americans and guns

I couldn't resist
Sometimes i dont think that its a good idea that the USA is the biggest possessor of nuclear weapons on the planet...

http://www.snotr.com/embed/523

Contradictionary terms

Business ethics
Corporate responsibility
Employee welfare
Private health insurance
Environmental policy
social mobility
Pensionable age
Compassionate conservative

May I also suggest some newly incompatible word pairs that will elicit
mirth in the future.

love & marriage
first-time (home) buyer
career path
job satisfaction
constructive criticism
impartial advice (especially financial)
public relations
objective reporting

words that cannot be used in any context

civic
progressive
left
prudent
loyal
committed
generous
pro-bono
open-minded
re-distribution

medical bills and bankruptcy in USA

Some people in Slovakia see the USA as a model of the general direction the Slovak economy should take.

I will refer to a simple thing about the American example, that I think might give one a good reason to think twice..

FROM BBC

"For the 1.5 million Americans who go through bankruptcy in an average year, medical bills are the leading cause. For all of that, you would think there would be a loud and visible constituency for healthcare reform.

You would think there would large demonstrations, or at least aggressive lobbying for change. But there is very little."
See more at BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7006933.stm

ALSO note these graphs when drawing your conclusions:




Saving for a rainy day (particularly for this non existent health safety-net) (negative saving is of course borrowing...)

Great news! Slovakia to Start Meeting Maastricht Inflation Criterion Next Month

The Governor of the National Bank of Slovakia, Ivan Sramko, stated on Tuesday that Slovakia is to start meeting the Maastricht inflation criterion in September 2007.

Initial estimates that the country could meet this criterion as soon as August will thus not be confirmed. The reason for this, however, is not worse inflation development in Slovakia but a change to the calculation base for the reference value.

“Development of the inflation rate still allows us to assume we would meet the nominal part of this criterion this year as well as in March 2008 and further in 2008, which we consider key issues for evaluation of the Maastricht criterion itself,” the Governor concluded.

Admiring the rich & famous

"The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the
powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean
condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our
moral sentiments."

Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759):

also...

Theodore Roosevelt ("New Nationalism" speech, 1910): "I believe in a
graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more
easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big
fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly with
the size of the estate."

Romano Prodi - Italian Prime Minister & former head of the EU commission Says that Slovakia is an economic miracle.

Bratislava, Slovakia. "Slovakia has become a real economic miracle in Europe." - Romano Prodi, Italian Premier (And former head of the European Commision)

We have come to a major milestone in economic development in Slovakia. According to latest estimates by Eurostat, Slovakia is to achieve the second highest ranking in standard-of-living among the Visegrad 4 countries, moving ahead of Hungary in terms of GDP per capita.

Slovakia has exhibited an outstanding GDP growth in recent years, which is becoming tangible. A strong and stable economy means more local spending power.

Fico & labour standards

Robert Fico seems to continue his moderate reign. He is pushing through some measures that amend the labour code so that it is not heavily skewed to favour employers. His labour minister said that this simply puts slovakia on the same level of labour regulation as capitalist darlings like UK or Ireland. Quite how giving slovaks mainstream standards in the workplace is being dangerously left wing is not explained.

I think that people who think that maternity leave is a threat to capitalism makes me wonder if some employers have any humanity left. Moderate social standards and capital can coexist and produce balanced & democratic societies like those found in Scandinavia and elsewhere where the fruit of capitalism is used to underpin enlightened societies and not go down the path of unstable militaristic taliban-esque regimes like the one plagueing the United States at the moment. The social ills that the US has accepted in order to gain a couple of percentage points of growth are an unacceptable trade-off. Only psychopaths can truly want societies that don't care about the fate of the individual i.e. without safety nets.

The richest irony of all is that in this century of the Self the checks and balances on capital that are being undermined everywhere, are the basic foundation upon which the social contract that allowed the prosperity of the past 70 or so years (i.e. after the war).

I also have a deep suspicion that most people who call for privatisation of healthcare or short-term contracts as the way of the future either are rich enough to not need the societal safety nets (and are therefore in a small atypical minority) or they are deluded fools who think they are the next Gordon Gekko... We are not all going to be rich.. Its impossible. Many will waste their life chasing these illusions and in the process they are creating a selfish cruel & consumeristic world to live in.

George Michael comes to Bratislava

Bratislava's Inter football stadium hosted world-renowned vocalist George Michael on May 25. The Bratislava concert was part of his 2007 summer European tour.

The two-hour show included hits like "Fast Love", "Too Funky", "Star People" and "Shoot the Dog". The highlight of the show was George Michael's dance hit "Freedom", which he played as a second encore.

The show began shortly before 21:00. There was a 20-minute break after an hour, and then George Michael continued for another hour.

latest Bratislava buzz

Robert Fico went to Frankfurt with Ivan Sramko the excellent Central banker that has kept a steady hand on the economic decision-making in Slovakia since his appointment by Dzurinda.

They met the European Central Bank chief Jean-Cluade Trichet in Frankfurt, and seem to have convinced the rest of europe that Slovakia has every intention but also a rising economy that can support the undertakings necessary to enter the eurozone.

It seems that given a steady 12 months of current policy will see Slovakia through to both Schengen and Euro membership, before all the other EU entrants bar tiny Slovenia.

