Panel tallies massive waste and fraud in wartime U.S. contracts

onq said:
The United States IS a private company and its starts wars using false flag operations and sells arms to both sides. One reason it wanted Russia out of the way was to remove a competitor in the market for arms.
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No, the US is a Federal Government, not a private company. What is needed to stop the influence of large business is not regulation of private industries, but regulation of government. Technically the US constitution should be enough, but one of the most important parts of it have been ignored and violated for decades. Thje tenth amendment states that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.", in other words, if the Constitution does not expressly say that the government is to do something, then it is forbidden from doing so.
Nowhere in the constitution does it say for example that government is allowed to subsidise military contractors.



100% agree with Purple. The Great Depression did not end until after WWII when finally an end was put to stimulus and deficit spending. It is also completely untrue that Roosevelt was leaned on to cut spending. He never did such a thing. What he did have to do was stop some of his spending programs because the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. Roosevelt's own secretary of the Treasury said "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work."
When it comes to economics Ellen Brown knows absolutely nothing and Gary North has extensively exposed her lack of understanding:
http://garynorth.com/public/4993.cfm
http://www.garynorth.com/public/department141.cfm
 
Chris,

I don't know where you get your take on economic theory or history, but the opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal and the legislative restriction on government spending in the States is well known.
The history of war profiteering and subsidizing the economy via Military spending is also well known - America is not behaving like a sovereign state, but a private enterprise with its own private Army.

The history of the American depression also seems to blow your Robinson Crusoe test out of the water - having goods to sell doesn't generate a market.
Need and desire generates the market - offering goods at the right price point satisfies demand - the right price point is not necessarily the lowest - ask any Mercedes or Rolex owner.
 
onq said:
I don't know where you get your take on economic theory or history, but the opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal and the legislative restriction on government spending in the States is well known.
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My economics would fall into the Austrian School of Economics, which incidentally predicted the Great Depression, the monetary crises since the last ties to gold were abandoned in 1971, the dot com bubble, and the housing bubble including subsequent mess.
There was no opposition to the New Deal, if anything economists and politicians of the time were saying that not enough money was being spent. The only thing that temporarily slowed down FDRs spending (for only two year) were Supreme Court decisions that forbid him to continue certain activities.

onq said:
The history of war profiteering and subsidizing the economy via Military spending is also well known - America is not behaving like a sovereign state, but a private enterprise with its own private Army.
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I agree that America has a huge history of "subsidizing the economy via Military spending", but this does not make the US a private enterprise. The only way military is subsidised in the way that it is by the state taking money out of the economy by force and then handing it to vested interests. There is absolutely no private company that can do that, only an elected government with powers to take by force with threat of imprisonment can do this.

Actually the Great Depression perfectly matches up with the Crusoe theory. Here are some fact about the Great Depression and the things that FDR did during same to "boost" the economy:
1) he increased taxation reducing the amount of money in the economy
2) he massively spent borrowed money reducing the amount of capital in the economy
3) he then paid farmers to not produce on all of their land
4) he spent money on "infrastructure" projects, which meant that labour was used to produce stuff that could not be sold
5) he introduced unemployment welfare, which paid people to not produce
6) he forced minimum wage laws on companies and also forced companies to not reduce wages; this resulted in companies hiring less people, resulting in less production
7) unemployment never went below 15% during the 30%

None of this resulted in increased production of marketable goods. The unemployment rate is most damning factor that shows that people's productivity did not increase. And even when unemployment went down it was because of the war draft and arms manufacture, none of these made Americans better off.

Demand in any market is infinite, what is finite is the ability to satisfy demand, and you can only satisfy your demands by earning money to pay for them.
It is also not correct to say that the same forces of supply and demand influence the price of a Rolex and a cheap Chinese plastic watch. In economic terms they are completely different products with completely different demand. Supply and demand can also be completely different from location to location; a pork chop might have a price tag of €1 here, but in Saudi Arabia it will be completely worthless. Supply and demand do not result in the same price being charged everywhere, they influence in differenct ways at different times in different places.
 
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