constructivist branch of academia certainly put their bootprint one someone's psyche. Interpretations of history may vary, but their are limits to the extent to which alternate interpretations can be considered valid, and those limits are arrived at when one "interpretation" of history is clearly at odds with facts that are so thoroughly documented as to admit no dispute. Or, as Moynihan stated, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." Therein lie the limits to the legitimacy of any school of thought that seeks to advance or reject a particular historical claim. Every subgroup with a particular identity and agenda to advance can do so if they wish, but their efforts should be judged solely on the weight of the factual evidence, methodological rigour, and logical force that they bring to bear in service of their arguments and claims. "I can't help but notice that the "animal nature of all" (in reference to violence) usually emerges in men. And the innocents you mention are most often the women and children. It is men who kill, rape, burn, and bomb." See above. In those cases where women have actually been invested with the responsibility for making such decisions, they [Margaret Thatcher, Catherine the Great, etc, etc, etc]. haven't actually differed notably from the tendencies exhibited by their male counterparts - as such considerations come down to abstract considerations of necessity and advantage, proficiency in which seems to be distributed more or less equally amongst the sexes. The fact that women haven't been engaged in the actual hostilities is the result of matters settled long, long before the arrival of our species, much less conscious thought - so it hardly seems like something worthy of congratulating oneself, or one's gender upon.

Nice. One could also inquire when you are going to be airlifted into Sudan to personally take up arms against the Janjaweed - since you presumably supported armed intervention there. Got any souveniers from your Tour of Duty in the Balkans? Drop everything and take your machete to help fend off the Hutus in Rwanda, did you? Anyhow - my best friend just returned from his second tour in Iraq, foot patrols in Baghdad, to be precise - and if a guy who both knows me well and has actually been there wants to accuse me of being a hypocritical pussy for arguing on behalf of an armed intervention that I'm not personally involved I'd actually take it seriously. The "If you haven't volunteered to join the police force you can't be opposed to crime" argument just doesn't have as much force coming from the likes of you. Sorry.

Must have been karma for all of the truckloads of left-wingers that I hauled up to the top of Loveland Pass in the back of my truck every winter while I was Colorado - just an inference, but I can't imagine the correlation between sporting dreadlocks and/or a snowboard or tele-setup and voting Republican is very high. I might also add that the earlier than expected arrival was a very much appreciated by the two close friends and lifelong Democrats who were awaiting my arrival. Seriously though - I owe you for the lift, and would be happy to provide you with free beers and/or a copy of "The Road to Serfdom" whenever I run into you again. Now, back to the main topic. Those looking to emmigrate could surely do worse than Canada.

Dru's uninviting tone after the election must have had an effect after all.... "Americans didn't flock to Canada after Bush win By David Ljunggren Thu Aug 4, 2:55 PM ET OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadians can put away those extra welcome mats -- it seems Americans unhappy about the result of last November's presidential election have decided to stay at home after all. ADVERTISEMENT In the days after President Bush won a second term, the number of U.S. citizens visiting Canada's main immigration Web site shot up sixfold, prompting speculation that unhappy Democrats would flock north. But official statistics show the number of Americans actually applying to live permanently in Canada fell in the six months after the election. On the face of it this is not good news -- Canada is one of the few major nations seeking to attract immigrants -- but Immigration Minister Joe Volpe was philosophical. "We'll take talent from wherever it is resident in the world. I was absolutely elated to see the number of hits and then my staff said 'You know what? A hit on the Internet is after all just a hit'," he told Reuters on Thursday. "I guess I'm happy Republicans and Democrats have found a way to live together in peace and in harmony," he said. Canada generally tilts more to the social and political left than the United States. Data from the main Canadian processing center in Buffalo, NY shows that in the six months up to the U.S. election there were 16,266 applications from people seeking to live in Canada, a figure that fell to 14,666 for the half year after the vote. A spokeswoman for Canada's federal immigration ministry declined to speculate on the reasons for the drop. Toby Condliffe, who heads the Canadian chapter of Democrats Abroad, did have an explanation of sorts. "I can only assume the Americans who checked out the Web site subsequently checked out our winter temperatures and further took note that the National Hockey League was being locked out and had second thoughts," he told Reuters. Last year, Canada, which has a population of about 32 million, accepted 235,808 immigrants from all over the world. "

Yeah, old, but oh so apt. As for your equation - it seems to indicate that profit equals the sum of revenue and labor costs. While I do enjoy cracking open Smith, Von Hayek, Von Mises et al from time to time, I can hardly call myself an expert - but to my uninformed eyes it certainly looks as though you have unveiled a novel proposition there. In your model, then, one can increase profits without limit by increasing labor costs, per the equation profit = revenue + labor costs. This finding should certainly delight our European friends, who while perhaps not able to express this relationship you've discerned well enough to reduce it to an equation, certainly seem to have been implicity aware of it for long enough to make it the basis of their industrial and wage policy since the early '70s. Thanks for the lesson.

Glad to see you are back in prime sparring form. Dust of the box-set of Joan Baez LP's before logging in yesterday?

Wow - guess my recollections were spot on....

From what I can recall expect about 1.5 hours driving time from Seattle. On my first trip there we followed the directions in Smoot and managed to get there without consulting any additional maps - but if you've got a Delorme it wouldn't hurt to bring it, I suppose. As far as the trail is concerned, park when you can drive no futher, and follow the decommissioned road until you run into a large, trashed aluminum culvert sitting on the trail, at which point you should see the trail leading to the climbs on your left. I'd guess it takes most parties roughly 1/2 hour to get to the culvert, and another 1/2 hour to get to the base of the climbs. Online is right there at the junction between the slabs and the trail. Most of the routes that start from Tombstone ledge have had the old leeper hangers replaced since the book came out.

