What political party do you vote with?

Indie

Why Individual determinism is flawed

An individual is incapable of choosing to be born into advantage or disadvantage, so the chances of what level of provision they may be able to archive for themselves is in large part out of their hands.

But that is key statement “their irresponsibility” – not the child’s irresponsibility, the child couldn’t choose to be born to ‘responsible’ parents instead of ‘irresponsible’ ones.

*

Let us imagine a plague, a disease that could affect anyone but will actually end up only affecting half of the population* But nobody knows which half.

That is a societal problem.

In such a situation I think most sensible people would want the community’s government to try and do something about it and be willing to pay the taxes to tackle the situation.

Now lets say that half a population are born into disadvantage and half not. But since no one can choose beforehand to which half they are to be born, it basically means disadvantage could affect anyone.

So again it is a societal problem.

The difference is that there is the problem of hindsight, when those born into advantage are taxed to help the disadvantaged, they don’t go ‘oh I could have been born disadvantaged myself’ they might go ‘why should I help’. It is like knowing who would be affected by the disease and who not.

(*And I’m not saying disadvantage is a disease, I’m just using the plague idea as an example)

 

Basically ‘individual determinism’ is a variation on the ‘deserving and undeserving’ argument.

And that is only a variation on the older rationales the advantaged have tried to put forward to justify advantage.

- The religious argument was that god(s) choose where someone was to be born, be it slave peasant or noble, so it was divine will that people be in the position they were.

- Later the pseudoscientific argument was added – this claimed that social position was ‘natural’. That some races were inferior to others and so could be subjugated or enslaved - that this was part of the human ‘evolutionary’ process. In the same way advantage was a sign of evolutionary success and disadvantages a sign of evolutionary failure. And as such the disadvantaged, some argued, should be allowed (even assisted) to die ‘for the betterment of mankind’.

- And then there is the moral argument which claims that advantage comes about form ‘better behaviour’ that if people are responsible and make “better decisions” they will be advantaged but if they’re irresponsible and make “poor decisions” they will be disadvantaged.

None of these actually stands up to much scrutiny but they can be very seductive to those that are greedily or want to feel superior.

 

Indie

But that is as far as your argument goes just a ‘yes’ it’s not exactly a very rational or reasonable answer is it?

Well according to your idea of ‘Individual Determinism’ they didn’t earn it.

But as I’ve explained it is about goals what is it you are trying to achieve

My goal is to make societies fairer and better to live in, places that give a reasonable opportunity, to all the habitants, of having a healthy and fulfilled life. Places were people are more likely to realise their potential

This seems reasonable and rational because it would seem totally irrational and unreasonable to actually want to live in a society where things were more unfair and many people’s lives were worse.

 

Individuals are not predestined to anything as a result of who they are born to, and someone born to poor parents may be more motivated to achieve success as a result, while another born to wealthy parents may end up broke and a failure as a result of lacking any motivation.

Society has no right to expect government to compensate the less affluent by taxing the more affluent. Of course I expect those who lean to the left to disagree as class warfare is more appealing than hard work.

While you claim to not be saying disadvantage is a disease, you did make use of it as an example and while drugs most often are the cure for diseases, hard work and diligent effort is most often the cure for disadvantage.

New wealth is created by converting natural resources into new and innovative products or providing services of value to consumers. Redistribution of wealth only takes the existing wealth and gives it to someone other than its original owner to spend. True GDP growth occurs when it is not a result increased productivity, and not just increased debt.

 

Indie

Oh hell Indie we’ve been through all of this before.

But they can be born into unearned advantage or placed with the burden of disadvantage through no fault of their own.

Been here before also – you have said

Not destined but it makes it much more likely just as being born rich means you are more likely to end rich. The question here is one of social mobility and we have been through that before and the US has a rather low social mobility compared to many European countries.
Try - The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

And – Economic Mobility at http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP%20American%20Dream%20Report.pdf

And again we get an assertion “I think that's utter nonsense” not a rational or reasoned argument.

*

I know that is your opinion - but I’ll ask again the question you never seem able to answer - where is your rational and reasonable argument?

Saying you just don’t like it, isn’t a rational and reasonable argument.

So just how does the child get out of been born into disadvantage through diligence and hard work?

Yes they might be able to rise out of disadvantage but the greatest effect on a person’s life is where and to whom they are born. This can give someone advantages or disadvantages that can affect their whole lives and their possibility of having success or failure, and long before they have the independence to take certain actions themselves.

What do you categorise as ‘new wealth’? What do you mean by natural resources?

