Agstar wrote: "This is all a result of consumate greed both individualy and collectively. There has to be a change in the ethic of the richer societies to redefine what is important and what individual self worth really is defined by."
Agstar's statement is more than a little vague, but I think he is blaming the problems we face today on the ethics of selfishness. Like so many commentators, he thinks that the investors who set up and financed highly leveraged derivatives, sub-prime loans and so on were motivated by selfishness.
On the contrary, the economy is declining today because we are involved in an unprecedented orgy of selflessness. The Federal Reserve, along with virtually every other central bank, set about several years ago to prime the monetary pumps with phoney credit, giving impetus to what we now recognize to have been little more than Ponzi schemes. Large numbers of investors selflessly put vast sums of capital at dire risk in order to gamble in the casino that the central banks had set up. Some made money, but most lost badly.
In a free market, these investors would be left to face the consequences of their own stupidity. But because our society is motivated by the ethics of selflessness, those who made sound investment decisions and who wisely refused to participate in these Ponzi schemes are now being taxed to pay for the mistakes of others.
While it is unfortunate that so many people are losing their jobs as a result of the chaos brought about by the socialization of investment, those job losses are not the fault of taxpayers in general.
The proper response to this crisis would be to let these banks and financial entities go broke; their assets could then be bought up at a discount by people who are actually competent to run them. This would be the ethics of selfishness in action.
These protesters in Europe are largely led by trade unionists, socialists and communists, who steadfastly blame capitalism for this crisis instead of socialist central banking. Rather than cut this crisis off before it balloons, they want to expand it. They don't see anything truly wrong with using force to dole out subsidies and special privileges; the problem as they see it is that the handouts are not being spread about widely enough and "fairly" enough. They believe that the solution is for competent investors to be taxed into oblivion to bail out unwise investors and keep that hallmark of selflessness and sacrifice, the welfare state, functioning at all costs.
Agstar's statement is more than a little vague, but I think he is blaming the problems we face today on the ethics of selfishness. Like so many commentators, he thinks that the investors who set up and financed highly leveraged derivatives, sub-prime loans and so on were motivated by selfishness.
On the contrary, the economy is declining today because we are involved in an unprecedented orgy of selflessness. The Federal Reserve, along with virtually every other central bank, set about several years ago to prime the monetary pumps with phoney credit, giving impetus to what we now recognize to have been little more than Ponzi schemes. Large numbers of investors selflessly put vast sums of capital at dire risk in order to gamble in the casino that the central banks had set up. Some made money, but most lost badly.
In a free market, these investors would be left to face the consequences of their own stupidity. But because our society is motivated by the ethics of selflessness, those who made sound investment decisions and who wisely refused to participate in these Ponzi schemes are now being taxed to pay for the mistakes of others.
While it is unfortunate that so many people are losing their jobs as a result of the chaos brought about by the socialization of investment, those job losses are not the fault of taxpayers in general.
The proper response to this crisis would be to let these banks and financial entities go broke; their assets could then be bought up at a discount by people who are actually competent to run them. This would be the ethics of selfishness in action.
These protesters in Europe are largely led by trade unionists, socialists and communists, who steadfastly blame capitalism for this crisis instead of socialist central banking. Rather than cut this crisis off before it balloons, they want to expand it. They don't see anything truly wrong with using force to dole out subsidies and special privileges; the problem as they see it is that the handouts are not being spread about widely enough and "fairly" enough. They believe that the solution is for competent investors to be taxed into oblivion to bail out unwise investors and keep that hallmark of selflessness and sacrifice, the welfare state, functioning at all costs.
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