Charlie Rose

TruthSayer  02/15/2011 11:47 PM Report

@ robdverity: "Our culture is so sick and wealth delusioned that as much as we should be we are not rioting in the streets a la the British. "

Nobody's stopping you from exercising your right to emigration. Heard that Cuba sounds nice.

JohnGelles  12/15/2010 10:46 PM Report

anne4444--your being sorry for previous posting is noted--and this reader forgives you; BUT I DO NOT FORGIVE THE CR SHOW FOR LACKING A POST-SEND EDIT CAPABILITY.

Anne should have been able to correct her message at any time. And especially, I should have that opportunity because I make so many errors.

Gordon Brown spoke of the need for the G20 to get together on a solution to the current lack of jobs and income. He thought they needed to have an opportunity to learn from each other and make changes to their remedies as they were applied and effects could be observed.

He did not bring Keynes Without Debt to our attention: but I did. And Brown did not mention Warren Buffet and Import Certificates to guarantee production everywhere and employment everywhere -- and not invite the race to the bottom where still in.

So, good as Brown is, he needs help. We need Bernanke for debt-free liquidity as well as lower long term interest rates. And we need Buffet for jobs everywhere, not just where labor gets cheated out of productivity gains.

anne4444  12/15/2010 01:52 PM Report

I am deeply sorry for my last comment regarding Mr.Gordon Brown.

It was based on misleading information. It is a very confused world and my tiny brain just couldn’t handle it.

Sorry for any inconvenience and apology for wrong information.

JohnGelles  12/15/2010 08:20 AM Report

You must admit Gordon Brown's vision of middle class shoppers in China, India, Russia and Brazil, joining the parade of shoppers in Germany, Japan, USA, UK, France, Scandinavia, and all the rest of the middle class and the rich -- living in the advanced industrial world defined by the G20 nations (and nations with oil or other high value trade for sale) -- as the DRIVERS of a coming immense economy to replace the economy we have which has been laid low by debt and the end of the end of history, IS A VISION WE CANNOT DENY.

If Brown sees a future that will not happen, it is because the world went to war or returned to the gold standard and closed its factories in favor of bread lines.

Well not to worry -- the vision of Brown is safe.

But, will the people too poor to shop, be desperately poor and neglected, or will we be on our way to the promise of the end of scarcity thanks to technology?

Much, in my opinion, hangs on your view of SPENDABLE MONEY, i.e., inflation, deflation, and monetary systems of production.

Brown, Rose and most of you see MONEY based on private sector IOU's, like we were used to in the years of 20th Century economic growth NOT based on sovereign debt-free money, as the legitimate spending money we must wait for no matter how long the wait.

Some few of us argue endlessly that monetary systems of production are happy to see sovereign debt-free MONEY inside the mix of spending that drives a global or national economy.

The two money's are exactly alike as cash flows from consumers to producers. The only difference that can ever be detected is the Friedman difference: IF too much money flows from buyers to sellers (because central banks created it) hyper inflation will undermine production, and the money may have to be replaced by scarcer money ASAP.

So I say to Brown and Rose, stand up and cheer for Ben Bernanke, and work with him to speed up the current recovery before the monetary system is replaced by nationalism and totalitarianism under right wing dictatorships.

We have the information technology necessary to plan production, consumption and income, necessary to escape from fixed debt and embrace equity financing and equity in all law -- especially the law of property.

Equity, jobs, equity, jobs, debt-free money in part and IOU money too. We are all embracing compromise. The real compromise we need may well be to move the ratio of debt-free money to IOU's from the very low point it is now to something near a half and half solution as esplained in Keynes Without Debt.

http://www.ustaxreform.us/kwod.htm

[please decode any typographical errors, it's too late for me to kill them.]

JohnGelles  12/15/2010 01:07 AM Report

Gordon Brown has a coherent plan for production and consumption to be rationalized as middle class consumers in Asia and South America become driving forces for the global economy in later decades of Century 21, along with Europe and North American shoppers.

His aim is maximize jobs in every nation, especially the 20 largest producing nations, whom he hopes will reach a trading and currency agreement to reduce protectionist sentiments and imbalances that condemn their competition to failure insofar as jobs and profits are concerned.

He sees value in exporting and importing by all nations and also in avoiding inflation and deflation in all nations without resort to a command economy in any nation with the power to impose such things as price control and systems engineering to plan and achieve objectives in time of peace the way we achieve them in time of war.

The chance of reaching a G-20 trade and currency regime that will maximize global full employment and minimize "debt-slavery", where participating nations are afraid to embrace serious natonal economic planning is, in my view, far fetched.

Charlie and Gordon may allow limited quantitative easing as a way to minimize tax and interest expenses. But they both appear to value IOU money, based on private collateral, over sovereign fiat debt-free money based on the output of useful goods and services. That preference for scarcer money than necessary to pay for needed homes, food, water, infrastructure, R&D, information systems, security, health care, pensions, education, etc., is not explained by either man. Money is money that words. Its origin is unimportant. Its performance is all that counts.

