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fatslob-:O said:
Cerebralbore101 said:

You are right that the US was helped a lot by the fact that the rest of the world was hurt badly by WWII. Other things also helped a lot though such as... 

1. Women started entering the workforce, which meant less people sitting around doing nothing. 

2. Interstate highway system (authorized in 1956) made transportation of goods, and building materials easier. 

3. Regulation of markets to help protect against things like pollution, low pay, and a ton of other things that can slow down an economy. 

4. Heavy government investment in R&D. 

5. More people going to college thanks to the government subsidizing education. (G.I. Bill and the like)

I'm not going to pretend to know exactly how much of it was a result of the rest of the world being bombed out, and exactly how much of it was a result of the above 5 things. But to just say it was all just a result of the rest of the world being bombed out is not the whole picture. 

1 and 2 had an effect but not so much for 3, 4, and 5 ... 

Environmental regulations are just a slog for economic growth and depending how employees are paid less, it can actually increase productivity. You need to stop pretending that the so called scandinavian 'dream' of getting tons of state aids and strong employee unions are somehow viable when corporations in those countries like Ericsson and Nokia are falling victim to Chinese competitors like Huawei ... 

Most of the America's golden age was due to a world in turmoil but now with strong competition from China, America can't afford to slip up anymore because the moment it does is the moment that China will seek to monopolize all high-end technology ... 

Can you imagine a world one day where America and it's allies buys all of it's defense equipment from China ?! Do you not somehow see the conflict of interest this poses ?

Cerebralbore101 said:

We were the current market leader in computer technology when ARPANET was being built, and that research eventually gave fruition to the internet as we know it. When we landed on the moon, we didn't just catch up to Russia in space tech, we blew right by them. Same goes for when we developed nuclear bombs. Government research didn't merely allow us to catch up. We passed current market leaders. Russia didn't have the bomb until 1949. 

The US was nearly ALWAYS the market leader regardless because the rest of the world was too busy recreating their own physical infrastructure ... 

ARPANET was nothing more than a concept. The internet as we know it today is largely thanks to the contributions of many private investments and work from large corporations such as Bell Laboratories and Cisco but many of them had very few state subsidies work with as well. The internet wasn't created mostly by some government funding like you seem to believe but it was created in collaboration with many corporations all over the world ... 

Yeah, I'm not sure if making a comparison between military technology like nuclear bombs to consumer technology is a great idea when the former has to face no market competition ... 

Cerebralbore101 said:

In 1989 there were 13.54 million people attending college in the US. In 2018 there were 19.83 million people attending college in the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollment-and-projections-in-public-and-private-institutions/ The population of the United States was 246.8 million in 1989. So that makes the college enrollment rate about 5.4% in 1989. Using the same math the enrollment rate was almost exactly 6% in 2018. That's an 11% increase in almost 30 years. Now look at the  following graph. 

*snip*

And, yes that graph is adjusted for inflation. It's all in 2018 dollars. Why has the cost of public four year schools nearly tripled, while enrollment hasn't grown all that much? Why has price exploded, but demand has not? 

Sorry, but it doesn't work that way in the real world ... 

increased enrollments =/= proportionally increased prices 

And not to mention, post-secondary schools were far less advanced back then but they also had fewer facilities as well ... 

Cerebralbore101 said:

Yes, all those things out listed about China suck. Slave level working hours, no ability to move in country, income inequality, anti-union laws, etc. But that doesn't make them not a mixed economy. Mixed economy simply means the government, and businesses work together to sustain or grow the country's economy. You can be a mixed economy, and still be anti-freedom, high poverty, no workers rights etc. 

P.S. Trump's overall policies are extremely damaging to the U.S. economy as a whole. Even if he managed to reel in China, we'd still be going down the toilet fast thanks to his other policies. But let's not make this thread about that. That would be a whole other thread topic. 

They're a "mixed economy" for the right reasons, you have the wrong reasons to implicate why America should model it's mixed economy like China's for totally different reasons. China's system is optimized for growth and self sufficiency. Trump realizes a weakness with America's system is that it's not optimized for holding on to global monopolies and he's trying to fix this but it's proving to be very hard to prevent the transfer of power to China ... 

Trump NEEDS to reel in China otherwise silicon valley as we know it may deindustrialize like the rust belt did and we won't see American brands like Apple, Google, Facebook or the others out there anymore in the future if they get ousted by Chinese competitors ... 

Silicon valley performing well is good for America's interests but performing badly threatens American interests and to a lesser extent their allies interests as well ... 

