Current goings on in Cyprus

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Now we all know that there are no real right-wing nor left-wing politicians in the U.S.  At best the Republican  party is slightly right of centre and the Democrats are slightly left.  When one speaks of a leftist party, think of the communist party:  Right is more on the fascist side -- both extreme examples. 

 

What most Americans call socialist is really a sheep in Democratic clothing.  Socialists don't believe at all in free enterprise and that everything should be under central control. 

 

The current Conservative Party of Canada is far more extreme than any Republican you've ever seen and they are the government at the moment.  They are slightly more right of centre than the Republicans.  In two more years we get to tell them what we thought of giving them majority power in Canada (out with the @#!$$).  The only other way we can get those Sweet Old Boys out is by a vote of non-confidence in the current budget, and this isn't going to happen.  Unless there is a case of Trudeaumania in the next election we will have a minority again, probably with the Conservatives running the show and the NDP (faint socialists) in opposition.  Could easily be the other way around.

 

There are some factions in the US that are on the extreme fringes but when was the last time anyone burned a cross in the south?  To a certain extent, I think that era is over at last.  I don't know if the Communist Party of the United States is still alive or not but I can state  that the German-American Bund is as dead as Hitler (I hope).

 

Now, as to Cyprus:  Things seem to have quieted down at the moment.  Mice have a hard time dealing with elephants.

[Dewm 177]

Wasn't aware that "staying within your means" and "conservative fiscal planning" is "crap".... but to each his own. I know here in the U.S. the most well off states and cities are run by republicans. But by the same token George Bush didn't do a thing to stop us from going down this horrible path, and he claimed to be a conservative..

We are currently doing that and it is not doing our economy any favors. Just cutting back billions after billions on top of more billions is destroying our economy just as much as not doing anything. It is destroying the social safety net, it is further eroding the public's trust in both the government and the economy, which only results in declining consumer trust, it is destroying more jobs than it creates. And does it make things more efficient? No, it does not, things are just cut out or outsourced to private companies who do the same work for double the price (which the government ends up paying). Meanwhile we also made education more expensive, when the benefits on education are huge. Every euro spend on educating people will pay itself back when you have a well educated workforce who can do good jobs that pay more. 

 

Are you really trying to make the argument that living within your means is a bad thing?  ..because I can tell you right now you are blowing into the wind if you want to go that direction. REDACTED are the problem that the EU is in the trouble it is.

 

Folks, everyone is welcome to have his/her opinion, even if that opinion is in direct opposition to someone else's opinion.  At the same time, it is absolutely vital that one express his/her opinions in a polite and respectful manner.  Civil discourse is impossible if we cannot be respectful.  It has been said before many times that we should be discussing the issue(s) and not the members.  Everyone needs to be careful with how he/she uses the word "you."  "You" can be a means to direct a question at someone, or it can be the digital equivalent of finger pointing (which is a fast way to send a thread into a full blown flame war).  Staff genuinely tries to make sure that the Current Events forum is a polite, respectful, and welcoming place for people to discuss the news of the day.  This is one of those moments where we step in to stop a possible flare up before it gets started.

 

Please understand what while this is the post that got edited, I am not calling anyone out here.  I am simply taking this as the opportunity to post another reminder of the importance of understanding the tone that a post can carry, and the impact that one's tone can have on the ability to have a civil, and hopefully constructive, conversation.

 

hym

[macvirt 361]

Wasn't aware that "staying within your means" and "conservative fiscal planning" is "crap".... but to each his own. I know here in the U.S. the most well off states and cities are run by republicans. But by the same token George Bush didn't do a thing to stop us from going down this horrible path, and he claimed to be a conservative..

We are currently doing that and it is not doing our economy any favors. Just cutting back billions after billions on top of more billions is destroying our economy just as much as not doing anything. It is destroying the social safety net, it is further eroding the public's trust in both the government and the economy, which only results in declining consumer trust, it is destroying more jobs than it creates. And does it make things more efficient? No, it does not, things are just cut out or outsourced to private companies who do the same work for double the price (which the government ends up paying). Meanwhile we also made education more expensive, when the benefits on education are huge. Every euro spend on educating people will pay itself back when you have a well educated workforce who can do good jobs that pay more. 

