I agree.. I've been traveling in & out of mainland China these couple of years & they're more like Singapore now.

china does not consider itself a free market, it consider the last financial crisis as the sign that the free market have failed. state control economy is still very much going the be continued in China for decades to come unless there is a revolution.

the most free market in asia and maybe the world i think is hong kong.

This post has been edited by robertngo: May 19 2010, 12:10 PM

Sprada,
Then there is no real communist economies. To say that communist economises is less effective is only in theory and textbook exercise. Such exercise I believe is clouded by "capitalistic" ideals.

Back to the question of greed. Are people in "conmmuist" countries not motivate to work because the are not properly rewarded in accordance to their efforts? Would rewardsnecessary be confine to monetary gains? Is there no other forms of motivaton? Yet being demand driven China had resolved this issue. Looking at it from China's prespective I call this "controlled capitalism". As quintessential pointed out their are no austrain economies. Therefore the are also a form of controlled capitilism like China.

Keynesian Economics Is Wrong: Bigger Gov't Is Not Stimulus

faceless, there is a real communist economy. Look at North Korea. In the past China was really communist before Deng Xiao Peng made changes in the 1980's, and look how much better its economy is compared to before then.

Yes, other rewards can be given besides monetary ones. But are they enough? Sure, you can say that we cannot just judge how well an economy performs from a capitalist viewpoint of money. But when people do not have enough to eat and have to queue up for miles to buy the humblest necessities of life, I think that should be unacceptable no matter what viewpoint we use to observe it.

Sprada, if there other factors to motivate other than greed, we are still stuck with the greed issue. The excessive desire to possess causing leading to bribery that case a weakness to the system.

As defined by Oxford
greed / grēd/
• n. intense and selfish desire for something, esp. wealth, power, or food.

Obesity is greed + stupidity.

Humans are by nature greedy. 200000 years ago, we were greedy for food and caves. Now we are greedy for different things. You be your own judge on what is right and what is wrong. All I know is, if you aggregate greed you get what is driving the economy. And the single biggest driver? Money. Or deferred goods and services depending on how you view money. Is that bad? You tell me.

Money is nutreal. Good or bad depend on how it is used or aquired. Good or bad is also determine by culture, religion ...

Maybe it was me that did not clarify the word finite enough. Assume there is one hundred people in a country that adopts communism ideology.

The leader group 25 pal to plant vegi, 25 pal to make clothes, 25 pal to make houses and 25 pals to make weapons. And he came out with their own currency for circulation. As you might imagine, the price you sell for the vegi and clothes are more or less fix. The money becomes a medium to trade different necessity. If 1 million dollars was printed, it would be more or less staying the same for a very long time.

The following questions raise:
1) How to calculate GDP for each people in the country?
2) How to calculate inflation which is a barometer for demand and supply?
3) The value of clothes and vegi are hardly demand and supply driven, how to determine the value of it?
4) How the leader know that 25 person planting vegetables is enough for national consumption, if it is not demand and supply driven?

Few months back, North Korea raised help to UN community asking for food supply as many of the citizens in the country live in starvation, however this request was turned down by UN. The reason provided was if North Korea afforts to make nuclear weapons, didn't see why they couldn't affort to feed their citizen. One can argues that it was UN that closed off the two way trading between North Korea and the rest of the worlds, the point here is North Korea which adopt purely communism ideology is not self sustainable.

In contrast, capitalism does not impose any restriction to the price of a product and services. A bag could be range from 10 dollars to 1M dollars as long as demand and supply calls for it. The GDP for a country is theoritically infinite, depends on how well the products that they produced are needed by the rest of the worlds.

When the price of the product reaching sky high, at one point it will burst just like all the bubbles burst happened in the history. One need to be smart enough to different between the intrinsic values of a products and services against the price pay. Like what Warrant Buffet has quoted: "Price is what you pay, value is what you get".

This is what make capitalism so seductive and dangerous at the same time.