Environmental regulations are not a slog for economic growth. They are an insurance policy to stave off massive environmental disasters, and other external costs of pollution. If I dump raw sewage into the town's local water supply, and everybody gets sick, is that not a massive drain on the local economy? The dust bowl was one of the main causes of the great depression. Chernobyl nearly poisoned half of Europe in the 80's. The economics of currency is ultimately dependent on the economics of ecology. Destroy the world's ecology so that crops can't grow, and fish can't be caught. Then see how important environmental regulations are. 

Yes, low pay can be good in some instances, and bad in others. The government regulations on low pay were mainly aimed at stopping the bad effects. But that's a whole other can of worms. Don't get me started on how much I hate these stupid "$15 an hour for minimum wage" types. 

As far as Ericsson and Nokia falling victim to Chinese competitors like Huawei... Who's to say that this is a result of those policies? Correlation =/= causation after all. 

Oh, no I completely agree that China needs to be reeled in. Tariff's are just not the way to do it. Buying our defense tech from China would be a military disaster. Honestly we should have never started trading with China in the first place. Any country that has that level of human rights problems shouldn't be a trade partner. They should be like North Korea IMO. Left on their own to rot, until they decide to join the rest of the world. 

"The US was nearly ALWAYS the market leader regardless because the rest of the world was too busy recreating their own physical infrastructure ..."

Right, but you said that government research only helps when playing catch-up. The examples I gave were to show instances where government research helped, while we were already the market leader. USA being the market leader was a crucial part of my argument. 


"ARPANET was nothing more than a concept. The internet as we know it today is largely thanks to the contributions of many private investments and work from large corporations such as Bell Laboratories and Cisco but many of them had very few state subsidies work with as well. The internet wasn't created mostly by some government funding like you seem to believe but it was created in collaboration with many corporations all over the world ..."

ARPANET was not just a concept. It was built, and actually existed. A concept is something that only exists as an idea. https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/

Bell Lab's UUCP came after ARPANET pioneered computer networks. The first router was built before Cisco was a public company. It was made by a team of people at Stanford. http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html

Packet Switching, TCP/IP, Email, and Hypertext were all the result of government agencies, or people employed by them. Ethernet was invented at Xerox. Stanford (a private university) came up with the router (not Cisco). So yes, it was largely the government. I'm more than willing to give Xerox/Stanford fair credit, for their contributions, but to say it wasn't mostly the government is simply revisionist history. 

"Yeah, I'm not sure if making a comparison between military technology like nuclear bombs to consumer technology is a great idea when the former has to face no market competition ..."

The point is that government research does help technology move forward even if we are a market leader (or technological leader in this case).

Sorry, but it doesn't work that way in the real world ... 

increased enrollments =/= proportionally increased prices 

And not to mention, post-secondary schools were far less advanced back then but they also had fewer facilities as well ... 

But you were the one arguing that prices increased due to increased enrollment. Did you change your mind? As long as we can agree that more people going to college isn't what drove prices up, we're good.

They're a "mixed economy" for the right reasons, you have the wrong reasons to implicate why America should model it's mixed economy like China's for totally different reasons. China's system is optimized for growth and self sufficiency. Trump realizes a weakness with America's system is that it's not optimized for holding on to global monopolies and he's trying to fix this but it's proving to be very hard to prevent the transfer of power to China ... 

Trump NEEDS to reel in China otherwise silicon valley as we know it may deindustrialize like the rust belt did and we won't see American brands like Apple, Google, Facebook or the others out there anymore in the future if they get ousted by Chinese competitors ... 

Silicon valley performing well is good for America's interests but performing badly threatens American interests and to a lesser extent their allies interests as well ... 

Whoa, whoa, whoa! I am not saying we should model ourselves after China. I'm saying we should go back to how things operated in the 60's with government/corporations working together to grow the economy. 

I'm not sure why we need to foster, and then hold onto monopolies in order to be competitive. Aren't monopolies bad for the overall economy as a whole? Or are you talking about a monopoly in the sense that every major corp is located in the US? I think that would be very hard to hold onto. China isn't the only country with cheap labor, and little value for human rights. Corps will always look for the cheapest place to build goods, and the USA will never be that place again. USA should be for inventing things, and upkeep of services. 3rd world countries should be the manufacturing base. 

But I do see the problem with China. They have the cheap labor AND the tech. Or enough of the tech to be able to compete unfairly, when combined with their labor.