Bratislava I can tell you is buzzing with investment, and many people are realising what a comfortable and cozy place its center is. A little known fact though is what lovely place it is to live in. Very affordable, and yet it still has all the amenities a larger capital like Vienna has.

Its political and economic leadership has serious communication issues, that is for sure. But the management of the economy has been prudent, and rotation of power beneficial for the maturity of this country's political life.

The fact that Slovak wages and living standards are rising by 8% per annum with productivity rising even faster than that (i.e. the growth is benefiting everyone in the country) and comparing it to the USA where the robber barons have returned via lobbying under the guise of de-regulation and aredriving living standars for much of the middle class down, makes me feel lucky and priviledged in my decision to base myself in this lovely corner of central europe.

In the US the poor really feel the pain of this lack of re-distribution. Repeal of common sense regulation coupled with a society that worships entertainers and doesn't bother to vote or value productive enterprises (why is Wall St. worshipped more than manufacturing?) has created a fine mess that is only just starting to unfold.

Europe is the place to be, particularly new europe.

J.K Galbraith

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-10-15 – 2006-04-29) was a Canadian-American economist and author.



In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well.

"The American Economy: Its Substance and Myth," quoted in Years of the Modern (1949), ed. J.W. Chase

But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated.
The Great Crash 1929 (1954)

In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.
The Great Crash 1929 (1954)

Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.
The Great Crash 1929 (1954)

You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.
Adlai Stevenson speech, Los Angeles, 1956, written by Galbraith

Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
The Affluent Society (1958), ch. 1

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
The Affluent Society (1958), ch. 11

In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.
The Affluent Society (1958), ch. 18

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
The New York Times Magazine (1960-10-09)

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Letter to John F. Kennedy (1962-03-02), printed in Galbraith's Ambassador's Journal (1969)

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

Foreword to The Beach Book by Gloria Steinem (1963); reprinted in Galbraith's A View from the Stands (1986)

Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.
Made to Last (1964), ch. 4

People are the common denominator of progress. So, paucis verbis, no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development. At some stages of development — the stage that India and Pakistan have reached, for example — they are central to the strategy of development. But we are coming to realize, I think, that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.
Economic Development (1964), ch. 2

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
The New Industrial State (1967)

There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.
The New Industrial State (1967)

The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.
The New Industrial State (1967), ch. 6

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
The New York Times Magazine (1970-06-07)

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.
"The United States," New York (1971-11-15); reprinted in A View from the Stands (1986)

The Senate has unlimited debate; in the House, debate is ruthlessly circumscribed. There is frequent discussion as to which technique most effectively frustrates democratic process. However, a more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.
ibid.

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
ibid.

The traveler to the United States will do well, however, to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.
ibid.
Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums.
ibid.

Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed.
"Power and the Useful Economist" (1973) (printed in Annals of an Abiding Liberal and The Essential Galbraith)

The decisive weakness in neoclassical and neo-Keynesian economics is not the error in the assumptions by which it elides the problem of power. The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience. Rather, in eliding power — in making economics a nonpolitical subject — neoclassical theory destroys its relation to the real world. In that world, power is decisive in what happens. And the problems of that world are increasing both in number and in the depth of their social affliction. In consequence, neoclassical and neo-Keynesian economics is relegating its players to the social sidelines where they either call no plays or use the wrong ones. To change the metaphor, they manipulate levers to which no machinery is attached.
"Power and the Useful Economist" (1973) (printed in Annals of an Abiding Liberal and The Essential Galbraith)

This is what economics now does. It tells the young and susceptible (and also the old and vulnerable) that economic life has no content of power and politics because the firm is safely subordinate to the market and the state and for this reason it is safely at the command of the consumer and citizen. Such an economics is not neutral. It is the influential and invaluable ally of those whose exercise of power depends on an acquiescent public. If the state is the executive committee of the great corporation and the planning system, it is partly because neoclassical economics is its instrument for neutralizing the suspicion that this is so.
"Power and the Useful Economist" (1973) (printed in Annals of an Abiding Liberal and The Essential Galbraith)

If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.
Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975)
Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.
The Age of Uncertainty (1977), ch. 2

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
The Age of Uncertainty (1977), ch. 2

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
The Age of Uncertainty (1977), ch. 3: "The Massive Dissent of Karl Marx"

Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
The Age of Uncertainty (1977), ch. 6

Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.
The Age of Uncertainty (1977), ch. 7

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
The Age of Uncertainty (1977), ch. 9

When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.
The Age of Uncertainty (1977), ch. 12

Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down.
The Age of Uncertainty (1977), ch. 12

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
The Age of Uncertainty (1977), ch. 12

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
Introduction (1977) to The Affluent Society (originally published in 1958)
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
"H.L. Mencken," The Washington Post (1980-09-14); reprinted in A View from the Stands (1986)

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
The Sydney Morning Herald (1982-05-22)

Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man... begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization — the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies.
"Corporate Man," The New York Times (1984-01-22)

Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant.
"The Convenient Reverse of Logic in Our Time," commencement address, American University (1984); reprinted in A View from the Stands (1986)
A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.
"The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism," interview (undated) with John M. Whiteley in Quest for Peace: an Introduction (1986), ed. John Whiteley [1]
Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians," who in effect said this is a complicated issue of seeing how little we can give away, how much we can extract from the other side; it's highly specialized. Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons, the delivery systems, the targeting, the nature of the MIRV and the CRUISE, on down, and the MX. This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.

