With job competition now in India/China..are our "good economic" days over?

[opebo]

You consider the good times the eighties and nineties?  Good times were the 1960s and early 1970s!  But yes, of course if we have an open market with very poor countries american workers must become impoverished by it.

[opebo]

Wrong, Gustaf. Productivity only determines wages once there is a macro-economic environment in which there is demand for the production.  Which is why capitalism doesn't work.

[opebo]

Wrong, Gustaf. Productivity only determines wages once there is a macro-economic environment in which there is demand for the production.  Which is why capitalism doesn't work.

I am glad to hear that our beloved opebo is capable of solving millions of interconnected input-output functions simultaneously and instantaneously in order to bring about a functional command economy that even remotely resembles our current macroeconomic environment. When are you going to be crowned as the greatest mathematician/economist of all-time?

'Command economy'?  No one suggested such a thing, p.

[opebo]

'Command economy'?  No one suggested such a thing, p.

For any market, there are only two options known to mankind: free markets or markets with government intervention. You clearly have more confidence in the latter and feel that markets should be completely controlled by government,

How absurd.  You always jump to these completely baseless conclusions, poli.  Obviously massive and frequent government intervention is necessary for the economy to function at all well in the long run, but there is no need to ever micro-manage it. Macro-economics is the function of the State, and 'businessmen' can operate the microeconomics, as long as they are firmly guided by the State.

For example, I've no interest in the State building any structures, but I would like it to exert a powerful influence over the market for housing, offices, retail, and suchlike structures through government loans, and in other ways, as well as contracting out enormous infrastructure projects.