Where is the US economy headed?

Not really. The competition would be fierce.

The goods and services wanted by the folks in both your country and mine who are counted by others as "poor", though they enjoy a far higher economic standard of living than someone in rural Nigeria or western Bolivia.

Your riff on Veblen and the imagined futility of consumption was amusing. It represents something of the truth, but leaves out far more than it includes.

The food in the yacht club dining room is quite good, the service and friendly associations very pleasant, and the views of the Golden Gate and ships passing by spectacular. I do enjoy it, but, like most of us, don't usually parse the pleasures into the imagined psychological components that so distract you.

USA.. USA.. USA..

We're the best because our poor are better off.

USA.. USA.. USA..

If only we eliminated the requirement that houses have indoor plumbing then we wouldn't have to show off how good our poor have it.

Looks like the citizens of Germany are getting ready to bail out Greece!

Piss off.

Please sir, can I have those designer clothes you no longer want?

Or how about that 3 year old couch you put on the curb?

You are - as usual - taking snippets out of context and ignoring the issue being discussed. No surprise coming as it dooes from an obsessive and doctrinaire nitpicking pedant. That's what you do.

What was the context I took your statement out of?

Please provide us with the correct context since I see nothing in your original post that would have made your context different than your statement as quoted.

While "pedant" may sound nice to you. I don't think you understand the meaning of the word. I made satirical remarks about your statement. You obsess about the context of your original statement.

Is this where the US economy is headed or is this just another conspiracy theory?

It's a conspiracy theory full of unsupported hyperbole and infounded, occasionaly self contradictory judgments of others. Good fodder for unthinking, uneducated paranoids, who see their salvation in reconstituted versions of the group think and authoritarian "reform" mass movements (all interestingly led by self-appointed elite cadres of authoritarian "vanguards") that buought so much tyranny, suffering ,and poverty to the world throughout the 20th century, but it is all merely tripe for those who think for themselves and understand history.

I'm not much into unions myself. Do you think that there is such a thing as a union being a good thing!

A union with an enthusiastic matron is okay rl.

I think you may have intended to post this on Bumblebeeboogie's thread, but I'll answer.

I don't have any objection to labor unions in principle, and I do recognize the beneficial effects of American labor unions in mitigating some very bad labor conditions, particularly in the coal and steel industries of this country in the late 10th and early 20th centuries. However, my (substantial) experience with operating a unionized business in recent decades is all bad. The unions deliberately and forcefully interposed themselves in every and all aspects of management communications with the workforce and worked incessantly to destroy any loyalty to the enterprise (or their non-union co-workers) and the common interests that should have united us all. As one (Steelworkers) Local president expressed it to me, "we don't work your ******* job, we work the contract and the contract is what we make it to be". Very hard to run a successful enterprise under those conditions.

I believe the evidence is very strong that these union attitudes (among other factors) contributed significantly to the early demise of U.S. manufacturing and textile industries. It is noteworthy that (except for Ford) all of the unionized auto companies in this country required bankrupcy & bailouts to continue, while none of the non union European and Japanese operations here did.

Germany is heavily unionized and even requires union participation in the governance of corporations. However, there they have managed to create a sense of responsibility among the unions for the health of the companies that employ them, and, as a result, continue a very healthy manufacturing industry which competes effectively in international markets. How they have done this, I don't really know.

What do you think of unions that include labor and politics?

Seems good to me! The problem that I see with unions is division. If the world was one big union I would be OK with that if everyone participated in the governing.

What do you think about the state of our union? Do you think we may have messed up? Maybe it is time to evolve!

Nothing works without competition. Universal solutions of all kinds end up becoming authoritarian, oppressive, and ineffective. The USSR had universal "labor Unions" and they were merely instruments of state oppression. Human beings are more like randomly shaped stones than bricks. Earlier advovates of massive universal solutions that rendered people into interchangable parts were the inspiration for the biblical story about the Tower of Babel.

Interestingly enough, when you measure the income of the entire world's population, virtually all Americans are in the 1%

So while our 1% may unfathomably rich for 99% of the rest of the world, our 99% are only obscenely so.

Is this a scientific fact or is something that all authoritarian and oppressive governments teach their citizens?

Do not get me wrong because there is no such thing as utopia and there will always be psychopathic behavior as far as I can see!

Do not worry as the GOP will end Americans being better off then the third world.

On another thread I mentioned the referendum that will be voted on Tuesday in Ohio. It involves the possible repeal of Senate Bill 5 which was adopted in March restricting bargaining rights of public employee unions. It is Issue #2 on the ballot and pits labor against Gov Kasich (R) and the legislature. A "no" vote would preclude the Bill from becoming law on November 9th.
I thought I had a correspondent in Ohio who was going to write about this but it didn't work out. Ohio will be a battleground state in 2012 and there has been some $50M dollars spent on this referendum.