The Business of America is Business

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Calvin Coolidge once said that. It was true in the 1920's and it is true now. Somehow, we of the United States, have to find our way back to becoming a place where good stuff is made and sold at good prices and new things are invented regularly. We have got to get out of the Superpower business. We are not that good at it and it is harming our country and it is not helping the world. Since the end of WW2 when the U.S. was one of two surviving superpowers, we have walked the path of perpetual war. It is no good. We have to find a way to get off of that treadmill to oblivion.

ruveyn

With corporate taxes in the USA being the second highest in the world, why would anyone start a business here instead of somewhere else?

Because it's perfectly legal to open a business account in the Cayman Islands.

The USA has been futzing with the world in one way or another since 1776 and the reasons are basically a matter of raw materials sources, markets, labor supply, and security. It is the giant corporations which now girdle the globe and that is what business is all about. To be ignorant about these fundamentals is to be totally naive.

I've really taking a liking to Calvin coolidge recently. Now that i'm older alot of my political viewpoints are changed. Also, with china on the map I doubt we are ever going to be able to compete with them, for goods&services. America tends to play by the "rules" while china does not, and money likes to find the cheapest place to opperate

Calvin Coolidge caused the Great Depression.

Yes because one man and free markets caused it. i mean tl;dr.

Coolidge set forth the policy that the U.S. would be a bubble economy - and the bubble burst, causing the debt deflation of the Great Depression. That was his doing, and his is the responsibility. People were encouraged to put their money in stocks for the refrigerator company for instance instead of actually buying one and the refrigerator company couldn't expand its market past the very rich and so much potential production was wasted; in the end, the stock buyers got wiped out during the crash of '29. An example of the folly of so-called supply-side voodoo economics.

The Federal Reserve System also had a hand in it along with the Smoot Hawley Tarif. Congress bears its share of the blame.

ruveyn

Smoot-Hawley? That's such a myth. Liquidationism and deflationism and the gold standard had far more to do with it and even Milton Friedman is known for blaming the gold standard... preferring money over people, that was the problem.

That however was not the main problem, the gold standard. The main problem was a bubble under Coolidge burst and debt deflation resulted. This debt deflation could only be countered by fiscal and monetary stimulus or debt write-downs but the guardians of money refused... so back to preferring money over people.

Coolidge started it with his bubble voodoo economics nonsense.

So it was policy made at the government level (I am including the Federal Reserve in this) that brought about the Great Depression. No surprise. If you really want to screw something up royally involve the government.


ruveyn

I'm confused. how can the gold standard create a bubble in economics? isnt that why they call it the gold standard? iron clad sort to speak? and i still like calvin coolidge i dont care if you think he caused the great depression because i know he didnt

im not a ecomoics professor but i think alot of things caused the great depression, it wasnt one man or one piece of legislation, but a combination of things. what about herbert hoover?

why were people calling towns hoovervilles?

personally i'm a supply side economics kindof guy

When the government became uninvolved with regulating the banks under Clinton and the killing of the Glass-Steagall act the private financial systems did a fine job of torpedoing the economy. Private business is always eager to screw the world for a buck.

Under Coolidge the country was prosperous. The problems started in the Hoover Administration, not the Coolidge Administration. In 1932 the Hoover people started to do what FDR finished doing in the New Deal. It did not work for either Hoover or FDR. What rescued the U.S. was the war in Europe. Adolph Hitler got us out of the Depression, not FDR.

ruveyn

So what's your remedy, communism?

It depends upon what you mean by communism. What happened in the USSR was not communism. It was totalitarian brutality under central government control with frightfully inefficient economic policies and an embedded foul corruption of minor stupid and vicious and totally unimaginative officials.
There is no doubt that capitalism has done interesting things economically but it also has consistently and repeatedly mistreated huge numbers of people in very horrible ways. To consider that as an ideal is either not to be aware of it's impact on civilization and the sustainability of life on the planet or simply to be totally stupid.
I am not a master planner that can offer a solution to society, I can only note what hasn't worked and suggest that people who have a better expertise than me in these matters think deeply about might work and try a few things out. Before you can cure a disease you must first recognize that there is a disease.