"The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism," interview (undated) with John M. Whiteley in Quest for Peace: an Introduction (1986), ed. John Whiteley
The huge capacity to purchase submission that goes with any large sum of money, well, this we have. This is a power of which we should all be aware.
"The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism," interview (undated) with John M. Whiteley in Quest for Peace: an Introduction (1986), ed. John Whiteley
Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.
"The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism," interview (undated) with John M. Whiteley in Quest for Peace: an Introduction (1986), ed. John Whiteley
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
The Guardian (UK, 1989-07-28)

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
ibid.

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
ibid.

In the first place I identify this ["the equilibrium of poverty"] with primitive agriculture, and two factors have been at work there. One is, of course, population growth. If you were a poor farmer in India, Pakistan, or in much of Africa, you would want as many sons as possible as your social security. They would keep you out of the hot sun and give you some form of subsistence in your old age. So, you have pressure for population growth that is, itself, the result of the extreme economic insecurity. This is something which hasn't been sufficiently emphasized.
Interview with John Newark (1990) from Interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith (2004) ed. James Ronald Stanfield and Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield [2]
One must always have in mind one simple fact — there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.
Interview with John Newark (1990) from Interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith (2004) ed. James Ronald Stanfield and Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
The Guardian (UK, 1991-11-20)

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
A History of Economics (1991), ch. 21

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
The Guardian (UK, 1992-05-23)

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
ibid.

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.
ibid.

We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.
ibid.

Almost 60-odd years ago in Canada. I was studying agriculture, how to produce better chickens, better cattle, better horses — horses in those days — better fruit, better vegetables. This was in the early years of the Great Depression, and the thoughts crossed my mind that there wasn't a hell of a lot of use producing better crops and better livestock if you couldn't sell them, that the real problem of agriculture was not efficiency in production but the problem of whether you could make money after you produced the stuff. So I shifted from the technical side to, first, the study of agricultural economic issues and then on to economics itself.
Interview with Brian Lamb, Booknotes, C-SPAN (1994-11-13) [3]

Broadly speaking, [Keynesianism means] that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.
ibid.

Going back to the most ancient times, national well-being, the national prestige depended on territory. The more territory a country had, the more income revenue there was, the more people there were to be mobilized for arms strength. So we had an enormous sense of territorial conflict and territorial integrity, and that was unquestionably a part of the cause of war, coupled with the fact that there was a disposition in that direction by the landed class, a disposition to think of territorial acquisition and territorial defense and to think of the peasantry as a superior form of livestock which could be used for arms purposes.
ibid.

I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula. There are some things where the government is absolutely inevitable, which we cannot get along without comprehensive state action. But there are many things — producing consumer goods, producing a wide range of entertainment, producing a wide level of cultural activity — where the market system, which independent activity is also important, so I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, "I'm in favor of privatization," or, "I'm deeply in favor of public ownership." I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case.
ibid.

I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.
ibid.

It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.
A Journey Through Economic Time (1994)
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
Interview with Lorie Conway (1997) from Interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith
(2004) ed. James Ronald Stanfield and Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield. Conway saw these
words on a framed needlepoint, entitled "Galbraith's First Law," at Galbraith's home

When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since the great tulipmania in 1637, speculation has always been covered by a new paradigm. There was never a paradigm so new and so wonderful as the one that covered John Law and the South Sea Bubble - until the day of disaster.
Quoted in Ben Laurance and William Keegan, "Galbraith on crashes, Japan and Walking Sticks", The Observer (1998-06-21)

Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes — indeed, deletes — the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.
"Free Market Fraud", The Progressive, January 1999)

[edit] Unsourced
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.
In economics, the majority is always wrong.
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.
Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

Would you buy a used car from this guy?

A blast from the past...

bringing Slovak labour code more in-line with the mainstream

I believe that the Fico's granting of some of the requests made by the labour unions were not excessive.

Fico insisted that the revised Labour Code will have no negative impact on economic growth and employment. This is probably true as the virtuous cycle that has taken place in Slovakia allows for building a more balanced society, and legislating some minimum standards.

What this means in the real world is that for example employers cannot play around with the law and deny a full-time job indefinately as many did below so they avoid materntiy costs. Practices like that are really barbaric, and maternity benefits are there for a reason. If we do not invest in our future through the next generation, we will suffer ourselves. continuous and ever accelerating accumulation of money and profit cannot be the only criterion of success and status in society.

Globalisation has brought about such a massive free-market shift in politics that to maintain sensible centrist policies, most european countries can and should easily elect left wing governments and still have a right wing tilt...

Anyway Fico said:
"We have to give employees the rights they deserve as citizens of an EU member," the PM said following a meeting with representatives of the Confederation of Trade Unions.

Labour flexibility for the employee means:
- Little or no paid holiday
- unpaid and frequent overtime
- taking on additional duties for little or no extra pay
- zero job security at a time that mortgages are the only way of buying property
- no pensions, or unreliable pension provision at a very old age (assuming that somebody gives you a job after 55 which is a very big assumption indeed)

Very rarely is it a positive.