Who is more likely to have the wealth from which ‘new wealth’ can be made, someone advantaged or someone disadvantaged?

Who is more likely to have access to the ‘natural resources’ those with advantage or the disadvantaged?

Is it justified for a person born into advantage to retain exclusive rights to advantages they didn’t earn rather than share them with others who through no blame of their own are disadvantaged?

Let us imagine a plague, a disease that could affect anyone but will actually end up only affecting half of the population* But nobody knows which half.

That is a societal problem.

In such a situation I think most sensible people would want the community’s government to try and do something about it and be willing to pay the taxes to tackle the situation.

Now lets say that half a population are born into disadvantage and half not. But since no one can choose beforehand to which half they are to be born, it basically means disadvantage could affect anyone.

So again it is a societal problem.

The difference is that there is the problem of hindsight, when those born into advantage are taxed to help the disadvantaged, they don’t go ‘oh I could have been born disadvantaged myself’ they might go ‘why should I help’. It is like knowing who would be affected by the disease and who not.

(*And I’m not saying disadvantage is a disease, I’m just using the plague idea as an example)

 

Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.
Both the Democratic and Republican Parties have been running this country since day one, which makes them BOTH responsible for the mess we have today.
If you don't think a $14 trillion national debt and perpetual war is a mess, keep voting for the same old crap, and that's what you'll get.
I voted for Nader the last four times. I've been told I wasted my vote. But someday there will be enough of us that waste our vote to actually change things.

 

Yes, we have been through all this before and you've not presented anything I would consider a rational or reasonable argument as to why government should have power to redistribute for one portion of society to another. Wealth is redistributed properly only through remuneration, and new wealth is created by both those who were born disadvantaged as well as those born advantaged.

Taxes should not be used as a means of equalizing the means of the members of society, and those who pay little or no taxes, regardless of their income or lack of income are paying no share, which is unfair in my opinion. Personally, I am some what attracted to the "Fair Tax" proposal which would eliminate all current forms of taxes, and allow tax to be embedded in the price of everything where there would be but a single tax rate applicable to all, and those who were capable of spending more would result in paying more.

Try to understand that we, you and I, will likely never reach any form of agreement as I find Socialism as a form of government totally unacceptable. It's what has brought us the problems and immense debts that we, the U.S. and most all developed world nations are facing today, and to try and present what you do as rational or reasonable thinking just demonstrates your ignorance of the facts related to the problems which will only worsen if allowed to continue. It's not just a Republican or just a Democrat problem, it's a problem of governments that are out of control.

 

Have to agree somewhat, but I don't think we have time to wait for a third party to rise up so the best thing we might do is take over one of the two major parties, or maybe more accurately put, take back one of the two parties and work to assure that one party will run with a candidate selected by the people instead of the party. The 2012 election primaries provide us that opportunity if only "we the people" will take advantage of it. It may be now or never, and the National debt is now close to 15 trillion dollars as spending continues with or without raising the debt ceiling. The money has been spent, but the bills remain unpaid. That's how raising the debt ceiling is forced upon the Congress. Government, by any party is addicted to spending, and each unsustainable social program only exacerbates the problem for future government, who will find those who are recipients and large voting blocks to demand the continuation of those programs no matter what the costs.

 

if i earn $600 a month, spend roughly 1/3 of it on rent, another third on utilities, and whatever's left over on food, how much would you like me to pay in taxes?

actually how that works is that the poor, who tend to spend most of their limited income, are taxed at a higher rate than the rich, who earn too much to spend it all

 

If I remember correctly, they were talking of a tax rate of about 15%, so you would only have to pay $90 on a $600 per month income.

Not at all, the same rate of tax applies to everyone, and the poor, who have less to spend, while spending less pay the same tax rate as the wealthy who though paying the same tax rate pay much more in taxes. But even more interesting is the fact that each person or family would receive a check from the government equal to the taxes collected at the poverty level so if you earned less than or equal to the poverty level you would pay no tax at all out of your income. Only spending that exceeded the poverty level would cost money out of your own pocket. And, money saved and interest earned would be untaxed until spent, plus it would do away with annual income tax filing for most everyone except businesses where taxes would be collected as a percentage of the sales. Less IRS agents needed and audits only of those evil and wealthy businesses and corporations. A more green environment with less paperwork for fewer people, and tax laws applicable only to businesses and corporations, not individuals and families.

 

I also thought about that. Zuma probably is so Helen Zille probably votes for herself just to even it out. They probably vote for themselves because they like their own party best..