 

I could not agree more with the absolute necessity to invest in people. Trouble is, for our current system in its circumstances of facing natural limits to growth it does not pay to invest in all people for those sectors which have the deepest footprint in our societal economics. I fully agree that it is an extremely short sighted perspective, one that does not take even the most basic lessons of history in to account. Unfortunately this is a consequence of our general mentality as well as the theories of our systems of organisation where people are part of available categories of resources. 

 

This is extremely visible in liberal orientation towards education today. If we must invest, we must do it in such a way that those who receive education a) receive it in a very specific job / function specialised format and b) receive with it a structural debt which binds them to the connected role for that path of specialisation for the bulk of their productive life. It does not take a genius to see how that conflicts not just with basic social orientation or the generic human dynamic (consider for a moment the relation between facing such a debt and on top of that also engaging on further debts for buying a house, bypassing the direct relations between participatory consumption and one of the biggest elements of national economics: the housing / construction industry), but more importantly how this encourages consumptive behaviour which is - to say the least - hardly in line with the requirements of the economical functioning of current society: consumerism. No wonder that in Europe people are less and less inclined to buy houses and more inclined to rent them, to name but one thing. 

 

The one thing I notice here in Europe is that in this struggle between political and economical forces both sides are a complete mismatch not just for each other, but also for those on who's shoulders they really rest (whether they admit or even realise it or not). Not a day goes by reading newspapers here where I wonder how both those sides completely miss the basic functioning of human psychology in their decisions and negotiations. Well, with the notable exception of Germany. For some reason there politics and economics still work in their roles together. Remarkable, and it shows. In Holland both the government and employer & industry organisations and representations somehow completely sidestep every sign of human psychology that does not underwrite their desired outcomes of ideas. Most recent example being the changes in their taxations of private capital for the healthcare system. How hard is it to understand that if you increase taxation on a basis of reserved private capital that people engage in methods to artificially decrease their capital so that they pay less. Yet both the advisories from their insurance companies and banks as well as the government in place elect to ignore the signs. Even worse, both sides spend a lot of energy and money declaring how people will not do such a thing. Practical result: people do it en masse. 

[LexusInfernus 908]

Are you really trying to make the argument that living within your means is a bad thing?  ..because I can tell you right now you are blowing into the wind if you want to go that direction. REDACTED are the problem that the EU is in the trouble it is.

Generally it is not a bad thing. But the timing of these cutbacks are horrible. The economy is based on consumption, people must consume in order for the economy to function. We are having a bit of a crisis here, consumption is already at a low, and then the government barges in with lots and lots of drastic, visionless cutbacks out of the misplaced idea that debt is bad. Debt is only bad if you can't finance it with more debt. We can, we have an AAA rating, borrowing money is cheap as dirt, we can pay of loans with new loans. Now should be the time for the government to spend money, so the people get back some confidence in the economy, so they start consuming again. 

 

Once the crisis is over, the government can carefully begin to cut back again, because then they no longer need to spend so much money. This is the basis of Keyensian economics really. Rake up debt when there is a crisis, cut back when the crisis is over. 

 

Besides, the Dutch government has been cutting back for over a decade now. The crisis only increased the magnitude of the cutbacks. 

 

 

@macvirt just saying but education doesn't work like that in a lot of European countries. In a whole number of countries, education is free or relatively cheap. The debt that you get is very manageable, and since education does allow you to get the better job, the increase in pay more than makes up for the debt you end up with. The specialization of education is simply the result of division of labor and the fact that tasks are getting so complex you need people who are specialized in certain areas. It is more efficient that way. Of course, it also depends on what you study. More social and arts oriented studies put an emphasis on critical thinking and sifting through information effectively. Skills that are rather broad really. 

[macvirt 361]

I was referring to the recent stream of proposed and effectuated changes in quite a few western European countries where the topics of student loans, reeducation loans as well as child budgets have become caught in an interesting set of changes. What struck me was that a lot of the debates were focused around changes which would make the results of those changes quite similar to American constructs. Ofcourse, the idea is always that a job yielded by education in return yields income to repay the incurred debts in such a manner that it does not conflict with the economic requirements of consumerism. Unfortunately that kind of thinking does make me nervous, because it is fine theory but the practice can be very different when the wrong knobs are turned (as we have seen in the US). 

 

But, lets's get back on topic, because there is an interesting case in point. Debt is only bad if you can't finance it with more debt. Let's think about that statement for a moment, it is a reality of our thinking today. But it is an artificial reality (ofcourse, that is always the case with our species), more importantly it is one that rests on a set of circumstances & conditions and is only stable as long as the dependancies for it remain under control. 

