The Politics/Religion/Conspiracies Deathmatch Thread

[The Dunster]

So we are in agreeance here?
You need a balance in all walks of life, once it goes to far to one side problems start to arise.
I know from some stories my father tells me how particularly in the 70's and 80's the Unions could call a strike from the drop of a hat.
Now things have gone too far the other way where employers have the upper hand in many cases.
The neo-Conservative movement which started with the Thatcher government in the late 70's has spread to many countries in the western world, destroying the power of Unions, privatising and selling off everything state owned. If this is the pinnacle of Capitalism, then it certainly is not good.

It's not Capitalism it is a Plutocracy.
Capitalism is a system whereby those that own the means of production seek profits and those that work with the means of production resist wage cuts.
When Neo-Liberalism took away the power of Unions to resist wage cuts the system was broken.
If you look at time series data for wages and productivity you can see that up until the early 1970's wages increase pretty much perfectly tracked productivity gains.
This was good because Capitalists could make more by increasing output, workers made incremental gains in income so they could purchase the output - and overall, both parties had an incentive to work.
From the 1970's gains in productivity have not been matched by increases in wages. Therefore, those working with the means of production have not had incomes sufficient enough to purchase the goods and services produced. The Capitalists, even though they have more money, they also have a much lower propensity to spend and therefore spending is at a lower level than it would have been if those working with the means of production gained their fair share.
By the late 1980's the Neo-Liberals came up with a solution called Financial Engineering which saw credit at levels we had never before seen available to pretty much anyone capable of signing on the dotted line.
Now the Capitalists could have their cake and eat it to and those taking up the credit on offer could pretend they could actually afford the lifestyle they had now become accustomed to.

The big winners in all this - BANKS. Even the capitalists in the traditional sense of the word are an endangered species because once households realise they need to reduce their credit holdings [and this has been happening for a while now consumption spending on anything but essentials has plummeted.