And I'd agree with that statement. It's just not personified in someone who gave over 99% of her multi billion dollar estate to charity.
Fair share! HA! why are you en led to somebody else's wealth. From what moral premise? ing about the rich's gadgets is not a premise.
You have no moral ground to backup your argument. So now you think the govt should be in the buisiness on how you should spend your wealth? By what right?
Last edited by Ignignokt; 07-18-2011 at 12:11 PM.
And the poor are protected from your internet rhetorical guardianship. Pat yourself on the back.
And how do the lobbyist do that?
1. Complicating the tax code in their favor
2. Passing progressive regulation that benefits their own private interest.
So, in essence. The programs you advocate to keep empower the endless cycle.
Last edited by Ignignokt; 07-18-2011 at 12:14 PM.
Nah, I don't do much for them -- definitely not as much as you for the rich, you brave class warrior.
brilliant posting
They do it by passing programs that benefit themselves and by shooting down legislation that doesn't. The banking sector being deregulated to dangerous levels is progressive how? The criminalization of drugs like marijuana and the lobby for harsh prison terms for drug violators is progressive? I could go on for days.
Regulations cause more problems for govt to fix. You wouldn't need Glass Steagull if interest rates were set by a truly free market. You would have bad consequences yes, but they would easily be liquidated and then the public wouldn't purchase them. THe fact that the govt artificially kept interest rates low excacerbated the risk of bad buisiness practice.
Fact is too, that the progressive movement started with prohibition of drugs. So yeah, i support repealing all drug laws.
taxes are already historically low, but that's doing nothing for getting the economy going
"Income-tax receipts are down sharply since the Bush tax cuts. In fiscal 2000, the year before the cuts began to take effect, receipts from the federal income tax on individuals amounted to 10.2 percent of GDP. That figure was down to 6.2 percent of GDP last year.
Spending for the military and for homeland security has risen substantially since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Spending for national defense rose from 3.0 percent of GDP that year to 4.8 percent last year."
http://factcheck.org/2011/07/fiscal-factcheck/
CBS Poll: 71% shun GOP handling of debt crisis
with a new CBS News poll showing a majority disapprove of all the involved parties' conduct, but Republicans in Congress fare the worst, with just 21 percent backing their intransigent resistance to raising taxes.
Even half of the Republican respondents (51 percent) voiced disapproval of how members of their own party in Congress are handling the talks.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/0...28Daily+Kos%29
U.S. Government Receipts as Percent of GDP
=======
Low taxes does not equal anything but deficits, not economic growth. The beast is starved, now the Repugs, pledged to Norquist to NEVER raise taxes, want to drown it in a bathtub.
Never said I was. I just asked you what you thought would be fair. You don't do very well with direct questions but I knew that already and you just keep proving it.
Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999, and didn't have anything to do with how the free market sets interest rates. "Bad consequences" in this case was that its repeal effectively let investment banks play craps with their depositors money with the mortgage crisis as one of the direct results.
Government isn't *the* solution to everything, but then neither is the "free market", whatever that means.
Large corporations wield immense power and groups of large corporations even more so. What I find funny is that the same people who rail against "government overreach" think nothing when large corporations and groups of corporations do things that shock the conscience.
People that worship the free market seem to always miss that no market, even if one were to strip away all regulation, would be truly "free", and still subject to all sorts of information assymetries that distort markets as much, if not more, than any government interference.
Personally, I am not one to want to rush back to the Guilded Age.
Ponzi schemes are only ok when Bernie Madoff runs them...
He'da gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those meddling government regulators!Ponzi schemes are only ok when Bernie Madoff runs them...
If the "truly free market" actually worked in any type of regulation then federal regulations would be redundant. We've seen thats not the case at all. Sure, corporations can buy the federal government at this time but pointing that out in favor of eliminating regulation doesn't solve the issue it just makes it easier for corporations and lobbyists to work the system in their favor.
That's not free market capitalism. But that problem you posed can be easily eliminated by taking away the legal definition of personhood from corporations.
You have no understanding of free markets. You assume there wouldn't be any way to punish ethics violations. Also, the point is not that Glass Steagall has rules regarding Fed Interest rates, but that Federal controlled interest rates worsened those effects. THe feds encouraged more debt lending by lowering the fed interest rates rather than letting the market set them. If the market set the interest rates based on economic performance, we've would have likely had the bubble come sooner, it would have been shorter, and the effects not as damning, considering that the Fed had to lower interest rates even tho the market was demanding them to be raised.If you can't understand this, i can't help you.
Last edited by Ignignokt; 07-18-2011 at 08:32 PM.
We've never had truly free markets anyway. The US from it's inception issued trade tarrifs and other regulations. So your point is moot.
