By the way, why the fuck is there any Google specific code in anything that is used in a browser?
Microsoft specific code is not OK, but Google specific code is just fine?
Ok, let's do blue specific code. I want code that is specific to blue. I like the colour blue, so I want code that is very specific to that colour, so that the colour has special privileges and execution strategies and tags that are only available for things that are blue.
There were lots of people who did things before "business creators" came along.
- smiths, sure, one off masters. Not people who give massive amounts of wealth to the society and thus make huge profits for themselves as well, because they can only benefit a few people as they have to hand craft all of their creations.
You want to return to that, so that again, only the wealthy can afford seemingly simple things like bath tubs, pianos, fancy food (that you can buy today in any store), any electronics at all, cars.
Yes, let's go back to people making things by hand on demand, that will take prices down and create maximum prosperity.... oh, wait, tens of thousands of years of THAT only allowed the wealthiest to enjoy all those products (that could be even created in that type of a society, where you had to make your own tools to build your own products).
Right, you are complaining that business creators are not business creators while in the same exact sentence making their case for them by showing that without them only few people will be able to afford anything and that there would be much less choice in the first place.
I am talking about people who fund and start their own businesses, just because you don't know any personally doesn't change the fact that there are people who take their own savings and start their own businesses in an attempt to grow their own investment capital.
Of-course I am also talking about people who participate in other people's businesses by providing the necessary capital to start/run/grow business.
What is so complicated to understand? 99.999% of people who are working for somebody else, building things with tools given to them by somebody else, using various materials brought to them by somebody else, they would NOT be making things by hand and selling them to you one at a time without investors, without people who build businesses.
A person can START a company by doing things by hand and eventually GROW it if he is successful and become his own business creator, an owner who starts expanding because his products are in demand and he hires more people.
The Marxist over there, who is arguing with me in this thread is saying that a person that does that is a 'leech' taking from others, while in reality without him there is no others, there is no economy, he builds that economy.
Management just for profit means destroying companies in the long term.
- management should be just for profit, companies exist to generate profit, if they don't, they should be liquidated.
The problem with HP and with so many other companies is that they are not for profit themselves, they are part of the financial shell game played by government money printers. What some call 'unsustainable growth expectation' really is an attempt at getting some profit above the real inflation rate and the real inflation rate is very high, so what do you expect a company to do to cover the costs, including all the costs increases due to inflation and to generate profit on the investment that covers inflation and provides some form of a return that is at least somewhat meaningful (people expect at least 5-6% on their return above inflation).
So if inflation rates are really at the minimum between 5% and 10%, then you have to look for a minimum of 10% to 16% profit margin a year to provide a real return of 5-6%
Except for that obviously the entire shenanigans that the governments are engaged in with the death taxes create a long term impossible situation for a company to be managed with a long term vision.
What long term vision is there for a company that really doesn't have an actual owner? Death taxes cause people to liquidate to pay the taxes (or to find ways to avoid paying taxes) and so even the original creators of the business are not long term oriented, they want to build something and to get rid of it as quickly as they can get a good enough offer. Who comes up with good enough offers? Large conglomerates do, funds of some sort. Are they there for the long term business prospect of that particular business?
No, they are there to maximise efficiency, to use the company in any way at all to make more money, and that's FINE, but it doesn't allow a company to have a long term future.
So as always, death and taxes (and inflation) is what causes companies not to be managed by people who care about that particular business. The kids of the original creators don't manage it.
OTOH look at Walmart. Sam was able to leave his company to his kids without having to liquidate most of it somehow, so his family is running it and quite profitably.
The moral hazard argument has been made (repeatedly) elsewhere in the thread, tacking it on as a response to a post about different claims to which it is irrelevant is pointless.
- what are you trying to say?
The only way that FDIC matters as the moral hazard is because it creates a false sense of security in depositors. What other way is FDIC a moral hazard?
Here is a comment I left probably at the minimum a year ago (/. doesn't tell you the year of a comment for some reason). It explains in which way FDIC is a moral hazard and links to a Congressional hearing on the matter.
FDIC created the 'too big to fail' problem by providing the moral hazard to the depositors.
FDIC does not have any assets, the 25 Billion has to be sold first, those are not assets, that's debt. When a large bank crashes (and takes others with it), good luck to FDIC trying to sell 25 Billion in long term US Treasuries.
It will be competing with everybody else trying to sell the same, it will be competing with the Treasury and likely the Fed at the same time as well. There are no 25 Billion.
