Future Timeline

(Vox) During the opening speech at Thursday’s Summit for Democracy, President Joe Biden told the assembled international leaders that the stakes of their meeting were nothing less than existential: that the survival of democracy itself depended on what his audience did next.

“We stand at an inflection point in our history,” Biden said. “The choices we make at this moment are going to fundamentally determine the direction our world is going to take in the coming decades.”

No one other than Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in the room to hear Biden’s call to action. The summit is a fully virtual affair due to the pandemic, with leaders of democratic countries speaking to each other via videoconference.

Absent the applause and pageantry of an in-person event, Biden’s words rang strangely hollow. It was as if he was issuing a dire warning to no one in particular.

This is a decent metaphor for the current American approach to democracy where it counts the most — at home.

(Eurasia Review) Neo-Liberalism is a Lie

The biggest problem in the debate over the demise of neo-liberalism is that it accepts a view that is obviously at odds with reality. Neo-liberalism was never about just leaving things to the market….The debates over the last four decades were about how to structure markets, not whether to just leave things to the market.

Starting with trade, there was no big effort from so-called neo-liberals to open up trade in physicians’ services or the services of other highly paid professionals. This is not because increased trade in these services, by travel of physicians or patients or telemedicine is not possible, it is because these professionals have a lot of political power and could keep any discussion of lessening of the barriers that protect them off the political agenda. As a result, our doctors get paid twice as much as doctors in other wealthy countries. (Our manufacturing workers get paid considerably less.)

There is nothing about the market that tells us to subject manufacturing workers to competition with low-paid workers in the developing world and to protect the most highly paid professionals from the same sort of competition. That was a conscious policy with the predictable effect of increasing inequality.

Government-Granted Patent and Copyright Monopolies Are Not Given to Us by the Free Market

An even bigger area that the critics of imaginary neo-liberalism like to overlook is patent and copyright policy. We redistribute over $1 trillion annually in rents, close to half of after-tax corporate profits, due to these government-granted monopolies. In drugs alone the amount likely comes to over $500 billion annually, as we will spend over $600 billion this year for drugs that would likely sell for less than $100 billion in a free market without patent monopolies or related protections.

These government-granted monopolies also account for the bulk of the price in a number of other areas, including computers, software, smartphones, medical equipment, and of course video games and movies.

caltrek wrote: ↑Thu Jan 18, 2024 5:35 pm caltrek's comment: That neoliberalism "never lived" also helps explain why there have been so few posts in this thread. There is nothing about which to post.

Powers wrote: ↑Thu Jan 18, 2024 8:13 pm

caltrek wrote: ↑Thu Jan 18, 2024 5:35 pm caltrek's comment: That neoliberalism "never lived" also helps explain why there have been so few posts in this thread. There is nothing about which to post.

Old buzzword?