On the Nature of Things | Forum

This was a major feature of the economic policy of early Mesopotamian civilizations. Sumerians and Babylonians realized that in their economy people would run up debts they could not reasonably pay, and rather than turn out smallholders for borrowing to buy seed (or what have you) they absolved all...

Colonel, Not clear to me what steelworkers and firemen have to to with anything. I apologize for my inaccurate off the cuff metonym. I used it because it means to me what it means to everyone, you included according to your obvious interpretation of it. The labor movement. What the labor movement ha...

Ibrahim, Let's see. I said, "They're both right. Everyone is corrupt. Mr. Perfect is more right, because only the government can change the rules of the game. Capitalists have to die by what they lived by, without government help." And you said, "Laughable. The ability of capitalists ...

Ammianus, It seems however, we have largely broken the historian's model of anacyclosis. Rather than going into the ochlocric and monarchic aspects that are supposedly de rigeur, we are directly stumbling into an oligarchic la la land I disagree. (And I specifically reference Juggernaut Nihilism abo...

They're both right. Everyone is corrupt. Mr. P. is more right, because only the government can change the rules of the game. Capitalists have to die by what they lived by, without government help. The point of democracy, in fact, is to make corruption automatically self punishing. (Like capitalism d...

I have long defended that only an universal debt pardon would solve the present crisis. But our financial overlords do not want to accept that. In the case of this topic, it would be "our financial overlords" who would be receiving the pardon. The bankers and the government regulators wou...

It will last in this form until its weakest government can no longer continue within it, because I doubt that the eurozone can conjure the will (or has the desire) for either greater union, endless transfers from the north to the south, or real austerity. Which will fall and when will it fall? The d...

The total value of all existing capital is something like $150 trillion, according to the IMF. Zillow says the value of all US real estate is $25 trillion or so. Let's say the US represents one sixth of the value of all real estate in existence. So, the total value of all long term savings, capital,...

Forty acres is forty acres. It doesn't matter if the recipients live there themselves. Plenty will sell it to logging concerns, mining concerns, survivalists, digital age frontiersmen or whoever. (I'd take mine in Nevada. It might be a desert, but I can get an air conditioner and a solar panel.) But...

Good idea.

I'd accept that. And it would spur economic development.

But it won't happen because it would hurt land prices.

Like the rest of the BRICs, China is and always will be the country of the future. That is their shared trait. They always do extremely well, enough to terrify the first world... Until the boosts in productivity offered by cheap technology can no longer overcome the deep cultural, political, and geo...

I have been busy. But my work is now done.

I am Alph.