Saying that something is an asset to FDIC and a liability to the Treasury, sure, 2 hands, the same body. You can move your IOU from one hand to the other, it won't help you to make that thing that you move from one hand to the other real.
It's the same nonsense argument they make talking about 'independent Fed'. Independent, ha? As if it ever failed to monetise any amount of debt that the gov't produces.
Depositors and banks aren't the same thing. A bank bailout would almost certainly be an action
- it's the same thing from POV of moral hazard.
The depositors, creditors to the bank don't care about the soundness of a bank as long as the gov't promises to bail them out. They don't care if the money comes from FDIC or the Fed or Treasury or the bank itself.
It's the bank that is getting bailed out when depositors get their FDIC money, the bank stays in business. In an actual free market there is no gov't bail out, there are no gov't covered deposits. A bank can have insurance and that's what would cover some of the deposits, but most importantly it's the reserve that the bank would have to hold to insure itself against a run.
Having gov't money being poured at a bank to cover the deposits is not there for the purposes of depositors, it's there for the purposes of keeping the bank afloat even when it is supposed to drown. FDIC wasn't created to provide deposit insurance it was created to provide moral hazard so that the banks that should have failed at the time would not fail because of this non-existing artificial 'insurance'.
It all comes down to the Fed, who will print any amount of money to cover any and all losses to the banks and to the depositors. Nominal losses. You clearly can't understand that USA gov't and every US bank is broke, it all comes down to the printing of money.
Yes, that's the reason FDIC is a moral hazard, it 'insures' deposits. It's a moral hazard that created the too big to fail problem in the first place by giving people false sense of security, so that they wouldn't care what the banks did with their money.
As to the FDIC 'assets' being 25 Billion in debt, and being a liability and asset at the same time (it's a wash), clearly you don't understand that FDIC doesn't exist at all, they have nothing. There are no assets, even those 25 Billion are not assets, they are a liability, yes, to the Treasury. However that's not what the FDIC will be relying on to bail out banks (depositors). The Fed, it all comes down to the Fed.
The money will be created out of thin air. The 25 Billion or no 25 Billion, it's an irrelevant amount even if it was actual gold when things come crushing down and they will.
Yes, it's rent seeking. It's getting paid for doing no work, merely owning something. This is not productive behavior.
- again, you are 100% wrong. Rent seeking involves using a government power to force some type of a monopoly or otherwise artificial relationship between some form of wealth that was already produced and somebody, who has enough power to draw some type of income from that wealth.
You are trying to redefine work as rent seeking, it's sick. A person's work is reflected in his savings, he can lend his savings productively to a person seeking this arrangement in order to grow his business.
A person with savings can use his savings to start a business as well, so his savings act as the initial capital.
Calling productive work 'rent seeking', which has a very clearly defined meaning of using government power to draw some form of income from wealth that had nothing to do with the seeker is sick.
You are a sick person, that's all, and it's obvious from all of your comments, and obviously from the last statement in your last comment (which completely confirms my assertion that you believe that profit is evil).
This bit:
Not at all. Profiting from your own labor is a great thing. Profiting from someone elses labor (capitalism) is evil.
- capitalism. Private ownership and operation of property is 'evil' in your estimation.
Well, given the moderation of this thread and your comments in particular, at least we know where/. stands on this issue.
As I said earlier, I am going to enjoy watching this go down in flames, and when I say 'this', I mean the socialist welfare state.
History shows that today the many are stealing from the few, it's somewhat a different system than 1000 years ago, but it is collapsing luckily now that the few do no longer want to be stolen from.
Let me put it this way, whenever I hear words: social justice, I know immediately who is on the opposite side of the argument, and it's not pretty, it's theft and murder, with a crudely drawn smile on a wooden mask covering the bare teeth.
In a free market economy I can start a bank out of my garage without registering any licenses with anybody, without having to jump through hoops, without having to pay any guild money, any monopoly fees, without having to pay for any licenses at all to anybody.
I can just post a note on my garage that said: bank by roman_mir.
done.
Anybody is welcome to come in and deposit if they like what I show them because I will be trying to outcompete the next guy in the next garage.
What you call 'monopolies' that supposedly 'arise naturally' are nonsense. There are economies of scale that are extremely efficient at running their business and I want to buy services / products at the lowest possible prices, so I welcome any amount of competition and scale.