Other comments in this discussion of Gordon Brown do not compute in my view. Brown wants JOBS -- you must give him credit for that. Brown wants to avoid protectionist sentiment in the face of joblessness. WHY? The object is not to cater to consumption of brand name luxuries. The object is JOBS, PEACE AND SECURITY. Import goals that make full employment standard in every nation on earth may be necessary. If they are not necessary, then a high basic income must be provided to all people to tide them over periods of unemployment. We are nowhere near to implementing such an income.

I liked all that Gordon Brown said -- as food for thought. But he stopped short of providing ideas for coming decades that would be free of terrorism and potential trade wars between continental size nations because they used money for effect and not as the force behind wage-slavery.

Gustav  12/14/2010 09:16 PM Report

I agress with with the idea that we need to keep our advances in innovation, but I don't know how we will.

I didn't like school very much and have yet to go to university. I ask myself, would I enjoy school more if it was given more money? I don't think so... Actually, what I hated the most was my peers in class. Spoiled brats everywhere! Sweden has high taxes, but sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't have higher because most of us are becoming so fat, bloated, and stupid it is ridiculous. At the same time I have never seen so many homeless people out in the cold winter.

When I was a child the only homeless people in Sweden were alcoholics or other types of junkies. But now even people with psychological issues are homeless, it is "too expensive" for us to take care of them financially it seems.

But my former classmates are still getting fatter, perhaps me too.

I don't think anyone disagrees that we need to take back some of that money from china in the same manner they took from us, exporting. But how to go about it?

robdverity  12/14/2010 05:48 PM Report

His most enduring (and telling) exhortation was that any ec. system to be successful had to have as its underlying strength a system of moral integrity. A slam-dunk against our corrosive predatory system of usurious fee sucking rapacious blood-suckers we call bankers and Wall St.

Our culture is so sick and wealth delusioned that as much as we should be we are not rioting in the streets a la the British. Our limousines are unscathed - to our shame. The big bank scumbags started class war-fare by scamming and scuttling the world ec. It's time to answer their call.

anne4444  12/14/2010 02:11 PM Report

He shall be responsible to the slow-down economy and unemployment inside the UK. It is the time for him to check his IQ. If he does have a high score of IQ, you will definitely find something in his bank accounts or something else.

I do like Charlie’s questions. That may be one of many reasons why Charlie Rose show is so popular.

REMant  12/14/2010 12:09 PM Report

An arch-Keynesian. If you keep giving businesses and ppl money, they will stop investing and working. It is that simple. I wish it weren't, but that is clearly the case in the developed economies at this time. I doubt education is being cut so much that it will be stifled. There is every evidence, that it has a lot of fat it can afford to burn off. At least in this country. And there is, probably, as here, a lot of unneeded credentialism. Perhaps some sort of compromise can be arranged to lower tuition in step with institutional budget cuts.

As for China, the fear is that it, itself, like the US in the 30's, will collapse without foreign markets. They needed foreign investment to get started. That's why they exported. They still need it to a great extent. It isn't just that they have to consume more; they have to develop the productivity to justify it. The only way I see parity developing is if BOTH sides move to an equilibrium. He's looking at it only from the Western viewpoint.

The talk about free trade is deluded, as well. His bank bailouts started the currency wars, just as the same sort of thing did in the 30's. It was the British desire to return to the gold standard before they could legitimately do so that precipitated all the problems. And they got themselves into that fix by going to war with Germany in 1914. The peace was lost not because we didn't give the Germans (or the British) enough money afterwards, it was because his righteous predecessors fought to keep their hegemony. All the countries in the worst situation now were among the financial high-fliers before the crash. It was, I suppose, only reasonable that their leadership felt that should in some way be restored. But it was precisely because they weren't really paying their way that the crash occurred. It makes no sense to keep trying to restore that state of affairs.

And it was Hitler, of course, who was the pre-eminent expositor of the triumph of the will. His oratory abounds with it. In Sept 1939 he said, "I conclude with the avowal I once pronounced as I began my struggle for power in the Reich. Back then I said: 'When our will is strong enough that need can no longer vanquish it, then our will and our German state will vanquish and conquer need.'" But, then, he was not speaking of merely printing money. In Dec 1940 he told the ppl: "The German capacity for work is our gold and our capital, and with this gold I can compete successfully with any power in the world. We want to live in houses which have to be built. Hence, the workers must build them, and the raw materials required must be procured by work. My whole economic system has been built up on the conception of work. We have solved our problems while, amazingly enough, the capitalist countries and their currencies have suffered bankruptcy." And in Feb 1941: "The Western world wants, on the one hand, to live upon its empires and, on the other hand, to export from its empires as well." This all could have been said by Sir James Steuart. There is nothing wrong with it, but Steuart felt forced to chide his mercantilist readers for forgetting the necessity of virtue. And that remains the problem.

Mr Brown seems to have never read Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. It and The Wealth of Nations are, in fact, quite compatible, at least, after the former was re-written, when the latter was published. It speaks of the necessity of seeing ourselves as others see us, and this egalitarianism he found quite at home with Physiocratic concept of circular flow, behind his idea of free trade. It has nothing to do with virtuous behavior, but with enlightened self-interest, which even butchers have. Smith's system, however, requires something like gold. Mercantilism, virtue. And I have to ask just how he intends to instill that.