Occupy

I can tell you now that this whole movement thing has received exactly zero news coverage over here so I don't really know what it is people are protesting about. I followed Sass's link but nowhere there does it actually state what their issue is.

I'm guessing though it's one of these "Big businesses are greedy and taking all the money and not paying enough tax and now we're all poor" deals? Kinda ironic to see that in the most capitalist country on the planet. Free healthcare not looking so silly now is it?

There's people over here banging on about how terrible it is that companies are registered in tax havens and not paying their full rate of corporation tax and unemployment is getting a bit silly here too but it'll stop being an issue once job prospects get so bad that all the Eastern Europeans leave for home, enough people can't afford to buy or rent a house so living costs fall and we kick all the lazy people off benefits so the government have cash to spend on infrastructure.

Essentially countries are going through a massive settling and adjustment and eventually market forces will balance things out. We have the advantage of being able to up sticks and move to another country pretty easily so things'll calm down in Europe long before they do in the US but eventually things will sort themselves up.

I'm surprised more Americans don't realise this, you guys pretty much invented the concept of a market-led economy.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Lord Styphon

That's not true. One of the defining images of this whole thing first showed up in the Daily Mail.

I'm not nearly biggoted enough to read the Hate Mail so I must have missed that.

I'm not being naive, Pang, I'm being deliberately obtuse (Borderline trolling really). The problem with relying on natural market correction is that there are no truly free markets, even the most laisez faire government will step in eventually to try to help. If the government hadn't stepped in to bail out our banks over here, then some would have gone bust, people would have lost their savings and jobs and been unable to keep up the repayments on the mortgages on their second homes. The remaining banks would have repossesed a load of them then sold them on. The glut of available housing would have bottomed out house prices, the income from the sales would have propped up the banks and hey presto, corrected market.

Of course in the mean time there would have been abject poverty across the country, a huge drop in wage rates, civil unrest and it would have been generally shit for ages before we emerged utopian the other side. No government is going to do that though, except a mentalist dictatorship and that's not a form of government known for standing back and letting people get on with it.

The difficulty states have and the whole reason why theoretical economics is largely pointless in these situations is that political systems the world over rely on keeping the populace happy in the short term. Sure the long game is the best idea on paper but you can't explain that to the electorate unless they all have economics degrees. There's also the fact that you can't run a government on a purely economic basis. Social security requires government intervention, the market will never support people who for whatever reason are unable to be economically active because the only people with a demand for that are the people who need help because they have no money.

My suggestion that the Austrian school of economics would fix everything is of course a naive one because in the real world, you can't just leave people to die of starvation in the street without becoming an oppresive police state.

I know a bit about economics really, I just choose to ignore it.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

In the US though the authorities can just turn up with the police and move people on. Over here if they try to evict the campers outside St Pauls there will probably be a months long legal battle before anyone even thinks of going anywhere.

Additional Spam:

Originally Posted by LeHah

Well, what did you expect? In the entire history of civilization, protest marches have not done a single thing.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.