Thanks Bob. Good input!!! I put that hoax article out there to see what the
reponse would be.
I hope Leo gets your comeback. I don't want him to suffer from spinmeisterism.
Peace, D. Mindock
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Molloy
To: biofuel@sustainablelists.org
Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2006 3:22 PM
Subject: Re: [Biofuel] The Great Thanksgiving Hoax
Hi All,
Hoax indeed. This revisionist version of the Pilgrims Progress is
pure unadulterated neo-con spin. Our masters continually rewrite history to
make it fit their political ambitions. As always, the aim is to blind the Great
Unwashed and line them up behind whatever their current scheme is to a) stay on
top, b) hog all the goodies, and c) keep the peasants in line.
We don't need to know any facts at all about the first colonists except the
obvious that starving people are desperate. They will even stoop to working in
the fields if necessary just to stay alive, which would suggest that political
orientation is much lower on the individual's hierachy of needs. Yes, some did
die in the first years. How many of inherited diseases, poor housing, worse
diet and plain homesickness is just a guess. What we can be sure of is that
crop failure would be a likely outcome under alien conditions. We also know
that the Founding Fathers learned quickly and soon adapted.
However, if an assessment of socialism as a working concept is needed let us
- instead of making assumptions about the outcome of socialism in the first
colony - take a look at how it actually works out in practice in modern states.
See below for a re-run of the recent Scientific American article.
On the question of efficient production and use of resources, how about this
fact (taken from "Freedom Next Time", John Pilger's latest book: "The US
military budget for one year is the equivalent of $30,000 an hour for every
hour since Christ was born."
Bob.
From:
<http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000AF3D5-6DC9-152E-A
9F183414B7F0000>Scientific American, Oct. 16, 2006
<http://www.precaution.org/lib/06/prn_nordic_economies_work.061016.htm
>[Printer-friendly version]
The Social Welfare State, Beyond Ideology
Are higher taxes and strong social "safety nets" antagonistic to a
prosperous market economy? The evidence is now in.
By <http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-1594200459-8>Jeffrey D. Sachs
One of the great challenges of sustainable development is to combine
society's desires for economic prosperity and social security. For
decades economists and politicians have debated how to reconcile the
undoubted power of markets with the reassuring protections of social
insurance. America's supply-siders claim that the best way to achieve
well-being for America's poor is by spurring rapid economic growth
and that the higher taxes needed to fund high levels of social
insurance would cripple prosperity. Austrian-born free-market
economist <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Hayek>Friedrich August
von Hayek suggested in the 1940s that high taxation would be a "road
to serfdom," a threat to freedom itself.
Most of the debate in the U.S. is clouded by vested interests and by
ideology. Yet there is by now a rich empirical record to judge these
issues scientifically. The evidence may be found by comparing a group
of relatively free-market economies that have low to moderate rates
of taxation and social outlays with a group of social-welfare states
that have high rates of taxation and social outlays.
Not coincidentally, the low-tax, high-income countries are mostly
English-speaking ones that share a direct historical lineage with
19th-century Britain and its theories of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire_economics>economic
laissez-faire. These countries include Australia, Canada, Ireland,
New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S. The high-tax, high-income states
are the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_countries>Nordic social
democracies, notably Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, which have
been governed by left-of-center social democratic parties for much or
all of the post-World War II era. They combine a healthy respect for
market forces with a strong commitment to antipoverty programs.
Budgetary outlays for social purposes average around 27 percent of
gross domestic product (GDP) in the Nordic countries and just 17
percent of GDP in the English-speaking countries.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Hayek>Friedrich Von Hayek was wrong
On average, the Nordic countries outperform the Anglo-Saxon ones on
most measures of economic performance. Poverty rates are much lower
there, and national income per working-age population is on average
higher. Unemployment rates are roughly the same in both groups, just
slightly higher in the Nordic countries. The budget situation is
stronger in the Nordic group, with larger surpluses as a share of GDP.
The Nordic countries maintain their dynamism despite high taxation in
several ways. Most important, they spend lavishly on research and
development and higher education. All of them, but especially Sweden
and Finland, have taken to the sweeping revolution in information and
communications technology and leveraged it to gain global
competitiveness. Sweden now spends nearly 4 percent of GDP on R&D,
the highest ratio in the world today. On average, the Nordic nations
spend 3 percent of GDP on R&D, compared with around 2 percent in the
English-speaking nations.
The Nordic states have also worked to keep social expenditures
compatible with an open, competitive, market-based economic system.
Tax rates on capital are relatively low. Labor market policies pay
low-skilled and otherwise difficult-to-employ individuals to work in
the service sector, in key quality-of-life areas such as child care,
health, and support for the elderly and disabled.
The results for the households at the bottom of the income
distribution are astoundingly good, especially in contrast to the
mean-spirited neglect that now passes for American social policy. The
U.S. spends less than almost all rich countries on social services
for the poor and disabled, and it gets what it pays for: the highest
poverty rate among the rich countries and an exploding prison
population. Actually, by shunning public spending on health, the U.S.
gets much less than it pays for, because its dependence on private
health care has led to a ramshackle system that yields mediocre
results at very high costs.
Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous
social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness,
economic equality and international competitiveness.
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