Some of you guys keep arguing a strawman anyway. When statements like, "well we saw how the free markets did in this case.. hah ha", you're discrediting mercantillism, not laissez faire capitalism
I don't disagree with your take on this, but 'easily eliminated' is easier said than done. Ultimately, politics is played with money. That's the bottom line, and the reason more and more the red and blue team are only 'different' in talk only.
Have there ever been a state that did not? Otherwise we're just talking unrealistic wishful thinking. By most standard measures, the US has historically been the closest you're going to get to ideal free-market in this planet.
There's no such thing as 'laissez faire capitalism' in the real world. There's a degree of compe ion, but the reality is that the big players that eventually come out on top, will do whatever it takes to avoid competing in the long run, and prefer monopolizing, price-fixing, dumping, buy-outs, and every other strategy in the book (barring govt regulation that prevent those practices) to minimize compe ion exposure and retain their market leadership. It's in their best interest (and shareholder's interests obviously) to do so. Minimizing risk is always atop the priority list, and compe ion is a always risky proposition.
The free market has it's place. Government regulation has it's place too.
I think a much better argument would be that govt regulation is sometimes overrreaching, and you probably have a point there.
Agreed. We know it's all bad for us now, so let's have a little more freedom.
The cartel price fixing examples you provided have already happened in the 19th century, but the market penalized those..Cartels are generally viewed as evil, destructive schemes because they are overt attempts by a group of businesses to increase revenues by raising consumers’ prices across an industry. In and of itself, however, seeking higher prices for one’s products is not evil; it is good. The problem with cartels is not that they seek higher profits, but that they shortsightedly attempt to generate them by non-productive means. So long as the economic freedom to offer competing or subs ute products exists—as should be the case—such a scheme is bound to fail.
Cartels are more accurately viewed as ineffectual than evil. Cutting off supply in order to effect higher profits rewards those who do not participate in the scheme (as well as cheaters within the cartel) with the opportunity to sell more of their own products at inflated prices. And to attempt a cartel is to invite a boycott and long-term alienation from one’s customers. These truths were borne out by both the South Improvement Company (SIC) scheme and the Pittsburgh Plan.
The Pennsylvania Railroad and its infamous leader, Tom Scott, a master manipulator of the Pennsylvania legislature, initiated the South Improvement Company cartel. Railroads, like oil refiners, were struggling financially; they too had overbuilt given the market. Having less traffic than they had anticipated, they sought to solve the problem by charging above-market prices. Here is the essence of their plan: The railroads would more than double the rates for everyone outside the cartel, including oil producers, to either bring all refiners into the SIC or drive them out of business. In turn, SIC refiners, which could cons ute virtually all the refiners on the market, would impose strict limits on their output in order to raise prices. It seemed to be a “win-win” plan: The railroads would get higher rates and more revenue, and SIC refiners would raise prices and start profiting again.
This whole scheme, however, was delusional. For one, it presumed that the oil producers would accept catastrophic rate increases. They did not.
The oil producers—who were also the railroads’ consumers and the refineries’ suppliers—retaliated by placing an embargo on refineries associated with the South Improvement Company. The proposed rate increases were so dramatic and arbitrary that producers were strongly committed to the embargo—and it worked, cutting off Standard’s operations while benefiting those who did not participate. Writes Charles Morris in The Tycoons, “By early March, [1872] the Standard was effectively out of business, and up to 5,000 Cleveland refinery workers were laid off. . . . [In early April] the triumphant producers announced the end of their embargo.”51 The South Improvement Company never collected a rebate.
So much for Standard’s and the SIC’s “monopoly power.”
The other cartel in which Standard participated, the Pittsburgh Plan, was an agreement between oil producers and refiners to inflate their respective prices. While the 1870s began with high crude prices due to low crude supply and excess refinery capacity, a series of gushers soon reduced the price of crude to about $3.50 a barrel. Oil producers wanted to reverse this trend. Again, the idea was to artificially restrict production, raise prices, and reap the profits while compe ors and consumers idly complied. The participants agreed that refiners would buy oil at the premium price of $5 a barrel (in some cases $4) so long as the producers substantially limited their production. Refineries, also, would limit production to raise their prices. The deal was wildly illogical; part of it stipulated that producers in the Oil Regions would simply cease new drilling for six months.
The plan dissolved in short order. Producers outside the cartel did not play their role of not trying to make a profit; instead, they expanded their production to make money—as did cartel members once this started happening. Prices fell—indeed, they fell immediately to the market rate, $3.25; within two months, following more crude discoveries, prices fell again, down to $2.52
Historians try to outdo one another in denouncing the oil cartels as immoral. But given the desperation of many in the industry, and the relatively primitive understanding of how such arrangements pan out, it is more valuable to learn from the incidents, to gain a better understanding of the nature of cartels and other attempts to control markets under economic freedom.
http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/...il-company.asp
for any of you that are contentious. The source also lists scholarly sources if you care to verify.
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