 

Indie

Ignoring criticism does not make it go away – refusing to answer address such criticism does not make it disappear – if fact the longer it goes unaddressed the more validity it seems to gather.

I’ve presented my case and so far the only argument you have put up against it, is to ignore it, present supposed personal and incredibly self serving ‘examples’ that only raise more questions than they answer (which you then refuse to answer) or you shrug your shoulders and say ‘that’s life’ or some other such banality.

Basically for main counter argument is that you don’t like it because you don’t like it.

As I’ve told you many, many times – I’m not trying to get you to agree with me nor am I trying to convert you – I’m just trying to understand why you hold your views to be true when you seem totally incapable of defending them from criticism in anything like a rational or reasonable way.

Also as I think anyone who’s been following your posts realises by now, you view anything to the left of your rather extreme right wing views as ‘socialism’.

To you it seems to be a insult and in some ways a show stopping argument, as if just saying something is ‘socialists’ proves it must be incredibly bad. It’s like some medieval priests labelling anything he doesn’t like as the ‘the devils work’.

As I’ve pointed out and explained the problems been faced at the moment seem more down to the silly neo-liberal ideas that have been dominant for the last 30 years or so.

Try reading – Age of Greed: The triumph of finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick


Here is a review - 'The Busts Keep Getting Bigger: Why?’
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/busts-keep-getting-bigger-why/

But I have at least presented arguments that I’ve been able to defend against your criticism. All you have done is make assertions that you haven’t been able to defend from criticism (just look at the discussion on ‘individual determinism’ above).

 

Thing is that ‘government’ and political party are not the same.

Government is the form or system of rule by which a state, community, etc is governed.

So you can have a theocracy, monarchy, democracy, plutocracy, anarchy and a whole load more.

The thing is that you can have ‘good governance’ under virtually any system of government, but in my view some are more likely to produce it than others.

The history of political thought has been a quest for the system of government that can create ‘good governance’.

But what is likely to produce ‘good governance’ can often be in the eye of the beholder.

What should be the controlling influence over the direction government should take? Should it be one, a few or everyone?

Should the strongest person be in charge or those with wealth or should there be a balance between the weak and strong, between those with money and those with less?

 

Balbus,

The U.S. was not formed as a Democracy, nor a Socialist form of government which is not to say that Democracy has no part, but it was formed as a Republic, comprised of 50 individual and sovereign States with government empowered by the consent of the people.
Currently a growing number of people are beginning to become aware of the problems we are facing due to the gradual shift leftwards over the past century, which will only worsen at a more rapid pace without making the necessary corrections.

Greece, Spain, Portugal, and England along with the other EU countries are welcome to fail if they wish, but don't try to bring down the U.S. along with you.

 

Indie

As I’ve pointed out and explained several times the problems been faced at the moment are all down to the silly neo-liberal ideas that have been dominanting politics for the last 30 years or so.

Try reading – Age of Greed: The triumph of finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick


Here is a review -

Suppose we describe the following situation: major US financial institutions have badly overreached. They created and sold new financial instruments without understanding the risk. They poured money into dubious loans in pursuit of short-term profits, dismissing clear warnings that the borrowers might not be able to repay those loans. When things went bad, they turned to the government for help, relying on emergency aid and federal guarantees—thereby putting large amounts of taxpayer money at risk—in order to get by. And then, once the crisis was past, they went right back to denouncing big government, and resumed the very practices that created the crisis.
What year are we talking about?
We could, of course, be talking about 2008–2009, when Citigroup, Bank of America, and other institutions teetered on the brink of collapse, and were saved only by huge infusions of taxpayer cash. The bankers have repaid that support by declaring piously that it’s time to stop “banker-bashing,” and complaining that President Obama’s (very) occasional mentions of Wall Street’s role in the crisis are hurting their feelings.
But we could also be talking about 1991, when the consequences of vast, loan-financed overbuilding of commercial real estate in the 1980s came home to roost, helping to cause the collapse of the junk-bond market and putting many banks—Citibank, in particular—at risk. Only the fact that bank deposits were federally insured averted a major crisis. Or we could be talking about 1982–1983, when reckless lending to Latin America ended in a severe debt crisis that put major banks such as, well, Citibank at risk, and only huge official lending to Mexico, Brazil, and other debtors held an even deeper crisis at bay. Or we could be talking about the near crisis caused by the bankruptcy of Penn Central in 1970, which put its lead banker, First National City—later renamed Citibank—on the edge; only emergency lending from the Federal Reserve averted disaster.
You get the picture. The great financial crisis of 2008–2009, whose consequences still blight our economy, is sometimes portrayed as a “black swan” or a “100-year flood”—that is, as an extraordinary event that nobody could have predicted. But it was, in fact, just the most recent installment in a recurrent pattern of financial overreach, taxpayer bailout, and subsequent Wall Street ingratitude. And all indications are that the pattern is set to continue.
Jeff Madrick’s Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present is an attempt to chronicle the emergence and persistence of this pattern. It’s not an analytical work, which, as we’ll explain later, sometimes makes the book frustrating reading. Instead, it’s a series of vignettes—and these vignettes are both fascinating and, taken as a group, deeply disturbing. For they suggest not just that we’re seeing a repeating cycle, but that the busts keep getting bigger. And since it seems that nothing was learned from the 2008 crisis, you have to wonder just how bad the next one will be.
The first thing you need to know about the cycle of financial overreach, crisis, and bailout is that it was not always thus. The United States emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated financial sector, and for about forty years those regulations were enough to keep banking both safe and boring. And for a while—with memories of the bank failures of the 1930s still fresh—most people liked it that way. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, however, both the political consensus in favor of boring banking and the structure of regulations that kept banking safe unraveled. The first half of Age of Greed describes how this happened through a series of personal profiles.
To some extent Madrick covers familiar ground here. He recounts the economic turmoil of the 1970s, as the country was caught in the grip of stagflation. And as he points out, Nixon and Ford—like today’s Republicans—blamed the economy’s troubles not on the true culprits but on big government. Madrick stresses a key point that is often forgotten or misunderstood to this day: the surging inflation of the 1970s had its roots not in some general problem of “big government” but in largely temporary events—the oil price shock and disappointing crop yields—whose effects were magnified throughout the economy by wage-price indexation. Yet constant policy shifts by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve (remember wage-price controls?) under Nixon, Ford, and Carter, Madrick argues, made the American public lose faith in government effectiveness, creating within it a ready acceptance of the antigovernment messages of Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan.
While we believe that there were deeper reasons for Reagan’s rise, Madrick is right that the economic malaise of the 1970s gave Reagan his big opening. As Madrick describes, Reagan’s enormous capacity for doublethink and convenient untruths enabled him, the front man for business interests, to convince a credulous public that “government had become the principal obstacle to their personal fulfillment.” In possibly the best chapter of the book, Madrick recounts the irony of how Reagan, the great moralizer, made unchecked greed and runaway individualism not only acceptable, but lauded, in the American psyche.
Madrick also does an especially persuasive job of demythologizing Milton Friedman, who provided intellectual heft for the antigovernment movement. As Madrick points out, although Friedman offered some important economic insights, he often shoehorned real-life data to fit into a one-sided narrative, gaining his theories wider acceptance than was ultimately justified. And Friedman, like Reagan, preferred “overly simple assertions of free market claims,” discarding the caveats.
In Friedman’s worldview, free markets were the solution to practically every problem—health care, product safety, bank regulation, financial speculation, and so on. And Friedman squarely blamed government for the Great Depression, a view that is at odds with the data. (Although it is almost certainly true that mistakes by the Fed made the situation worse.) As Madrick quotes him, “The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government management rather than by inherent instability of the private economy.” Replace “Great Depression” with “the financial crisis and its aftermath,” and it could be John Boehner today, rather than Friedman in 1962, speaking these words. Like Reagan, Friedman proclaimed a creed of greedism (our term)—that unchecked self-interest furthers the common good.