 

Let's not go in to a moral aspect of how healthy it is to institutionalise and internalise on a cultural level that spending what you do not have is good. Let's take a look at dependancies. Every system of organisation, every reality effectuated by human beings has them. But they are not static, they do change. More importantly, they can be outside of the realm of control and influence required to maintain them and their state. This is something we see in our modern patterns of globalisation in many regards, dependancies shift. What was once a domain of say politics today is a domain of economics, what was once a given set of circumstances within the national economy of a country today under the influence of finance no longer rests within a national economy, and very often not even in the actual country. 

 

The way we organise things are indeed based on our ideologically influenced systems of declaring debt. But we forget the dependancies of these influenced systems. In essence, our governments and banks are trying to treat symptoms. They are not acknowledging the possibility that the body has to operate in a changing environment, nor how that affects that body, or even how such changes can cause a disease or injury because the body continues to operate as if it is still walking around in the previous environment. 

 

Equally, we should not forget that the premises on which we base our influence of ideology on our systems of organisation are artificial constructs as well. Ofcourse we seek models and ways to capture our desired reality in order to control it, but that takes us right back to the challenge of changing circumstances. Whereas here we have to think about that influence, and the premises it rests on. Capitalism once had natural limitations to growth as an integral part of ideology, today however it does not. It is interesting to see that most debates on that tend to point to how throughout history there is always growth! Well ofcourse, after all if we forget about the demographics underneath it all we are ofcourse free to creatively use statistics for graphs that support our desired convictions But we no longer acknowledge that there are limits to growth, most of the fear in high finance today (which creates most of the causes of both excesses in human behaviour connected as well as the reflexive focus on concentrating wealth in a sense of planning for the "expected" next cycle of growth which has to happen because that is what our convictions tell us) comes from not being able to come to terms with this. We've had that fundamental problem since decades now, and our only solution has been to artificially inflate the volume of wealth by thinning the stream. 

 

It's the crux of having cake and eating it too. Since there is but one cake, and we are seemingly unable to bake another, we inflate the cake to make it look bigger. No wonder the sides of the cake crack a bit already. 

 

So if our idea of paying debt by financing it with more debt is such a good system, why is that not solving the problems today? Our cyclic models that  predict" that the system works flawlessly have already faltered and failed. The most known ones today are covering behinds with claims of the cycles stretching but all the variables and dependancies being the same. Yet if we look out in to the world and the practical reality we see that those are increasingly not the same. 

 

Don't get me wrong, I fully agree that most governments in this conflict with our financial industry misses quite a few things, and that many actions taken are counterproductive to the realities of human psychology. But might it not be an idea in light of limits to growth being an actual reality and not a mere conviction (as today's theorem of unlimited growth being a natural state of capitalist organisation) to reinvestigate this notion of "it is good to pay debts by financing it with more debt"?

 

Throughout our history as a species we have had the opportunity to organise ourselves according to the circumstances and challenges we faced, but every so often we arrive at a point where our forms of organisation no longer match the circumstances as they have changed as (depending on era and event ofcourse) either dependancies have shifted to outside forms of organisation or they have degraded or even disappeared. At such times in history we - with the obvious luck of hindsight later in history - see that after quite a bit of turmoil we create and adopt new systems of organisation because the old ones no longer work. We try to adapt them for a while, things go badly, cultural catalysts ensue, and after a lot of costs that could have been avoided we come up with new forms of organisation for new circumstances. 

 

The question in economics in our day & time now is whether we can stretch current systems through limited adaptations because it is still part of the "normal" cyclic forces of economics as we "see" them (and thus no necessity to create new forms of organisation) or whether we have reached limitations of our current organisation as the dependancies for it are shifting and whether that signals another such point in history of having to say goodbye to the old and come up with new forms of organisation. 

 

It does not take much to see the extreme potential for conflict between these paths. Nor to see the potential for conflicts for either, regardless of whichever is the case. But we can't ignore the necessity to look without the glasses we have been wearing to see whether there is a fork on the road or whether we missed it. It is only natural for us given our nature to seek status quo as a factor of enablement and growth, but we can not deny that there are structural limits to our ability to maintain an artificial state of affairs as a stable foundation for anything we might dream to build on. 

