In a message dated 4/26/00 9:02:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
mike@datamann.com writes:
"If you magically introduced one of these aircars for a price of about $20,000
today, with a production capacity of a million units a year, GM, Ford,
Toyota, Daimler Chrysler, et al would all be declaring bankruptcy in short
order, and you'd have millions of unionized autoworkers out on the streets
unemployed. Markets woul crash (all except your AirCar, Inc. stock), wealth
would evaporate, consumer spending would decrease (all those autoworkers
unemployed), and you'd get the vicious cycle I described earlier. Those other
companies could try to introduce similar products, but they can't compete
being saddled by all those union labor costs, by their outmoded factories,
and their lack of automation. Are you starting to see what I am getting at?
Mike"
Mike
Isn't this basically the phenomena that Marx saw correctly and then
described as the weakness of Capitalism
He thought that because Capitalism was constantly undergoing this sort of
change and disrupting people and constantly requiring reinvestment that would
not be required in a planned economy that Capitalism would eventually
collapse? Is that a fair representation of his position?
But isn't it also true that while our changes do cause disruptions and
other economic damage, in the short run, that in the long run those same
phenomena are what caused Capitalism to thrive and Communism to collapse.
Consider what a really accurate watch used to cost. Then along came the
digital watch and an entire industry disappeared. But today does anyone miss
them?
By the same token the vinyl disk record disappeared; they tell me that
the CD is going to get its comeuppance also. The record of disappeared
industries that have been advantageously is so long it would bore you for me
to tell it. In fact the same auto industry you cited destroyed all sorts of
industries.
Yet, the world gets better.
Ron H.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:09:50 MDT