While 1970s inflation undermined confidence in government economic management and catapulted Friedman to fame, it also undermined the New Deal constraints on financial institutions by making it impossible to maintain limits on interest rates on customer deposits. To tell this part of the story, Madrick turns to an often-neglected figure: Walter Wriston, who ran First National City/Citibank from the 1960s into the 1980s. These days Wriston is best known among economists for his famous quote dismissing sovereign risk: “Countries don’t go out of business.”
But as Madrick documents, there was much more to Wriston’s career than his misjudgment of the risks involved in lending to national governments. More than anyone else, he epitomized the transformation of banking from cautious supporter of industry to freewheeling independent profit center, creator of crises, and recurrent recipient of taxpayer bailouts. As Madrick deftly points out, “Wriston lived a free market charade,” strongly opposing the federal bailouts of Chrysler (1978) and Continental Illinois (1984) while his own back was saved multiple times by government intervention.
The transformation of American banking initiated by Wriston arguably began as early as 1961, when First National City began offering negotiable certificates of deposit—CDs that could be cashed in early, and therefore served as an alternative to regular bank deposits, while sidestepping legal limits on interest rates. First National City’s innovation—and the decision of regulators to let it stand—marked the first major crack in the system of bank regulation created in the 1930s, and hence arguably the first step on the road to the crisis of 2008.
Wriston entered the history books again through his prominent part in creating the late-1970s boom in lending to Latin American governments, a boom that strongly prefigured the subprime boom a generation later. Thus Wriston’s dismissal of the risks involved in lending to governments would be echoed in the 2000s by assertions, like those of Alan Greenspan, that a “national severe price distortion”—i.e., a housing bubble that would burst—”seems most unlikely.” Bankers failed to consider the possibility that all of the debtor nations would experience simultaneous problems—Madrick quotes the head of J.P. Morgan saying: “We had set limits, long and short, on each country. We didn’t look at the whole.” And in so doing they prefigured the utter misjudgment of risks on mortgage-backed securities, which were considered safe because it was deemed unlikely that many mortgages would go bad at the same time.
When the loans to Latin American governments went bad, Citi and other banks were rescued via a program that was billed as aid to troubled debtor nations but was in fact largely aimed at helping US and European banks. In that sense the program for Latin America in the 1980s bore a strong family resemblance to what is happening to Europe’s peripheral economies now. Large official loans were provided to debtor nations, not to help them recover economically, but to help them repay their private-sector creditors. In effect, it looked like a country bailout, but it was really an indirect bank bailout. And the banks did indeed weather the storm. But the loans came with a price, namely harsh austerity programs imposed on debtor nations—and in Latin America, the price of this austerity was a lost decade of falling incomes and minimal growth.
This was, then, an enormous bank-led crisis—soon followed by the savings and loan crisis, which Madrick treats only briefly, but which had a higher direct cost to taxpayers than even the current crisis. And the response of the political system to these crises was… to shower more favors on the financial industry, dismantling what was left of Depression-era regulation.
The second part of Madrick’s book surveys the wide-open, anything goes financial world that deregulation created. This was an era marked by two huge bubbles—the technology bubble of the 1990s and the housing bubble of the Bush years—both of which ended in grief, although the economic damage inflicted by the second bubble’s bursting was vastly greater.
Again, Madrick’s exposition takes the form of a series of personal vignettes. As in the first part of the book, some of these cover familiar ground. We learn about the career of Alan Greenspan and how he used his reputation as an economic guru—a reputation that in retrospect was entirely undeserved—to push his antigovernment, antiregulation ideology. We meet some of the architects of the 2008 crisis: Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial Services, Jimmy Caine of Bear Stearns, Dick Fuld of Lehman, Stan O’Neal of Merrill Lynch, and Chuck Prince of Citigroup (created by the merger of Travelers Insurance with—yet again—Citibank). Mozilo was the leading peddler of subprime and other risky mortgages, loans made to people who shouldn’t have been getting loans. The others were all involved in the process of slicing, dicing, and recombining these loans into supposedly safe financial instruments, AAA-rated investments that suddenly turned into waste paper when the housing bubble burst.
However, the real star is a figure who, if not exactly neglected, isn’t at the center of most crisis narratives: Sanford I.—Sandy—Weill. Weill’s personal rise paralleled the transformation of finance, as the genteel figures of the era of regulated, boring banking were replaced by aggressive outsiders. During the 1960s, old-school Wall Streeters mockingly referred to Weill’s brokerage—Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt—as Corned Beef with Lettuce. By 2000, however, the old Wall Street was gone, and the former outsiders were in charge. Weill, in particular, had masterminded the merger of Citibank and Travelers, and after a power struggle emerged as the new Citigroup’s CEO.
What was truly remarkable about that merger is that when Weill proposed it, it was clearly illegal. Salomon Smith Barney, a Travelers subsidiary, was engaged in investment banking, that is, putting together financial deals. And New Deal–era legislation—the Glass-Steagal Act—prohibited such activities on the part of commercial banks (deposit-taking institutions) like Citibank. But Weill believed that he could get the law changed to retroactively approve the merger, and he was right.