Many people have bought into the idea that by espousing US style capitalism everybody will be rich. This is not true. There will be winners but most people will be losers. This trend is driven by greedy people and it causes problems in all sorts of aspects of life. From alienation and psychological problems, to obesity, family breakdown, consumerism, enviromental destruction to feed the consumeristic excesses and reshaping everything to a product to be bought a sold. Monetising human relationships and turning all into money is a false idol and will impoverish all of us, mentally, and otherwise.

very strange...

international women's day by Fico acting on stage???

http://zsolna.blogspot.com/2007/03/international-womens-day.html

via the ever excellent Roger

Cubicle world

Let's get some things straight, in alot of blogs there seems to be a strong neo-liberal viewpoint (Slovak or otherwise), so although i consider myself a centrist I feel obliged to put the case for the other side of the argument.

Historically treadmills were big wheels, like old-fashioned water wheels, powered by the weight of prisoners endlessly walking forward and, of course, getting nowhere.

Today we're virtual prisoners, chained in our cubicles, toiling to further corporate profits.

To compensate for the boredom and futility of work we chase the 'rewards' of consumerism, the existential emptiness inside is filled up with huge quantities of food and comfort snacking as well as borrowing more money to buy status symbols, and then have to work harder to pay off our debts

Just compare the obesity statistics between USA and Canada (a country with much more left wing policies and an emphasis on quality of life) Prisoners used to know all about treadmills. They were big wheels, like old-fashioned water wheels, powered by the weight of prisoners endlessly walking forward and, of course, getting nowhere.

The turning wheel held several prisoners, all treading forward for hours on end. It was used to power other machines.

But really it was a form of punishment.

Has much changed? Today we're virtual prisoners, chained in our cubicles, toiling for 'the man'. We're replacable pawns to further profits. Yet, there's no revolution, no anger, no challenge to the status quo. We accept our lot, programmed to obey authority.

Wasn't that what school was all about? Sitting behind a desk for six hours, mindlessly bored. Just being 'trained' to fit into the new-style treadmill of work.

Got to work hard in school and get good grades so you can get a good job so you can buy everything you want... and if you don't get a 'proper' job, you're a 'failure'.

To compensate for the boredom and futility of work we chase the 'rewards' of consumerism, borrow more money to buy status symbols, and then have to work harder to pay off our debts. Life is a bitch and then you die. [1]

Management by Stress
Bosses and neoliberal ideologues tell us modern capitalism has changed our lives and the way that we work.

According to them, the world of work has changed dramatically since the years of poverty, lack of control and constant work that characterised the lives of workers at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But the world of work hasn't changed that much, as many workers could testify.
How many of us have had to put up with Human Resource Management? Workers have become used to "key performance indicators", "team working', "appraisals" and a whole battery of measures that go under the rubric of "flexibility" and "modernisation".

Modernisation means more exploitation. Karl Marx described this process as the bosses' desire to "fill up the pores of the working day".

He wrote in the mid-19th century about the brutal effect this has on people's lives: "It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight.

"It haggles over a mealtime, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself. It reduces the sound sleep to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential."

That is a description which is just as relevant today, whether you are a slave to a factory production line or to a computer in a call centre. [2]

The World Isn't Flat
The vision of the globalized world that Thomas Friedman offers in his book [The World is Flat - A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century] is a rose-tinted, cheery, bullish version, one that has little to do with reality, according to the authors.

Friedman's 'golf course account' of globalization revels in accounts of successful businesses and people. Friedman proffers a vision of a globalized world that has an essentially 'flat' meritocratic global playing field, and provides limitless opportunities for profit for people who are intelligent or who choose to invest in schooling.

He seasons his 'analysis' with accounts of his unmitigated fascination with gadgetry, and unbridled confidence in technology. Friedman's conjuring of this globalized world is in fact so utopic that even the familiar hindersome 'olive tree' is missing.

Only rearing up its head in the Middle East to let you in on the fact that its only the backward culture that's holding the Arab civilization back from the wonderful riches of the flat world.
There are no losers in Friedman's flat world - only people for whom it may take a little longer to get their piece of the pie, for example the Chinese sweatshop worker who saves up to educate his kids who then go on to get better jobs and better pay. Of course, Friedman is wrong.

Globalization is a highly complex interaction of forces. Not only does it exhibit integration, it also exhibits disintegration. It is rooted in cooperation--and it is rooted in violence.
For some, it represents the triumph of free-market capitalism over communism, ushering in democracy, world peace and universal prosperity.

For others, it represents conflict, unbridled greed, deregulated corporate power, and an utter disregard for humanity."

There are the shrinking white collar jobs, the vanishing health and retirement benefits, and the simultaneous mass exploitation of the poor in the global third world.

This attrition, this slide to the bottom, on both sides of the globe, argue the authors, is due to one single mechanism - the transnational corporations whose gargantuan profits have been fuelled by leeching the job security from the white collar workers in the west and extorting labor and resources from the unprivileged.

The Profits of Exploitation
Wal-Mart—the largest private retailer in the United States—is about to completely change the system it uses for scheduling workers’ shifts.

Last year, the company implemented the new system for a portion of its workers, including cashiers and office personnel. This year, Wal-Mart will begin using the system for all of its 1.3 million workers.

The system, developed by Kronos Inc., uses data from previous years along with new information on individual store sales, transactions, units sold and customer traffic to create a "cost-cutting" schedule.

Workers will now be asked to work shifts during those times in which potential profits are the highest.