I do NOT welcome gov't coming to any business at all and telling it that it is too big and it has to be broken up, because in a free market a business becomes big when it does well by its customers, not by lobbying the politicians, that's because politicians have no power over businesses and over individuals and over money in a free market.
In fact USA was a free market economy and it didn't 'collapse within a month', it did extremely well to turn an agrarian afterthought of a country, a huge debtor into a first world manufacturer, exporter and creditor. Today that flag is carried by others, not by America.
As to externalities - that's precisely what governments create, they give a pass to people to socialise costs and privatise gains by promoting and defending externalities, by allowing certain well connected businesses to do what they want on public property (another oxymoron, there is no such thing as 'public property' , there is either private property or theft, nothing else).
So it is private property rights that have to be protected in order to ensure that there externalities are minimised, all that gov't does is creates externalities and creates moral hazards by setting various liability caps that invite abuse.
As to FDIC, FDIC and the Fed working in tandem is what created the problem of capital destruction in USA.
Of-course FDIC is completely responsible for the terrible misallocation of people's lending (deposits) all of which have gone to the banks that are propped up by FDIC, the moral hazard of which created the 'too big to fail' problem.
It's funny that you are accusing the free market of monopoly creation and in the same post you are defending FDIC, which is what allowed for the banking monopoly that created the too big to fail, I guess one has to be completely confused to have such a massive cognitive dissonance in one's head.
In a free market a bank run is possible and it happens, however it's a normal situation of weeding out bad businesses, bad decisions, shutting down failures, restructuring bad debts.
In what you have today, FDIC and the Fed created the monstrosity of a banking system, which only has one single function left at this point: maintain the status quo for the government, prop up government spending by laundering money from the Fed to the Treasury and allow a select few to pocket the gains in form of the difference between the Fed's discount window cost of fake credit and the Treasury yield.
Talk about externalities, socialising the costs and pocketing the profits.
The mental image of the economy and politics in your head is an abomination created by this corrupt system.
Oh, so only things that you didn't make belong to you, but things that you made do not belong to you? Interesting theory, it's good to know such high order thinkers visit/..
Do you understand what a loan is? I wonder if you understand what it is, I think you don't. I can loan money to a business that I start and I expect to get the money back and to have a return on it. If the business is failing to provide a return within certain time frame I am going to liquidate the business piece by piece and return some of my original investment.
Obviously I am going to fire all of the employees. Tell me, oh wise one, who pays the employees if the business is not being productive, it's not making a profit? Who pays the employees if business is losing money?
Should employees be re-imbursing the employer in case the business is losing money rather than making money? Do you think people who want to get hired want to share in the success of the business by ensuring they do a good job or do you think they want to share in the success of the business by putting their own money on line?
Do you know that people can today be part of business and make or lose money with it by loaning money to business (those are called bonds) and that's where the money comes out of to pay the employees? Do you know that if the management stops doing their work properly the business can croak much faster than if any individual employee slacks off?
Do you realise that employees are just cogs in a machine that the investors purchase pieces of / hire in order to become productive by adding actual value to the inputs of their business so that something of higher value than the total sum of all the inputs is produced at the end, something that the market desires and pays for?
You think the profits are evil I bet, completely not realising that without profits there are no motives at all to risk any amount of savings to start/invest in/run a company?
You think without specialisation created by the capitalist society you'd have a computer to type your nonsense on today? The networks that together constitute the Internet? The power needed to operate all of this? etc.etc.
Curious, how do you stay so obtuse, do you have to make a concerted effort or does it come naturally?
They cannot save for themselves. They cannot invest for themselves. They cannot start businesses for themselves. They cannot live without government stepping all over them.
"Wage slavery" is not a capitalism problem, it's not a free market problem, it's the exact opposite problem created by government - inflation, money price manipulation, regulations, taxes, all of this prevents people from saving on their own and doing their own thing not to be so called 'wage slaves'.
I am not talking about that of-course, I am actually talking about real slavery, where your labour is owned by the state and the state just decides to throw you some crumbs by not confiscating 100% of your productive output.
That's slavery.
"wage slavery?" AFAIC is a gov't created problem, nonsense otherwise.
The problem with that type of thinking is that you actually believe that in a free market society there will be no wealth created that in fact lifts people out of poverty and this is demonstrably not the case.