Almost immediately, the new financial behemoth was wrapped in scandal. Nowadays it’s common to treat the technology bubble of the 1990s and the housing bubble of the decade following as having been very different stories. And in financial terms they were quite different: the tech bubble didn’t lead to a dramatic rise in debt the way the housing bubble did, and as a result the bursting of the bubble didn’t cause major defaults and a run on the banking system. Yet Wall Street—and Wall Street corruption—played a crucial role in both bubbles, as Madrick reminds us in a chapter titled “Jack Grubman, Frank Quattrone, Ken Lay, and Sandy Weill: Decade of Deceit.” As Madrick points out, Grubman, an analyst at Salomon Smith Barney who was effectively on the take, was central to some of the biggest accounting frauds. And Weill ended his reign at Citigroup immensely rich but under an ethical cloud.
There are a lot of villains in this story—so many that by the end of the book we were, frankly, suffering from a bit of outrage fatigue. But why have villains triumphed so repeatedly?
The proximate answer, clearly, is the abdication of regulatory oversight. From junk bonds to derivatives to sub-prime mortgages, regulators either turned a blind eye or were impeded by business interests and politicians—Democrat as well as Republican. Undoubtedly the most outrageous act—and the most economically damaging to the country—was Greenspan’s refusal to use regulatory powers at his disposal to rein in the exploding sub-prime market, despite being warned repeatedly that a catastrophe was brewing. Like Reagan and Friedman, Greenspan firmly believed in greedism; in his view, the financial markets could do no wrong.
Yet if the problem was lack of oversight, that leads to another question: Why did the regulators abdicate—and keep abdicating despite repeated financial disasters? This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Madrick’s otherwise excellent book: we get a lot of the what, but not much of the why. Madrick’s character-centered narrative makes it seem as if the triumph of greed was the result of a series of contingent events: the inflation of the 1970s, the exploitation of that inflation by Reagan and Friedman, the wheeling and dealing of the likes of Sandy Weill, and the diffidence of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Yet surely there must have been deeper forces at work.
We have argued elsewhere (and are not unique in doing so) that white backlash—especially Southern white backlash—against the civil rights movement transformed American politics, creating the opportunity for a major push to undermine the New Deal. Also, it’s hard to make sense of the growing ability of bankers to get the rules rewritten in their favor without talking about the role of money in politics, and how that role has metastasized over the past thirty years. There’s another book to be written here—perhaps less personality-centered and hence less entertaining than Madrick’s, but one that gets at the forces that made the reign of financial villains possible.
Whatever the deeper story, however, Madrick’s subtitle gets it right: what we have experienced is, in a very real sense, the triumph of Wall Street and the decline of America. Despite what some academics (primarily in business schools) claimed, the vast sums of money channeled through Wall Street did not improve America’s productive capacity by “efficiently allocating capital to its best use.” Instead, it diminished the country’s productivity by directing capital on the basis of financial chicanery, outrageous compensation packages, and bubble-infected stock price valuations.
And what has happened in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 crisis is still worse: all the evidence suggests that the United States is on track to spending the better part of a decade experiencing high unemployment and sub-par growth blighting millions of lives—particularly the old, the young, and the economically vulnerable.
Yet even now we don’t seem to have learned the lesson that unregulated greed, especially in the financial sector, is destructive. True, most Democrats are now in favor of stronger financial regulation—although not as strongly as is required by the continuing manipulations by large financial institutions. But today’s Republicans remain firmly attached to greedism. In their view, it’s still government that’s the problem. It has now become orthodoxy on the right—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not Angelo Mozilo and Countrywide Credit, are to blame for the subprime mess. While proclaiming themselves defenders of the little guy, Republicans are currently hard at work undermining the Obama administration’s consumer protections that would largely prevent a replay of rapacious subprime lending.
The Age of Greed is a fascinating and deeply disturbing tale of hypocrisy, corruption, and insatiable greed. But more than that, it’s a much-needed reminder of just how we got into the mess we’re in—a reminder that is greatly needed when we are still being told that greed is good.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/busts-keep-getting-bigger-why/

 

Balbus,

I don't have a problem with greed, but government attempts to manage it, I do.

 

Why?

 

here in germany we have no political party i would trust in. maybe the socialist communist but then communism is just a rothschild way of manipulating people...

 

I don't vote with any party. I'm a libertarian-leaning unaffiliated voter. There usually isn't anyone for me to vote for, not even Libertarian Party candidates since most of them are pro-choice and I'm not.

 

my first choice is green. my second is democrat. that's because i live in the u.s.

like many, i don't vote party line however, and i'll vote for any member of any party if i think they'll do the better job where the things that interest me are concerned.

i'm more interested in issues then personalities, and the more directly i can vote on THEM the happier i will be. representation is mostly nonsense. and the political game often costs even the best intended their usefulness.