Excluded the discussion of greed here. Be it capitalism or not, it is always an issue and need to be regulated.

i do support capitalism, but it dont seen to be sustainable in the long run, the world have finite resource , but capitalism have not limit, i devour resources like they infinite. it is good the economy depend on supply and demand, but sometime human demand too much and create too much waste on resource that are not renewable.

Just like what illustrated in Al Gore's an inconvenient truth video, which won him a nobel prize in peace. Although whether he walks the talk is questionable.

There will always be endless discussion on how do we weight on what we have achieved, to the expend of consuming our very own mother nature.

Do we measure the value of a human by what he own or what he do?

Who do we value more? An environmentalist named John or Bill Gates? If we only have one choice to be friend with only one of them and he will be friend with us, who would that be?

Off topic a bit I would say

we do need to value the sustainability of the earth environment, there are changes to nature that are cannot be undone, business should consider if what they are doing really add value to humanity that it is worth comsumming finite resources to do it.

Population control and eugenics is the answer.


Sterilize people who insist on having more than 2 children and those who don't have the brains should not reproduce.


We start with the religious nutjobs.


'Go Forth and Multiply' type of people.


This way we reduce uncontrolled demand/consumption.


Instead of waiting for them to overpopulate before we resort to either soft or hard kill to take them out.


Better to not have these humans born than to have to kill them later to sustain the future of the entire human race.

YES SIR.....
I HEARD YOU CLEARLY.......
I GOT YOUR MESSAGE
NOW CAN YOU JUST LEAVE THIS THREAD BECAUSE YOU ARE CLEARLY GOING OFF TOPIC

We often talk about greed as being bad in itself. Actually greed is the main driver of human progress.

You want to earn enough money to feed and clothe yourself right? When you achieve this goal, you want to earn enough to buy a house and car right? I don't blame you. So do I.

Now, you may say that this is not greed, but merely desire for the basic necessities of life. The fact remains though, these are still material desires. What we see as basic necessities might be great luxuries to people in Ethopia, and so to them, we are very greedy. The fact is that there is no clear line in the sand as to what is legitimate material desires, and what is overarching greed.

The only thing we can do is to regulate by law so that one person's greed cannot harm another, and that people have to take responsibility for their greed.

In the United States, many huge companies did not do well not because of the greed of the top executives. It was more of a case of disconnection of risk and return. They had the rights to control the company and would collect great rewards if the company did better than projected, but would lose nothing if the company failed. This of course led them to adopt risky financial practices to maximize returns to themselves. IF it was their own capital they were dealing with, I'm sure they would have been more cautious and conservative financially.

How does this help the world economy?

He has his point Wodenus. Less mouths to feed. I rather hope Gary would come out with something new than always repeating the same thing. Perhaps offer himself to be the first to be sterilise to set an example.

On the issue of greed, I like the way Sprada saparated the types of greed. Those deemed as basic necessities, those beyond necessities that will not hurt others. I think this can to some degree pin point the greed issue.

Speaking as one who benefits from lower prices of open competition, greed is good. Speaking as one who sees natural resources dwindling by the hour but still has 5 more decades to live, greed is not good.

I understand how needs are not the same as wants. Well it always starts off that way. Once upon a time our needs were just food, water, clothes and a spear. These days, a diploma... is that a need or a want. How about a car, or a cell phone. We can say they are wants, until we realize that we can't compete and survive without them. Who's to say today's wants won't become tomorrow's needs.

Because greed is a relative creature that changes rapidly with the times, I'm not entirely sure if we can be compelled to take responsibility for it, legally or otherwise. What's certain is we will pass the cost of our greed to the next generation in the form of debts, diseases like obesity, environmental wastelands, social conditions and so on. Nothing is free. You can't see these things in the span of one lifetime. You have to look beyond that to see it.

Just my 0.02.

it doesn't matter what kind of economy system the world has, as long as people act like assholes toward each other, any kind of economy is flawed.

if i were a supreme leader of the world, i'd put less focus on economy and tech advancement and more focus on teaching everyone how not to be dicks first.

That is not very nice Black Kitty. Even if the economy is in recession you still want to do propaganda on gearing everyone not to be dicks. They kill you and present your life 4 nerzhul.