The fact is that USA lifted its people out of poverty exactly during the industrialisation, when the capitalism was done in a free market environment, all boats in fact were lifted. The problems that people experienced in the 19th century were caused by government, the Civil war and the attempts to introduce paper money as a way to inflate away debts, the resulting bubbles in real estate. That's what caused problems for the people of 19th century USA, not free market capitalism.
Free market capitalism gave American people of 19th century a much more prosperous society by the end of that century than ever existed on the face of the Earth up until that moment in time.
China, where the capitalism is actually allowed to exist within a more or less free market environment (I am not talking about the political system, but just ability to operate without being impeded upon by the gov't and at least a simple enough way to get them off your case - simple bribes with money, none of this lobbying crap) 350 Million people were lifted out of poverty in 30 years.
That's way better than what Europe did in the same period of time or what USA did (which is to say put people back into poverty with more government than ever).
No, I don't see it that way. With people not being oppressed by the government, with actual free market capitalism you have a wealth building nation.
It does not mean there will be no crime, but TODAY what do you have in USA? 3,000,000 people in jail, for what purpose?
Rent seeking involves somebody using a position of power that others cannot escape, a government connection in order to force market participants into something that they otherwise would not engage in on their own volition.
That is rent seeking. You don't have any clue at all.
I must tell you how silly it sounds to hear you say that.
- that's because you completely misunderstand what is being said.
You think the cheap Chinese hands putting together your keyboard are the key to you having that keyboard? You think you are sold the keyboard by the cheap Chinese hands and some truck driver?
No, they are a part of a complex supply chain that is put together not by people screwing the keyboard together or tossing boxes in and out of a truck and driving that truck. It's not even the sales clerks.
The supply chain is built by investment capital, money. That supply chain is built to make money. That supply chain is a machine that is built by people who came in with money and wanted to make more money. They took the cheap Chinese hands that used to crush rock on pretty bad dirt fields, they contacted the companies that manufactured the tools, they rented or bought the space. They put together the entire conveyor like line that many many hands are part of.
Those hands are tiny cogs in a big machine, and the machine is the productive output of the people who put their money on line to create that machine. Every single hand and eye and body there is just a part of the mechanism that makes the owners of the property productive.
It's not some guy named Lee, who put the screws into that keyboard, it's the guy with the savings capital that hired Lee, gave him the screw driver, the screws, the place in front of the conveyor belt, ensured everything is running on time, that bills are paid, contracts are fulfilled, everything works together, clicks.
Like a complex piece of software that makes the software developer or an admin more effective by giving them to tools not to have to manipulate bits manually but by running complex commands on computer.
Do you think that when you run 'ls -lart' the information is brought to you by pixels on the screen, by the reading head of a disk, by the processor? The information to you is brought by the entire system that is the computer.
Remove the totality of the parts and you have nothing at all, but the reason there is a totality of parts is the market and the money that took the risk of increasing itself by giving the market that it may or may not want.
You have the keyboard in front of you, thus the market wants to make that transaction and make the money for the investor.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, ooh, one more of those.
Yes, the people who make about as much as you do... do what? They do their little piece, whatever is handed to them to do. They do what is managed for them to do in order for it to be the larger thing, the productive output of a company, none of it would have ever existed if it wasn't for people investing their savings into that and keeping their investments running that company.
Take their cut and add no value? Their cut is the company, their value is the entire productive output of the company. The company is just a mechanism, a machine that they built that makes their own labour much more productive.
Walmart gives you the cheapest products to buy not because any clerk a Walmart gives it to you, because the mechanism that makes the owners of WM so productive allows the entire supply chain to exist, to connect you to the suppliers who are hand picked for their ability to bring the lowest possible prices to the market. That's why WM owners are so wealthy - they give the most to the poorest of all.
are you slaves? What am I asking, people have voted their rights away long ago, when they promoted politicians that pushed for things like income taxes, business regulations, money manipulation, welfare state, etc. You are slaves.
Yes, the first block is known, etc. That's my point. The first block is known, it was known to the originators of the protocol before it was known to anybody else.
People with massive amounts of wealth have created the society that you enjoy, they are not living on your dime, you are living on theirs.
Every item in your hands was built and delivered to you by somebody with more money than you.
Every bit of energy you use was extracted, refined and delivered to you in a convenient manner for you to enjoy.
Every bit of infrastructure is either built privately or with money stolen from people's work and then companies still have to build that infrastructure. Obviously it is not a place for gov't to be involved, but neither is health care, insurance of any type, banking, finance, money itself, any type of business regulation (though regulation of an actual act of commerce is allowed, but that does not mean regulation of business itself).