I'd say I give enough to argue against prolonging it by denying them the right to make the best use of the few assets that they have to actually make a living, rather than subsisting on foreign aid and the odd infusion of cash and self-righteous blather emmanating from graying Britpop acts, pampered parlor Marxists, protectionists, et al - which is rather more than you can claim, kemosabe.

Odd sentiments from one who would consign the developing world to poverty by denying them the right to put their comparative advantages to use in their own service in the global marketplace. If allowing as much of the world to lift themselves out of poverty requires a bit of extra exertion and discipline on our part, I think that's a fair trade.

"Profitable corps are using globalization to force massive concessions from their employees." Deepak and Ming-Li don't seem to mind. I agree that Dieter and Laurent may have to come back from the Cote D'Azur a couple of weeks early from now on, but I can live with that.

I wouldn't expect everyone to be happy to work at Walmart - but I suspect that those folks whose present set of skills or circumstances led them to believe that a job at Walmart is better than no employment at all are, at the very least, convinced that it was the best option they had at the time. While they are typically very nice people, I am not convinced that the average Walmart greeter had to settle for a spot there as a result of just missing the cut for optical-engineering gig at Cisco. For any given enterprise there's such a thing as an optimal payroll, and if you downsize staff beyond that point you typically end up downsizing profits as well. Some layoffs keep companies in business that otherwise wouldn't be, others are short term gambits that end up hurting the business and...reduce profits. If this happens enough, at some point the shareholders, analysts, lenders, credit-rating agencies, and boards of directors start to take notice. It's a shame when bad management decisions affect people who didn't make them - but I am not aware of any system out there that could address this without resulting in a higher structural unemployment level than we already have. See Germany and France for Exhibits A and B. Anyhow, to reiterate, the basic point was that companies that are either making no money or are losing it are far less likely to increase wages or hiring than those which are profitable. It's amazing that anyone has actually attempted to dispute this point, but -- well, it's actually not amazing on this board but it is kind of sad. Ditto for the aversion to profitability, which simply means that the value of the goods or services that a given concern produces exceed the costs of the things required to make them. Profits, the excess of outputs over inputs, thereby represent the only means by which humanity can increase the resources available to lift its material standards of well-being. A "unprofitable" subsistence farmer who consumes more calories than he produces year after year will surely starve to death, and like it or not, any society without profit-growth that at least keeps up with population growth will eventually experience wide-ranging hardships that are far more difficult to characterize in a single example, but no less real.

"The economic growth that has occurred has flowed to corporate profits to a degree unseen in the post-World War II period, leaving relatively little for compensation." Interesting news item, but it's a blip, not a long-term, world-wide trend. It certainly does nothing to alter the fact that over the long term, a profitable company is much more likely to increase wages and payroll than one that is either making no money or actively losing money. You can even conduct an experiment in your own home! Just quit doing whatever it is that generates money for your household, and engage in producing something - your choice one - that absolutely no one is especially interested in buying, and costs more to produce than you can sell it for. Hire several people to help you. Continue doing so until you have exhausted all of your assets. Then, once all of your assets are gone, your debt vastly exceeds your ability to service it, no one is willing to lend you any more money, witness the effect on your payrolls. My hunch is that they will not increase. Let me know how it goes.

That was real time sarcasm, amigo. Quiz: Which company is most likely to increase production, hiring, and wages? A) The company that's conducted its affairs in such a way that it's marginally profitable or actually losing money or, B) The business that's producing record profits? For a bonus, square your answer with the notion that increased profitability is a cause for alarm and dread.

oh, really! i can tell, you must have failed basic logic in school, which would explain the need for zealotry. As long as we are on the subject of unemployment...: Push Me

oh, really! i can tell, you must have failed basic logic in school, which would explain the need for zealotry. Yes. Had I passed it, I would no doubt see the truth behind the proposition that nothing leads to sustained increases in employment and wages like absent, marginal, or declining profits.

Just thought I'd take a moment to point out a statement from the Evil Homonym that, with a certain number of qualifiers - I agree with. Buy some lottery tickets everyone.

ONE by one, economies around the world are stumbling.By cutting interest rates again this week—for the seventh time this year—the Federal Reserve hopes it can keep America out of recession. But in an increasing number of economies, from Japan and Taiwan to Mexico and Brazil, GDP is already shrinking." Something about that quote makes me think we're dealing with a rather more dated article. I think that was the point of PP's posting the link to the Fed data showing steadily increasing interest rates as of late. Not a policy move usually associated with an economy in recession.

They would definitely be better off with no employment of any kind.

"The economic growth that has occurred has flowed to corporate profits to a degree unseen in the post-World War II period, leaving relatively little for compensation." If one parses the reasoning in this quote it would seem that: -Companies that are either sustaining losses or eking out marginal profits are more likely to expand production and hiring -let alone wages - than those enjoying robust profits. -Corporations which are actually managing their affairs ably enough to insure that the value of their outputs is greater than their inputs (hint: these are profits) are not going to reinvest them to expand production in their most profitable lines of business. -That real wages have any chance whatsoever of rising in the absence of increased productivity (increasing output per worker). -That paying wages in excess of the real value of worker's output will lead to a net increase in employment. Exhibit A: GM. Not to mention the fact that in the face of increasing unemployment brought on by mandating wage increases beyond their real value, the Fed will simply take measures to decrease the value of the currency to the point where the value of the increased money wages is once again reduced to parity with the value of the outputs. -That increased output per worker can actually occur in the absence of increased capital spending on more efficient machinery, additional on-the-job training - all of which must be funded by...profits. -Etc, etc, etc. No profits, no jobs.