Wal-Mart is not alone in implementing the so-called scheduling optimization system. Payless Shoe Source expects to have this system in 300 of its 4,000 stores by the end of January 2007. RadioShack and Mervyns are also implementing the new system.

Nikki Baird of Forrester Research said, "There's been a new push for labor optimization."
"Labor optimization" is a euphemism for an attack on worker rights. While the implementation of this system is a new tactic in the bosses’ constant drive to increase the exploitation of workers, it is anything but a new push.

The bosses must compete with each other to constantly increase the rate of profit. They consistently work to undermine workers’ job stability, wages and benefits while increasing their workloads.

Wal-Mart is also an example of the criminality of the entire capitalist class. Along with hundreds of other companies like it, Wal-Mart is guilty of stealing millions of dollars in unpaid wages and benefits from workers. [4]

The Corporate Cube-Farm
It is the right of working people to have jobs free of exploitation.
The sweat shop of old has now become the corporate cube-farm where employees are still required to work long hours without sufficient pay.
Instead of paying workers by the hour, the corporations came up with the ego-assuaging idea of designating nearly all positions as "salaried" which means they are free of overtime costs.
Workers are laid off, their pensions diverted to deceptive "401K" plans that often means they will not be free to retire ~ ever.

CEOs of corporations drive Jaguars and send their kids to Harvard while low-wage workers wonder how to feed their kids and get medical care.

Most people at all ranges of the socio-economic scale work long hours, denying them adequate time to nurture their family lives.

Kids are stuck in impersonal day care centers where mothers and fathers have little input into their upbringing. Day care workers promote capitalistic and consumerist values to the children.
Now we go into the next phase of worker exploitation called "globalization". Worker security is forfeited in the name of corporate profit while workers in third world countries are exploited without even the minimal protections of workers in the US.

The propaganda machine cranks out endless justifications, all of them cloaked in positive language, to make this sound like "progress". [5]

The Unending Benefits of Capitalism [for a Few]
In December, 2006, Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street financial services company, announced a sixteen and a half billion dollar bonus for its 26,500 employees, an average of $623,418 per employee. Their newly appointed CEO received a bonus of $52,000,000.
With the rain of riches falling upon Wall Street these days, the practice of distributing rewards at the top is picking up steam.

CEOs and executives at Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley are receiving bonuses as high as $60 million. The manna from heaven continues to fall, and the optimists just want to let the good times roll. They see the benefits of Capitalism unending. Halleluiah! We're on a bonus march!
If Karl Marx were alive and well today, and living in America, he might not even recognize the economic system that he critiqued and analyzed in Das Kapital, when he wrote it in 1867. It wasn't a bad call.

Starting with primitive capital accumulation to feed the Industrial Revolution, small commodity production developed. It was a snowball rolling down hill. Mergers and acquisitions were the inevitable result.

Monopoly, imperialism and war followed, stimulated by the grab for raw materials from less developed areas around the world. The creation of surplus value and profit, of course, was the key to it all.

Marx might not have believed the working class would have allowed it to have gotten this bad. The amount of profit being raked in by the corporate class is obscene. It certainly would have boggled his mind.

The coming world economic crisis is long past due. It wouldn't be just a stock market crash. It would be the total collapse of the house-of-cards still called "capitalism" today.
All that is needed is a single spark-like China calling in its paper-the debt that the US has accumulated to finance the Iraq war and other catastrophes.

When the collapse comes, the question is, will there be enough time and enough of the natural world left to start rebuilding a new kind of society that has been demonized for generations called "socialism".

Discovering Time Travel in Bratislava

Worth knowing if you are visiting...

Guidebooks mentioning Slovakia's capital, Bratislava, spend more ink extolling the pastoral charms of the surrounding countryside — the wineries, the former Habsburg hunting lodges, the ceramics factories — than on the city itself. Sketched out in broad strokes with references to monuments like the turreted castle that looms over the Danube, Bratislava often comes off sounding like an Austro-Hungarian also-ran.

What the books don't evoke are the sensations that one is both stepping back in time and leaping into the future while strolling through the city's compact historic center.

Main streets like Panska and Michalska are lined with giddy Baroque palaces in shades of marigold and lavender. Onion-domed turrets and spires rise above churches, a grand opera house draws music lovers from neighboring Austria and fin de siècle coffee houses fill up in late afternoon.

Less trafficked lanes, like Kapitulska, look like 19th-century paintings, nary a power line in sight. The street ends with the soaring verticality of St. Martin's Cathedral, a Gothic church consecrated in 1452 that has tremendous historic importance — 11 monarchs, including Maria Theresa, were crowned there from 1563 to 1830.

Yet amid this Old World backdrop there is the buzz of a city brimming with exuberance. With its combination of well-worn cobblestones by day and well-mixed cocktails after dark, Bratislava has become a popular weekend destination for a free-spirited crowd from across Europe and beyond.

"I've been elsewhere in the region, and the amazing thing about Bratislava is that you have these glorious buildings and historic context, but then you've got boutiques like this one tucked into them," said a visiting Briton, John Strachan, who was on a shopping spree with his girlfriend at the new Dana Kleinert boutique on Venturska Street. "And the flight from London cost all of about £50," he added.

Mr. Strachan is not alone in taking advantage of cheap fares from cities like London or Berlin. Indeed, all across the city, Bratislavans are managing to attract visitors with an improbable variety of enterprises tucked into those glorious buildings.

