10 hours ago, evildictait​or wrote
Capitalism is great. It's just unregulated capitalism that sucks.
You can't have capitalism with regulations, protecting some at the expense of others. What you end up with is a socialist system run by government. Forcing bankers to loan to non credit worthy people, FED lending money for free, politicians thinking they should 'save' the economy, etc. etc. etc.
But keep pretending we have capitalism and that all the problems we have do not arise from government, but from the failure of capitalism.
The only regulation you need is protecting ones freedom.
Solving the problem of "capitalism doesn't always work in societies interests" by simply saying "society should drop those principles" doesn't work in more extreme cases.
What problem of capitalism?
If society doesn't want a thing, they should stop buying it!
It's the ultimate democracy, you get a vote with each dollar and not once every four years.
For example, I could argue the same about assinations. Worried that criminals are killing each other for money? Let's legalize and tax it. Worried that terrorists might be buying nuclear material to blow the crap out of New York? Well at least this way the terrorists will have to pay VAT on that nuclear bomb.
That's another appeal to ridicule. I'm for a set of basic rights. You do not have the right to kill, never.
You keep making up these ridiculous scenario's, don't you have normal examples to prove your case?
Some activities are just too extreme for society to just bring within the confines of capitalism. Sometimes things must be illegal - whether it be as extreme as flying planes into buildings and setting off bombs in market places, to slavery, forced prostitution and selling children.
What does terrorists building bombs have to do with capitalism?
They will build bombs, rape women and kill people if we have communism, capitalism, or any kind of ism.
This is another guilt by association fallacy. The one has nothing to do with the other.
I would argue that if you have a magic box that whenever you press the red button you get a bonus, and that bonus is paid by the taxpayer, then it should be illegal to press that button. Whether it be embezzlement by an official, or applying risk to non-invested ordinary accounts, it should not be legal to deliberately and fraudulently bring the nation to its knees by paying yourself bonuses that you know will eventually be paid by the taxpayer in the form of a bailout.
Yeah, write a law that prohibits you from pressing that button.
Clearly the better solution is to take away the box.
But you go ahead, place a sign next to the button saying, don't press.
Rather than making the bonuses illegal (as some would like), or taking the magic box away (i.e. forced splitting of the banks as others would like), I think that they simply shouldn't be allowed to profit from applying risk to non-invested guaranteed ordinary accounts.
If you leave them alone with the magic box and tell them to continue as usual, they'll keep pressing the magic button, and sooner or later we'll have to bail them out again.
Like I said, remove the power from government to create the box in the first place.
People will press that button, regardless of the signs or warning labels. You can't plan people, it's time you realized that.
And as I've said over twenty times in this thread now, the things the government are regulating (that you see as the government stopping you doing something) can also be seen as the government protecting the person you're going to do it against.
I'm not forced to trade with the bank, so it's my own free choice. I'm not hurting anyone else then myself if things go wrong, so no need for the government to step in at all.
But if you want a safety net because you think people are to dumb, then that's exactly what you end up with. Risky investments, customers not caring, banks not caring and tax payers bailing the system out.
All the facts say that people will press that button, regardless of how many signs you put next to them.
Again, you can't plan people.
In order to stop someone forcing you into a grave by shooting you in the face, they have to legislate against someone else's "right" to do so.
Again, nonsense. Where I am arguing that I have the right to shoot anyone in the face?
In order to stop someone blowing a 20-mile crater into New York, they have to legislate against a jihadist's "right" to buy nuclear weapons.
In order to protect the public's right to not pay $20,000 in bailout money each to Wall Street, perhaps we should legislate to prevent another bailout (note: NOT legislate to prevent them going bust. Just legislate so that when they go bust, we won't have to bail them out).
Yeah nuclear arsenal solely in the hands of government, good idea!
Go ask the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki how they feel about that!
Again, you want to prevent symptoms rather then create a better system.
I suppose we could just state this another way. Because the bankers were allowed to apply risk to ordinary citizen's non-invested savings accounts, yielding massive profits for the bankers which they paid to each other in bonuses, you, Maddus, must pay $20,000 to the financial sector in bailouts.
I wish they only risked the consumer savings. Then we could solve this mess.
The problem is, that the FED lent out money covered by bonds at 0.5% to Wall street.
Normal savings are way to expensive to invest so risky,.
Of course the reap massive profits, we gave them money for free!
You might pay this money TO the government, but it goes immediately TO the bankers via the bailout. Money is fungible, so this is EXACTLY EQUIVALENT to you just writing them a cheque directly.
Exactly my point! Why pay the man, if he does stupid things with it!
So far from working for 4 months for the government, you're actually working for 2 months in return for the government building roads and policing your streets, defending borders, managing visa applications and educating your children and stopping someone from robbing your house.
And people on trains? They are paying for those roads as well, but might never need them.
People should pay for what they use.
And if the private sector was responsible for the roads, I would only have to work one month for them instead of two.
And then you work the next two months for free to pay off all of the debt to pay for all of the banker's bonuses and share options that they've been paying themselves for the last decade. You get nothing in return for those two months.
Oh I agree, I want to stop paying for that. But regulation prohibits me.
It seems to me that what you're arguing is that the government should, rather than mistakenly looking the wrong way when banks are doing misdeeds (which is the kindest thing you could say about the current bailout), DELIBERATELY looking the wrong way when it comes to the next one.
Money that isn't spend regulating the market is money spent bailing it out next time it goes bust. Because unless the non-invested savings and income of ordinary citizens are put out of reach of bankers, they will screw us over time-and-time-again and the government will have to just keep bailing them out.
Not at all.
I'm arguing that no one should pay to save a bank. And that we should not tell the banks how to run their business. That's the trade off.
In order for them to act responsibly, they should have responsibility. If you take away their responsibility, they will act irresponsible. Like we are seeing right now.
The crisis we are in, was not created by banks. It was created by government trying to prevent a market collapse. Which is folly, because markets fail all the time. It's nothing new, nothing to be scared off. Take your losses and build a better market in it's place. This is how we evolve the market.
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