I have never and will never advocate getting rid of the welfare system (which in the US was abolished by Bill Clinton).
Ronald Reagan and Bush the Greater, actually. Clinton just presided over the funeral. But hey, who's counting.
I would like to have a google, yahoo, microsoft, ebay, facebook or so.
Actually, I could do without a Microsoft in the Union. Microsoft should never, ever, in any properly managed universe have become as big as they did. In fact, they should have been killed off in their fight against IBM which had a clearly superior system but unfortunately also had clearly inferior lawyers.
That being said, however:
And I would point out that in quite a lot of areas, Europe is doing a lot better than the US:
And our openness is exactly what makes the pressure on wages in our countries. In 20 years this is over. Let China, India and Brasil become half as rich as the developed world and you will see that gloablisation starts to become a better game for workers.
A rather deterministic view of history for a non-Marxist. If their labour organises, if labour unions don't undercut each other across country borders and if something serious is done about flag-of-convenience countries, then yes. But all three will require political will and political action.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
I dislike Microsoft as well and I'm rarely using it. However, it is a big company which has managed to make most schools using their system. Being good at engineering isn't enough. Zuse invented the first computer, the Fraunhofer institute invented MP3, both technologies became big in the US.
With regard to companies you may be right, it may be a cultural bias of the media I use, which gives me a false impression.
If you any economic theory which would make it useful for a country to have huge current account surpluses forever, I could agree, that it is arbitrary to assume, that things change from alone, but I have never heard of that. It would make sense for an Chinese emperor to let is slaves work all day for foreigners. Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den MenschenVolker Pispers
If you any economic theory which would make it useful for a country to have huge current account surpluses forever, I could agree, that it is arbitrary to assume, that things change from alone, but I have never heard of that.
Mercantilism.
For that matter, there is no real reason to assume that the Chinese government considers economy to be overridingly more important than other strategic interests. That kind of thinking is a Western(TM) peculiarity. It's entirely possible that the Chinese leadership is perfectly content with having lower than possible economic efficiency if that means that it will have a more solid grasp around the balls of several other major powers.
And if e.g. China would use Mercantilism even after having an overall decent standard of living, we could still start protectionist measures to defend ourselves against them. But up to now this is not the case and western protectionism would really hurt a lot of poor people (and has done it in the last years on agricultural protectionism). Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den MenschenVolker Pispers