From their courtyards, multiple doors and passageways wind through former palaces leading to lively beer gardens, shops selling etched glassware, art galleries, a wine museum or a Turkish-style tearoom that also stocks seven varieties of Argentine maté. Weather permitting, the action spills out into the courtyards and streets.

"It's amazing how far the city has come in a little more than a decade," said Juraj Alner, a Slovakian journalist who moved to the city with his family in 1948. "There used to be no life here: you didn't go out because there was nowhere to go. Now you can't even cross the streets of the old town in the summer for all the packed outdoor cafes."

Even the remnants of those dark days are up for reappraisal. The Novy Most, or New Bridge, built in 1972 by the Soviet-backed government, is easily Bratislava's most visible structure. For many, the enormous asymmetrical bridge is an eyesore that destroyed the scale and perspective of the riverfront along with some historically important neighborhoods, like the ancient Jewish quarter. But for anyone with a taste for chunky modernism and architectural audacity, the bridge holds some appeal.

Last summer that appeal became easier to savor when the discus-shaped observation deck atop its tower was converted from a kitsch coffee shop to a swanky cocktail lounge and restaurant called UFO. Most visitors there stick to the liquid menu, which includes concoctions with names like Tiger's Milk or Grapeful Dead.

While sobriety is not exactly illegal, liquor does seem to lubricate a fair amount of the local interaction. Before the napkin is in your lap, the jingling aperitif cart will have pulled up tableside at Slovenska Restauracia, where waiters wear Slovakian folk dress and trellised walls are laden with ceramics and braids of garlic and peppers. In late November, I joined the locals in quaffing a borovicka, a potent juniper-flavored liqueur served in traditional long-necked, pot-bellied shot glasses that seem designed to get as much booze into your system as quickly as possible. I downshifted to a glass of the hearty local red wine to accompany a meal of fragrant garlic soup and creamy turkey paprikash.

At neighboring tables, business deals were going down in English, Slovak, German, French and Chinese. From the number of high-end brands like D & G, MaxMara and Gucci appearing in store windows it would seem that business is booming.

"Most of those shops came in with the E.U.," one local said, referring to the Slovak Republic's entry into the European Union in May 2004.

But Bratislava, which has actually been the capital of modern Slovakia since 1968, when the Soviet-bloc Czechoslovakia decentralized into a federation, could teach a master class in European relations. The city and the country have been adapting to the shifting cultural and political landscape for a thousand years.

Bratislava, known as Pressburg before 1919, sits at a strategic crossroads between Vienna, Prague and Budapest. Home to several universities, the city has long had a rich intellectual and cultural life — as when the 6-year-old Mozart played for Maria Theresa in the stunning Palffy Palace.

The palace is now home to the City Art Gallery, which recently inaugurated "Passage," an installation by the Slovakian artist Mantej Kren, which uses mirrors to expand stacks of books into an infinite library — a fitting image for a city of learning.

BEYOND the City Art Gallery, Bratislava also has the Slovak National Gallery, which displays mostly paintings and betrays the Austro-Hungarian predilection for Dutch artists. Bratislava Castle is home to several museums, including one that exhibits relics of the region's Celtic, Roman and Moravian past; another features musical instruments, clocks, arms and armor and Slovakian furniture.

After dark, the modern-day mix of cultures gets shaken up like a good apple martini in the city's heaving night scene.

"Bratislava deserves its reputation as a party destination," said Eva Boskovicova, who runs the Botel Gracia, a 29-room hotel on a former steamer moored near the New Bridge. "We do get a lot of British stag parties," she added.

Nearby is the truly underground Subclub, a former nuclear fallout shelter tunneled into the castle foundations. It is now trance and techno-music central, where narrow tunnels lead to a large vaulted chamber in which the D.J. and dance floor take the place of whatever accommodation the communist government had in mind for itself in case of nuclear Armageddon.

Those more interested in the first two activities may want to linger after dessert at restaurants like Cajway, which practically turn into clubs when the kitchens close around 10 p.m. and D.J.'s, African drummers or jazz musicians turn up the volume and diners end up dancing among the tables.

As for the surrounding countryside, excursions can be made to the Devin Castle, a center of the Moravian Empire in the ninth century. There are also wineries and delicately painted ceramics to buy in the hamlets of the Little Carpathian Mountains.

But now that post-Soviet Bratislava is in full bloom, the surrounding hills may not beckon quite so loudly.

Slovak PM riding high on popular measures

this says it all really...

By Alan Crosby and Peter Laca

BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - Many Slovaks began the year with a little extra cash in their pockets thanks to a new leftist government which has brought few of the dire consequences economic analysts warned of six months ago.

Prime Minister Robert Fico, at 42 the country's youngest leader, rose to power after a June election that saw citizens turn their backs on a reformist government that took them from political outcasts to EU members during its eight-year rule.

He promised to reverse many of that government's reforms that were widely praised by foreign investors and analysts but hit ordinary Slovaks in this mainly rural country hard.

The charismatic former human rights lawyer promised to scrap a flat tax system, give pensioners Christmas bonuses, eradicate health service user fees and fight to reduce the large profits made by banks and utility companies.

Analysts said the moves would scare off foreign investors and hit the very open economy and possibly derail plans to adopt the euro in 2009. But six months into governing Fico has toned down his rhetoric and turned from populist to pragmatist.

