Thank you for your answer. I was the one asking about your work potential. I was trying to make the point that if a man still has a "Human Action" or a "Wealth of Nations" in him then we should not make him retire just because of his age.

Many great thinkers are "late bloomers"... Hobbes, for example (he pooped the Leviathan on us, out of a sudden, in his late 40s, if I'm not mistaken)

"Some of you claim that capitalism and capitalists are the source of inequality and hard-hearted treatment of older workers. I do not believe that is correct. Inequalities, for example, under Mao and Stalin were enormous, including those in the economic sphere. And employee-owned companies, such as United or Avis, have usually fared very badly because of incompetent management."



I wouldn't say capitalism is bad; capitalism is an extension of barter and barter worked for a very long time. Capitalism, when properly modified to keep the greedy under control, works because barter works. A lot of those cultures that would say things like that are in a very real way oppressed and hateful because they have in a very real and very powerful way been hurt by the government and society. They don't hate barter or capitalism per se, they hate how it's used.



I could make an arguement about the effects on retirement by the actions of congress and banks printing money and that effect, known as inflation, is a tax on the people of the United States. I could also make a very sound arguement about certain pieces of legislation being used as corporate subsidy, as well as government spending as corporate subsidy, to keep corporations afloat that aught not be afloat. These arguements would basically state how these scams have stolen money from the general populace to do whatever with, thus not allowing them to have a proper retirement fund. However, while these things are worth mentioning, I feel a far more powerful, and pertinant, arguement can be made about social security.



Social security, in it's current state, consists of non-marketable bonds or as I call it, play money. The money in social secuirity was long ago spent on war and subsidy and other misc ideas and projects. It is known that the government has enough money to provide for Social Security; to believe this is to say economics 50 years ago are far more magical than today because 2 trillion doesn't dissapear. How did that happen? They reduced the amount of spending on social security and increased taxes, then went into debt. The amount spent on medicaid and other medical services is, by me, anyway, considered more of a corporate subsidy than anything else. That arguement, in itself, is fairly sound if you want to take a look at legislation over the past 2 decades.



I do not call these people "hard-hearted capitalists" nor do I blame capitalists in general. Capitalism itself is a system of trade based on barter and is, in my opinion, when comparied to many other systems, the most sane I know of. But, like any system, it can be exploited and modified. I have a better definition for your hard-hearted capitalists; murderers, thieves, rapists, liars; the worst sort of cruel inhuman evil ever known to humanity. I'm not talking about your average son-of-a-bitch businessmen. I understand there needs to be some amount of hell to pay for running a business and getting things done. You need to treat your employee's like resources just like everything else, if you don't, your buisness fails; that is nature. These are not the kinds of businessmen I am talking about.



I am talking about the businessmen who hire psychologists and draft research papers to wage psychological warfare on children to make money, such as McDonalds or BurgerKing. I am talking about businessmen who put addictive substances into their foods to increase profit margins, such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Pizza-hut. I am talking about businessmen who want to grow genetically modified soy beans that produce antidepressants next to regular soy bean crops meant for general consumption, such as Monsanto.



There is a very big difference between dollar worship and moral/ethic worship. These people view the dollar as a god, whereas any sane person would view it as a tool. Dollar worship is fundementally predatory as slaves make the highest profits and as history has shown, all predation is self destruction.



Barter and Capitalism isn't the issue; the issue is corruption of the capitalist system and nobody wants to acknowledge that. There's a very simple way to fight that which is learn not to be taken advantage of which is something that is increasingly becoming more and more difficult to do as the government and corporations increasingly treats people like slaves. Although I will say, ever since I started learning to jam and evade so to speak, my standard of living has only gone up and that cost has nearly halved. That is the solution; don't buy any products that take advantage of you. Coca-cola, pepsi, genjoked soy, Gap jeans; if the producer wants slaves then their product will make slaves. As the old saying goes; you are the product.



Finally, Becker, any company can fail due to incompetent management. By that arguement I can say Enron failed due to incompetant management and therefor profit-driven corporations are inherently flawed. As for what the reasons for the incompetancy are, that's irrelevant in your arguement since you didn't state the kind of incompetance; you used a general statement. There is no huge inherent flaw to a worker-run business except that there is often very little reason to be ambitious. The often eccentric and energetic inventor must be empowered some system and at the same time the greedy ambitious fool needs to be enslaved by the same system, lest we get into the situation we are now in whereas the greedy ambitious fools modify the system to get into power and enslave the energetic inventors and everyone else. We've been in this situation before, notably during Roman times, and just before the French and American revolutions by the rule of the Brittish.



There's nothing saying a worker run business couldn't be compeditive with the right people, but the average mundaine person just wants to do work hard and live a good life and you can't blame them for wanting that or having that attitude; it's the farmers attitude really. Everyone just wants a good life; the only difference is in the amount of work they want to do in order to get it.

What is the so-called "natural" rate of unemployment is somewhat controversial. A couple of decades ago, it was believed to have risen in the United States to 6 per cent or more. But experience of the past 20 years suggests that the United States can achieve full employment with 5 per cent, or perhaps even lower, unemployment

I think the reason the "natural" rate of unemployment has dropped in the last two decades is the ravenous disability lawyer industry getting people on SSI for behavior disorders.