Leeches? Those who live off of the world built by people that made tons of money and still want to take away disproportionate amounts of cash (they want cash, so they want assets liquidated) away from people who actually earned it.
All that money that is hiding somewhere, it is working somewhere else, not in your economy, but it's working somewhere. It's not just cash sitting idly and if there is some cash sitting idly, the world needs some real savings, and will need those especially badly when the shit hits the fan. Guess who will be providing the savings as investments to restart businesses, not you.
All the taxes, business regulations, the welfare state, all of this complete lack of rule of law, which has to exist in order for people just to be able to engage in proper capitalism: private ownership and operation of property, under a free market system: equality before law, non-discrimination against some individuals on behalf of others. All of this has moved the capital savings somewhere else and it's not working for you, you are not allowing it to work for you.
So you're saying it's ok for people who have a lot more money to not have to give back more to allow progression of our social system?
- not only is it 'ok' to ensure that your money is not stolen by a gov't, but if you are not doing it, you are complicit in a gigantic immoral and discriminating enterprise.
Everybody should stop paying all income taxes immediately, those that are not paying income taxes today wouldn't have to stop, they are already not paying them. Those who are paying them are discriminated against on a 'progressive scale', that's what it is.
Absolutely all types of 'social welfare' systems should be annihilated, stopped in their tracks dead. They will be anyway once the dollar crashes, it would be much better to see it happen because people's conscience and intelligence wake up, not because they have no choices left.
As to offshore bank accounts and trusts - that's what you get instead of investments going into businesses and increasing everybody's standard of living when you tax people's work, labour, incomes, wealth rather than taxing transactions based on consumption. It's immoral and reprehensible to have a social welfare state, I have seen a number of them collapse during my time here, hopefully I enjoy watching a few more collapsing.
It only takes about 1200 bucks to start an offshore company and open an offshore bank account, there is nothing about it that is illegal and there is nothing about it that requires you to be super wealthy.
It's a convenient way to do business around the world.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, why the fuck is there any Google specific code in anything that is used in a browser?
Microsoft specific code is not OK, but Google specific code is just fine?
Ok, let's do blue specific code. I want code that is specific to blue. I like the colour blue, so I want code that is very specific to that colour, so that the colour has special privileges and execution strategies and tags that are only available for things that are blue.
There were lots of people who did things before "business creators" came along.
- smiths, sure, one off masters. Not people who give massive amounts of wealth to the society and thus make huge profits for themselves as well, because they can only benefit a few people as they have to hand craft all of their creations.
You want to return to that, so that again, only the wealthy can afford seemingly simple things like bath tubs, pianos, fancy food (that you can buy today in any store), any electronics at all, cars.
Yes, let's go back to people making things by hand on demand, that will take prices down and create maximum prosperity.... oh, wait, tens of thousands of years of THAT only allowed the wealthiest to enjoy all those products (that could be even created in that type of a society, where you had to make your own tools to build your own products).
Right, you are complaining that business creators are not business creators while in the same exact sentence making their case for them by showing that without them only few people will be able to afford anything and that there would be much less choice in the first place.
I am talking about people who fund and start their own businesses, just because you don't know any personally doesn't change the fact that there are people who take their own savings and start their own businesses in an attempt to grow their own investment capital.
Of-course I am also talking about people who participate in other people's businesses by providing the necessary capital to start/run/grow business.
What is so complicated to understand? 99.999% of people who are working for somebody else, building things with tools given to them by somebody else, using various materials brought to them by somebody else, they would NOT be making things by hand and selling them to you one at a time without investors, without people who build businesses.
A person can START a company by doing things by hand and eventually GROW it if he is successful and become his own business creator, an owner who starts expanding because his products are in demand and he hires more people.
The Marxist over there, who is arguing with me in this thread is saying that a person that does that is a 'leech' taking from others, while in reality without him there is no others, there is no economy, he builds that economy.
Management just for profit means destroying companies in the long term.
- management should be just for profit, companies exist to generate profit, if they don't, they should be liquidated.
The problem with HP and with so many other companies is that they are not for profit themselves, they are part of the financial shell game played by government money printers. What some call 'unsustainable growth expectation' really is an attempt at getting some profit above the real inflation rate and the real inflation rate is very high, so what do you expect a company to do to cover the costs, including all the costs increases due to inflation and to generate profit on the investment that covers inflation and provides some form of a return that is at least somewhat meaningful (people expect at least 5-6% on their return above inflation).