"When he came to power, he huffed and he puffed," said one EU diplomat based in the capital Bratislava, "but he hasn't blown the house down. Not even close. He's shown a pragmatic side while still giving his core electorate something as well."

To be sure, Fico has managed to unnerve foreign investors, raise eyebrows in the EU and even anger his own coalition partners.

He canceled the $357 million sale -- agreed by the previous government of centre-right Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda -- of the country's largest airport to a consortium led by Vienna airport operator Flughafen Wien.

He pushed the energy regulator to approve lower than requested hikes in gas and electricity prices, and then adopted legislation strengthening the regulator for future decisions.

CHRISTMAS BONUSES

And as pensioners found out, he also approved their Christmas bonuses, a wildly popular move made thanks to the tax revenue windfall inherited from the strong economy brought about by the previous cabinet.

"I did not like the previous government, we did not understand Dzurinda, and he did not understand us. This one is much more attentive to how common people live," said 56-year-old pensioner Magdalena Moravova.

The Dzurinda government was the darling of foreign investors, who poured billions into the economy which is now growing at close to double digits.

The hectic privatization schedule angered Fico, who felt the country was being sold to outsiders on the cheap and to the benefit of a few.

Fico has targeted foreign firms that had bought up Slovak assets -- especially in the banking sector and utilities -- saying they were making a windfall profit on the back of ordinary citizens.

He told the Italian utility Enel, which owns dominant electricity producer Slovenske Elektrarne, that if it did not like changes he wanted to make to a previously signed $2.7 billion privatization contract, it was welcome to leave.

But he later backed down in that fight, and has also left in place the flat tax system that attracted many foreign firms.

Instead, he tweaked other parts of tax laws to help generate funds needed to offset increased social spending and still keep the public sector deficit in line with "Maastricht criteria" needed for Slovakia to adopt the euro in 2009 as planned.

The result, said Samuel Abraham, editor of a Bratislava political quarterly magazine, is that Fico has used the benefits of the booming economy built up by the previous government to make pointed statements to his electorate while maintaining an environment friendly for foreign investors.

And according to opinion polls, Fico's Smer remains by far the single most popular party.

"The government has taken steps that may look small, but they were all visible and brought a message to the people," he said. "This is a very populist government, and it must do things that resonate with people."

finally a sensible article about the situation in Slovakia in the western press

Slovakia's Reforms Deserve Second Look

The go-slow approach of the country's premier has been criticized, but it appears necessary to correct past mistakes and chart a better way forward

by Robert Anderson

Central Europeans have become used to permanent revolution over the past 17 years and are still being urged to make further reforms to catch up with Western Europe and cope with global competition. Any politician who questions this is condemned as "anti-reform," as if that ends the argument.

Reform should be a banned word for journalists covering central Europe. Its unqualified use implies that the tide is going only one way and that you can either go with the flow - preferably as speedily as possible, catching the wave and being borne aloft - or you can futilely rail against it, march into the waves and drown.

But there is not just one model that central European societies must adopt. Western Europe has diverse economic models ranging from the United Kingdom's free market to the French social market, and it is a political decision which one a new member should adopt. To demand "reforms" begs the question of which direction the reforms should be heading.

Before applauding reforms one must also examine the content, to see if they are really needed and well prepared, as well as the timing, because it can sometimes be better both politically and economically for governments to take their time introducing complex and painful changes.

Robert Fico, Slovakia’s leftist premier since July, has suffered more than most from this simplistic misperception of reform.

His rightwing predecessor, Mikulas Dzurinda, pushed through the most radical reform program in the region. Economists and business people were so enamored that they cited Slovakia as a model for sclerotic Western Europe. Conversely, Fico was disparaged as the anti-reform candidate who would try to turn the clock back.

Business was therefore shocked by the scale of Fico’s victory and his decision to opt for the "worst case" scenario of a coalition of his Smer movement and two nationalist fringe parties.

Fico’s initial lukewarm commitment to adopting the euro in 2009 led to a plunge in the value of the Slovak crown at the end of June. The central bank spent more than 3 billion euros - around one quarter of its reserves - trying to arrest the crown’s fall before Fico and his business-friendly finance minister, Jan Pociatek, were able to restore confidence in the euro timetable.

Since that inauspicious start the worst fears have not been realized. Many of Fico’s campaign promises have been cut back and the reform framework has been preserved. For example, the flat income tax has been maintained, though personal allowances have been reformed to force high earners to pay more tax.

The crown is now at record levels and the rating agency Moody’s even increased Slovakia’s credit rating in October to A1. The country is likely to be chosen as the site of a huge new LCD plant by Samsung, demonstrating that foreign investors remain bullish.

Economists and business people now damn Fico with faint praise, commending him for making only minor changes to Dzurinda’s reforms, as if anything his government did would necessarily be negative. They now either see his government as a giant waste of time or, if they are charitable, as a period when the country treads water and catches its breath before another giant wave of reforms.

TRIED AND FAILED
This overlooks first of all the problems with Dzurinda’s reforms. Many were successful but others, notably in the more complex areas of health care, education, and welfare, either failed or created huge discontent or both.

For example, long-term unemployed - primarily Roma - were forced to do unskilled manual work just to receive a lower level of benefits than they had previously been entitled to. The aim was to cut welfare spending and improve incentives to work. However, given that many Roma live in areas of very high unemployment and discrimination, this simply deepened poverty and alienation.