 

 

I fully agree that the timing and nature of actions taken and considered is far from right. Yet none of the alternatives where effectuated in countries (or even global economics) show themselves to be closer to being right. That alone should tell us something. All I am saying is that at minimum it should tell us that we need to examine our circumstances, our dependancies, our assumptions, our convictions, and figure out how and where changes are still under influence or control. And to take it from there. Every now and then we have to look at not just the horizon, or the road, but also our shoes, feet as well as the other people on the road (including those sitting on the side and the dead ones at the horizon behind us).

[LexusInfernus 908]

There are still natural growth limits within capitalism. The fact is more that no one wants to hear about it. If a company hits a limit, people get fired or outsourced and then next year it will look great once more in the books. I agree, that is stupid. I am all for a shift in business culture, with an emphasis on long term growth and sustainability. Big deal if the companies profit no longer grow, it still makes a profit, and that is good. At the same time, you run the risk that people get lazy. The constant pressure to improve profits means that one will look at ways to make the process more efficient, more cost effective or trying to find new things to sell to people. It is a double edged sword. 

 

As for financing debt with debt, well, if you don't want to do that, great. It just makes paying off your debt more expensive. For example, if you have to repay a loan with 2% interest, but you can now take out a loan with 1% interest, you can pay off the first more expensive loan and you end up with a cheaper loan. Saves you 1% interest. Besides that, countries need to go in debt to do a lot of things. Unless you don't want to wage war anymore. Or do a big infrastructural project and see it finished within a few years rather than a few decades. Countries simply must spend money it does not have directly in order to do a number of things that are vital to the success and safety of the state. 

 

Unless of course, a state finds a better way to raise money, in which it no longer has to borrow money from other countries or the financial markets. Perhaps the state should just crowdfund wars and other things in the future. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Suppose man the predator decided to study war no more.  What kind of savings would you get?  A lot of capital equipment would wind up as scrap, and many of the personnel would wind up discharged with no work.  The result in the US would be a full scale depression unless there was a way to employ all these surplus Johnnies.

 

Since the general infrastructure of most of the world's cities is in rough shape, there could be a lot of long term work for people provided they didn't borrow to get it done.  Yes, it might take decades, but making a little wage on a long haul project is better than starving to death.  Probably price controls would be necessary and the current rampant consumerism more than slightly suppressed. 

 

The various service systems in most cities is the major casualty at budget time.  The "we can do that next year" theme is BS, and they've put this off so long that in some cities the sewers and bridges are failing.  It is time to stop feeding the sacred cows and get on with the needs of the people if you want to continue to have these people heaps.

[LexusInfernus 908]

Meh, economic wise, the military is dead weight anyways. It does not produce anything, it just sits there and costs a lot of money. Occasionally DARPA comes up with something that could be converted for civilian use, but generally it doesn't. The only reason you can't cut out the military entirely is because you might need it in the future. Of course, the military has its uses politically. Sending a carrier group to a specific theater is a very powerful message. And joining some peace mission also makes you look good. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Yes, but do you need enough military to conquer the whole world?

[LexusInfernus 908]

That depends on what your objectives are and who you are competing with. If you don't much care about what happens beyond your borders, then obviously not. But if you have vested interests in the security of other countries, then obviously you need an army that is capable of deploying to those countries. And if your enemy is weak, your own army does not have to be that big. If your rival is strong and big and has sufficient military capacity themselves, you probably need a bigger army yourself. 

[larelo6 3]

Which Cyprus are we watching on tv news? And if my suggestion that it's Greek Cyprus is correct, why does tv news call it just "Cyprus" as if Turkish Cyprus isn't there?

 

Btw how's situation in Turkish Cyprus today?

[LexusInfernus 908]

Mostly quiet. No one but Turkey actually recognizes that place as a country, and they don't have the Euro and are not facing a big economic crisis because of it. Then again, that bit of Cyprus doesn't have much of an economy to begin with. 

[larelo6 3]

Do you say Turkish Cyprus is the separatist, while Greek Cyprus is the real Cyprus?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Quit trying to stir up old trouble.  This nonsense was settled when I was still in college.

[Diftrin 0]

Do you say Turkish Cyprus is the separatist, while Greek Cyprus is the real Cyprus?

without dispute, Greek cyprus is the real cyprus. Look up on internet. Greeks were there first.