"The fundamental theories on which the modern science of political economy is based are these:
That under primitive conditions men lived and live by barter"
The basic premise, that barter was (and is) by which 'primitive' (whatever that is) live, has been thoroughly debunked by contemporary anthropologists of money. David Graeber's 'Debt: The first 5000 years" is a must read for anyone interested in the topic of theory of money from the anthroological (i.e., empirical) perspective:
I read "Debt" as well, so I had the same reaction. But it should hearten you that the author agrees! Two paragraphs down, he argues:
"But modern research in the domain of commercial history and numismatics, and especially recent discoveries in Babylonia, have brought to light a mass of evidence which was not available to the earlier economists, and in the light of which it may be positively stated that none of these theories rest on a solid basis of historical proof—that in fact they are false."
A few paragraphs later, he even says:
"In both these instances in which Adam Smith believes that he has discovered a tangible currency, he has, in fact, merely found—credit."
In other words, the author who wrote this piece, A. Mitchell Innes in 1913, is one of those "contemporary anthropologists of money."
That's actually quite a poor book. It essentially defines debt as any, absolutely any, sense of liability towards another being. When you define it like that, it isn't only true that debt predate money, it's obvious.
Besides that, the book is a collection of anecdotes carefully selected to try to paint a coherent picture. It is clearly written by someone who doesn't understand economics, to a public that doesn't understand economics.
It is so full of basic mistakes that it is hard to decide if the problem is ignorance, laziness or malice.
"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s"
The level of stupidity in this quote is unbearable. Basic fact checking for 5 seconds on Google would have been enough...
Now take that and apply the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
And that's before we get into ignominious phrasing such as "I would like to end, then, by putting in a word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone."
Debt is a book written backwards. It starts with and idea: capitalism is bad and debt is the instrument of capitalism. It then piles up and links selected - but vague and frequently unsourced - anecdotes to try to create a logic supporting that idea.
From an economics perspective, it isn't even wrong. But it does sound appealing to anyone who has debt or dislikes capitalism. Therefore, I expect a lot of downvotes.
This is the typical comment where preconceptions are so strong that they ignore, and even go literally against, the evidence at hand. In this case, the news is precisely about the Indian regulator standing against the wealthy lobbyist (who happens to be an American company, by the way). Talking about how corrupt countries are, or how corrupt they are perceived to be, I wonder if the same result would take place in the US.
It's really a form of fingers-in-ears hear-no-evil self-deception. That is, USA is certainly corrupt (e.g. access to US Senators is more dependent on donations than state of residence), but in different ways than other nations. So the typical maneuver is to say "look at what's going on over there: it's corrupt and we don't have it here so thank goodness we aren't corrupt". Situations like this lead the typical maneuver astray because as you say this particular corruption didn't fly in India while it happens many times a year here in USA.
Photovoltaic power is actually less efficient where it's warmer. The ideal for photovoltaic generation is somewhere cold but sunny. And I'm not aware of too many solar thermal plants that are online and profitable versus other generating methods.
Legally? Going by whose laws? The legitimate owners of all that wealth are the indigenous inhabitants of the territory it was extracted from by invaders. According to indigenous law, it is definitively NOT legally owned by Spain.
In other cases, Spain has won the rights over salvaged treasure from sunken Spanish ships, as the countries they plundered the gold from weren't countries at the time, but colonies of Spain (for example: Peru).
Sincerely, if this is in International waters, you would think there was a expiry date of shipwrecks and it's finders-keepers after, Oh, I dunno, a few hundred years or so.
Me too. It would be cleaner, unpolluted, less bloody, and the native cultures would probably be blossoming and making interesting stuff by combining their knowledge with outside influences. Too bad most of them were exterminated and dispossessed (the galleon being just one instance of that dispossession), and too bad they continue to be institutionally and structurally marginalised, decimated, and dispossessed.
The spaniards have been better prepared for war and overcame the local population in bloody conquest — this is a historical fact that no one will argue with.
How, from this fact, do people come to an assumption that local population had higher moral values than invading spaniards?
Have you completely no idea what pre-columbian era indian cultures were like? I mean, not today's "New Age" versions that have been adopted for Californian yappies, but actual kingdoms, chiefdoms and empires that resided there several hundred years ago.
In fact, most of the army Hernán Cortés used to overcome the Aztec empire were natives that hated the oppressive power of the aztecs. He managed to exploit these regional feuds, and also internal problems of the Aztec government.
The spaniards alone were a skeleton crew, not enough to conquest anything that big, despite having better technology.
Empire which was revoked due to being an illegitimate and genocidal regime. Your argument suggests they should be allowed to re-steal now what they would have stolen back then.
No, I'm not saying that they should be allowed to re-steal. I said that I don't care about a shipwreck, but the spanish government has been known to claim this kind of finds in the past because technically that is a Spanish ship and legal precedents exist.
Also, all the global empires have been built on the same coercive foundation, and that doesn't make them "regimes".
The reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a"vast genocide", the most sustained on record.
While I think it is possible that the US is engaged in economic spying for profit, there isn't as much info about them providing data to companies directly for profit, and certainly not in that link. Industrial spying is a power grab more than an economic one. Your article noted Siemens as a spying target. Here is a a possible reason for industrial spying:
> Stuxnet functions by targeting machines using the Microsoft Windows operating system and networks, then seeking out Siemens Step7 software.[0]