So if inflation rates are really at the minimum between 5% and 10%, then you have to look for a minimum of 10% to 16% profit margin a year to provide a real return of 5-6%
Except for that obviously the entire shenanigans that the governments are engaged in with the death taxes create a long term impossible situation for a company to be managed with a long term vision.
What long term vision is there for a company that really doesn't have an actual owner? Death taxes cause people to liquidate to pay the taxes (or to find ways to avoid paying taxes) and so even the original creators of the business are not long term oriented, they want to build something and to get rid of it as quickly as they can get a good enough offer. Who comes up with good enough offers? Large conglomerates do, funds of some sort. Are they there for the long term business prospect of that particular business?
No, they are there to maximise efficiency, to use the company in any way at all to make more money, and that's FINE, but it doesn't allow a company to have a long term future.
So as always, death and taxes (and inflation) is what causes companies not to be managed by people who care about that particular business. The kids of the original creators don't manage it.
OTOH look at Walmart. Sam was able to leave his company to his kids without having to liquidate most of it somehow, so his family is running it and quite profitably.
The moral hazard argument has been made (repeatedly) elsewhere in the thread, tacking it on as a response to a post about different claims to which it is irrelevant is pointless.
- what are you trying to say?
The only way that FDIC matters as the moral hazard is because it creates a false sense of security in depositors. What other way is FDIC a moral hazard?
Here is a comment I left probably at the minimum a year ago (/. doesn't tell you the year of a comment for some reason). It explains in which way FDIC is a moral hazard and links to a Congressional hearing on the matter.
FDIC created the 'too big to fail' problem by providing the moral hazard to the depositors.
FDIC does not have any assets, the 25 Billion has to be sold first, those are not assets, that's debt. When a large bank crashes (and takes others with it), good luck to FDIC trying to sell 25 Billion in long term US Treasuries.
It will be competing with everybody else trying to sell the same, it will be competing with the Treasury and likely the Fed at the same time as well. There are no 25 Billion.
Saying that something is an asset to FDIC and a liability to the Treasury, sure, 2 hands, the same body. You can move your IOU from one hand to the other, it won't help you to make that thing that you move from one hand to the other real.
It's the same nonsense argument they make talking about 'independent Fed'. Independent, ha? As if it ever failed to monetise any amount of debt that the gov't produces.
Depositors and banks aren't the same thing. A bank bailout would almost certainly be an action
- it's the same thing from POV of moral hazard.
The depositors, creditors to the bank don't care about the soundness of a bank as long as the gov't promises to bail them out. They don't care if the money comes from FDIC or the Fed or Treasury or the bank itself.
It's the bank that is getting bailed out when depositors get their FDIC money, the bank stays in business. In an actual free market there is no gov't bail out, there are no gov't covered deposits. A bank can have insurance and that's what would cover some of the deposits, but most importantly it's the reserve that the bank would have to hold to insure itself against a run.
Having gov't money being poured at a bank to cover the deposits is not there for the purposes of depositors, it's there for the purposes of keeping the bank afloat even when it is supposed to drown. FDIC wasn't created to provide deposit insurance it was created to provide moral hazard so that the banks that should have failed at the time would not fail because of this non-existing artificial 'insurance'.
It all comes down to the Fed, who will print any amount of money to cover any and all losses to the banks and to the depositors. Nominal losses. You clearly can't understand that USA gov't and every US bank is broke, it all comes down to the printing of money.
Take the hero, for example. His father didn't get killed ...
two thumbs down to this 'Wizard of Oz'
His father? I think I spotted the problem.
I too sometimes look down and see your legs. WTF is going on?
Business creator, a person without who there is no job for that engineer, for that delivery boy, whatever.
Yes, that's the reason FDIC is a moral hazard, it 'insures' deposits. It's a moral hazard that created the too big to fail problem in the first place by giving people false sense of security, so that they wouldn't care what the banks did with their money.
As to the FDIC 'assets' being 25 Billion in debt, and being a liability and asset at the same time (it's a wash), clearly you don't understand that FDIC doesn't exist at all, they have nothing. There are no assets, even those 25 Billion are not assets, they are a liability, yes, to the Treasury. However that's not what the FDIC will be relying on to bail out banks (depositors). The Fed, it all comes down to the Fed.
The money will be created out of thin air. The 25 Billion or no 25 Billion, it's an irrelevant amount even if it was actual gold when things come crushing down and they will.
