Drivel.
I sense that you have become over-excited after reading the first edition of F. A. Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' but you have neglected to read the far more nuanced introduction to the more balanced 1956 US paperback edition. Few other Americans have read it either, but as Bruce Caldwell (the ultimate expert here) strongly suggests, it adds subtle truths you clearly cannot comprehend.
(Read: The Road to Serfdom, text and documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell, The Definitive Edition. Uni Chicago Press. 2007)
Should you want to do serious research as well as rant, try 'Capital in the 21st century' (2014) by Thomas Piketty. (he is a French economics Prof. but US academics paid for his work to be translated for people like you). The book is Belknap/Harvard, ISBN 978 9674 4300 6. It is on my desk now, should you wish to have an informed debate.
First...
Try a cold shower.
I didn't watch the talk but I agree with the OP description of the talk.
I agree the OP above challenging the Henry Ford story as raising wages so they could afford to buy the cars. That message would be propaganda.
It doesn't make any economic sense. Ford's customer base was the country. He could hardly make a dent in his sales that way, and it'd be a very expensive way to get each sale - he might as well give them the cars for free as pay them more they then pay back to him for the car. What he would do is help his competitors underprice him.
The explanation about less turnover is what makes sense.
At a societal level it does make sense to have 'workers able to buy products'. On a global level that's hardly the case - Chinese workers making things for the US they can't afford - but we'd like a consumer class in the US. But that is done with broad policies, not company by company.
We're in pretty big trouble. Globalization, growing global equality that is good morally and good for others but will make the US less able to benefit from cheap labor, our move to plutocracy, the loss of our effective democracy as it is taken over by the servants of the wealthy, these so-called trade agreements that cripple elected governments' power to pass laws, and so on.
A Ted talk can be correct, but it doesn't change the policies or forces causing them.
I can point at Byron Dorgon's Senate speech warning de-regulation would cause a banking crash - but it passed and it did.
True enough. What we have today is definitely NOT capitalism. It is National Socialism, to the core. When huge corporations get in trouble, the central bank prints trillions to bail them out. They take those trillions and use it to buy back their own stock and give out dividends. All of it was just an offhand way of giving trillions to the richest 1%. Then the ex chairman of the central bank has the gall to say that he did not contribute to wealth inequality!
Capitalism means economic freedom - letting people decide what to do with their own money and resources. It's quite simple.
I'll tell you where you are wrong, but I will leave the research to others. My arguments are based on Reason and Reality and do not require cites.
Well come on then...
If you KNOW I am wrong tell me, as you promise (above).
Your 'arguments' are not based on reason and reality at all. You have yet to offer any evidence, you have yet to construct any argument.
So far you have uttered some unfounded rantings, mere snippets of left-over 'Fox News', Donald Trumpesque posturing. Rantings you demand that we must accept at 'face value'. Sorry, no chance of that. I have looked them in the face and see no value in them or their author.
Imagine that you are in an academic research seminar and you tell your professor that you cannot remember what you have read and "in any case it doesn't matter" because truths have been revealed to you and they don't require references to source material.
Not only would that provoke a ripple of laughter at your arrogance, it would probably lead to your professor approaching the Dean to discuss concerns about your mental health and fitness to continue the programme.
Arguments require evidence. No evidence, no argument. Just assertion.
You say that capital is "life creating". Thomas Piketty (2014) says that capital is the cause of inter-generational inequality. He offers 669 pages of evidence.
You offer none.
Who should we trust?
Having read Adam Smith, I can assure you that the modern concept of 'free markets' is nothing like what even the most economically-liberal of philosophers envisioned.
realibrad said:Piketty looked and things and made correlations. His paper about inequality did not really explain anything.
That is my problem with anyone that claims to be a 'free market capitalist'. In today's economy there is no possibility of a free market. A free market relies on free flow of readily available information, and not a single 'free market capitalist' I have ever heard of supports such a thing. Nor is such a thing even possible in a world as complex as ours.
You might as well be a magical wish fulfilment economist. The two amount to the same thing.
We aren't in capitalism. In capitalism AIG, BAC, GM, and a whole host of others would have gone bankrupt.
It just depends on how you define capitalism.
I believe the biggest problem we have is with the finance sector, where "moral hazard" can become destabilizing for an entire economy. "Too big to fail" is just that... you take out the losing and there's no limit to the destructive potential, especially when about 4 entities handle 80% of the country's wealth. Too big to fail is unsustainable and such businesses must divest. I don't see another way to make the losers pay without bringing down the economy.
Nick Hanauer, in a Ted Talk.
He does, however, puncture the idea that capitalist are "job creators."
He says, "When business people take credit for creating jobs, it's like squirrels taking credit for evolution."
But don't let that sound bite, click bait type quote turn you off. Nanauer makes a deeply persuasive case, in a highly technical way, that it's consumer demand that creates jobs, and that when you eviscerate the middle class, you eviscerate that demand, in a vicious, downward cycle.
I agree.
This is exactly why Henry Ford unilaterally decided to pay his workers the then exorbitant sum of $5 a day . . . so they could afford the product he was producing!
If you've got the time, listen to all, or at least most, of his hour plus talk.