The reforms were also shallow because the Dzurinda government did not tackle the issue of how they would be administered. The impact of the reforms was eroded by a state administration and local government that remained overstaffed, inefficient, and obstructive. Ironically for a government that liked to boast about attracting foreign investment, a good example of this is Sario, the investment promotion agency, which remains a pale shadow of CzechInvest, its Czech counterpart.

The reforms also ignored the chronic unemployment and poverty in eastern Slovakia. Bratislava and western Slovakia boomed, but for those in the east migration was the only way out. Only at the very end of his government did Dzurinda target investment incentives at eastern Slovakia and accelerate motorway building to link it the west.

Using the healthy economy he has inherited from Dzurinda, Fico plans both to improve the reforms and address problems that have been neglected. For example, social benefits are being increased to tackle poverty, while Pociatek plans big cuts in state administration through an ambitious e-government revolution.

In other fields Fico’s party - true to its Slovak name - plans to go in a different direction altogether. The flawed and unpopular health-care reform has already been canceled, while next year the Social Affairs Ministry should reform Dzurinda’s liberal labor law, aiming to restore workers’ and trade union rights and to maintain the flexibility that employers crave.

Overall, Fico’s reforms will be much more modest than Dzurinda’s, but it is often essential to pause in order to assess and correct the impact of reforms and to build popular support for the next step.

It should not be forgotten that Dzurinda never really had a popular mandate for his bold reform program. Most of the reforms were at best sketchy before his coalition’s narrow election victory. His government rushed the implementation of the reforms because it knew it would never have a second chance.

By contrast, Fico now enjoys record electoral support and is in a strong position to win the next election and push through further reforms at a time and pace of his own choosing.

Robert Anderson is a Prague-based correspondent for the Financial Times. The opinions expressed in this article represent his personal views.

Free people or free capital? Does money have rights?

I agree with Adam Smith that free movement of people is a core component of
free trade. As for free movement of capital, that's a totally different
matter. Unlike persons of flesh and blood, capital has no rights, at least
by Enlightenment/classical liberal standards. As soon as we bring up the
matter of free movement of capital, we have to face the fact that while
people are in principle at least equal in rights, in a just society, talk
of capital conceals the reality: we are speaking of owners of capital, who
are vastly unequal in power, naturally.
In the real world, free movement of capital entails radical restriction of
democracy, for obvious reasons that have long been well understood.
Speaking of capital and labour as if they were on a par is so hopelessly
misleading that sensible discussion is impossible in these terms.

State vs. Private sector

An old interview with a great economist. What he says has been common sense since the 1930es until the mid 90es. Its strange how this view would be seen as leftist these days... Especially if the same words were uttered by a politician anywhere in europe including Slovakia but particularly in the english speaking countries.

Government and the Market:
INTERVIEWER: Who knows best? government or the free-market system?

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH: I have no doubt on that. The correct balance is pragmatic. If the market system, as you call it, has its own things that it does very well, no one could question, for example, its ability to make automobiles or grow food or provide a large part of the substance of life. But then there's an area where it doesn't work, and the distinction between
the areas where it works and the areas where it doesn't work is the basis of sound policy.

We're not, as we talk, in the United States having a big, sometimes quite mindless, argument about education. Everybody agrees that education is a public service, or almost everybody, and has to be handled, financed by the state, by the government. On the other hand, there's nobody, so far as I'm aware, suggesting that the state should take over the manufacture of automobiles, which I just mentioned, or farm products, or a wide range of other things. So it's a practical judgment that has to be made in the specific case, and it doesn't lend itself to the kind of broad theory implied in your question.

INTERVIEWER: At the end of the day, is morality at the heart of economics?
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH: No, but it can be. We're talking today in a very rich country, at a very rich time, and at the time we talk a large part of the American population, 10, 15 percent, are living below the level of enjoyment. They're hungry, they're ill housed, they are sick, and very largely as the result of the lack of income, mostly as the result of the lack of income. I would like to see a minimum income for everybody so that you have a life-supporting safety net. I think it's something a rich country like the United States can afford. And I'm not the only one with that view. Conservatives will say that people endowed [that way] won't work. Well, that's quite possible, but I'm impressed with the fact that leisure, if you're rich enough, is also a very good thing. In the past, often I've walked through Harvard Yard and have had one of my colleagues say to me, "Ken, aren't you working too hard?" Excessive work, leisure can be very good for a college professor, or somebody of affluence. Work can be unnecessary.

SRAMKO: Slovakia Will Meet Maastricht Inflation Criterion

Slovakia Will Meet Maastricht Inflation Criterion, Says NBS Governor The National Bank of Slovakia (NBS) estimates the reference inflation level in 2008, which Slovakia should not exceed with regard to its ambition to join the eurozone in 2009, at 2.8 percent. In the monitored period in the spring of 2008 the central bank expects the average inflation in Slovakia to be at 2.5 percent, NBS Governor Ivan Sramko said. The central bank's predictions do not count with further prepared changes in regulated prices that significantly influence the development of headline inflation. After inclusion of the declared drop of natural gas prices for households, the growth rate of consumer prices could be even lower. We could thus meet the Maastricht inflation criterion, although it still remains the most difficult hurdle on the way to eurozone, stated Mr. Sramko. Despite expectations of positive changes, Mr. Sramko still sees a risk in regulated prices of energy.