I haven't watched Fox but for a few short youtube clips when somebody links to some weird shit they show, so you are just plain wrong.
I don't see an argument coming out of you but some nonsense, give me an actual rational argument for your side, whatever it is.
Yes, it's rent seeking. It's getting paid for doing no work, merely owning something. This is not productive behavior.
- again, you are 100% wrong. Rent seeking involves using a government power to force some type of a monopoly or otherwise artificial relationship between some form of wealth that was already produced and somebody, who has enough power to draw some type of income from that wealth.
You are trying to redefine work as rent seeking, it's sick. A person's work is reflected in his savings, he can lend his savings productively to a person seeking this arrangement in order to grow his business.
A person with savings can use his savings to start a business as well, so his savings act as the initial capital.
Calling productive work 'rent seeking', which has a very clearly defined meaning of using government power to draw some form of income from wealth that had nothing to do with the seeker is sick.
You are a sick person, that's all, and it's obvious from all of your comments, and obviously from the last statement in your last comment (which completely confirms my assertion that you believe that profit is evil).
This bit:
Not at all. Profiting from your own labor is a great thing. Profiting from someone elses labor (capitalism) is evil.
- capitalism. Private ownership and operation of property is 'evil' in your estimation.
Well, given the moderation of this thread and your comments in particular, at least we know where /. stands on this issue.
As I said earlier, I am going to enjoy watching this go down in flames, and when I say 'this', I mean the socialist welfare state.
History shows that today the many are stealing from the few, it's somewhat a different system than 1000 years ago, but it is collapsing luckily now that the few do no longer want to be stolen from.
Let me put it this way, whenever I hear words: social justice, I know immediately who is on the opposite side of the argument, and it's not pretty, it's theft and murder, with a crudely drawn smile on a wooden mask covering the bare teeth.
Nonsense.
In a free market economy I can start a bank out of my garage without registering any licenses with anybody, without having to jump through hoops, without having to pay any guild money, any monopoly fees, without having to pay for any licenses at all to anybody.
I can just post a note on my garage that said: bank by roman_mir.
done.
Anybody is welcome to come in and deposit if they like what I show them because I will be trying to outcompete the next guy in the next garage.
What you call 'monopolies' that supposedly 'arise naturally' are nonsense. There are economies of scale that are extremely efficient at running their business and I want to buy services / products at the lowest possible prices, so I welcome any amount of competition and scale.
I do NOT welcome gov't coming to any business at all and telling it that it is too big and it has to be broken up, because in a free market a business becomes big when it does well by its customers, not by lobbying the politicians, that's because politicians have no power over businesses and over individuals and over money in a free market.
In fact USA was a free market economy and it didn't 'collapse within a month', it did extremely well to turn an agrarian afterthought of a country, a huge debtor into a first world manufacturer, exporter and creditor. Today that flag is carried by others, not by America.
As to externalities - that's precisely what governments create, they give a pass to people to socialise costs and privatise gains by promoting and defending externalities, by allowing certain well connected businesses to do what they want on public property (another oxymoron, there is no such thing as 'public property' , there is either private property or theft, nothing else).
So it is private property rights that have to be protected in order to ensure that there externalities are minimised, all that gov't does is creates externalities and creates moral hazards by setting various liability caps that invite abuse.
As to FDIC, FDIC and the Fed working in tandem is what created the problem of capital destruction in USA.
Of-course FDIC is completely responsible for the terrible misallocation of people's lending (deposits) all of which have gone to the banks that are propped up by FDIC, the moral hazard of which created the 'too big to fail' problem.
It's funny that you are accusing the free market of monopoly creation and in the same post you are defending FDIC, which is what allowed for the banking monopoly that created the too big to fail, I guess one has to be completely confused to have such a massive cognitive dissonance in one's head.
In a free market a bank run is possible and it happens, however it's a normal situation of weeding out bad businesses, bad decisions, shutting down failures, restructuring bad debts.
In what you have today, FDIC and the Fed created the monstrosity of a banking system, which only has one single function left at this point: maintain the status quo for the government, prop up government spending by laundering money from the Fed to the Treasury and allow a select few to pocket the gains in form of the difference between the Fed's discount window cost of fake credit and the Treasury yield.
Talk about externalities, socialising the costs and pocketing the profits.
The mental image of the economy and politics in your head is an abomination created by this corrupt system.
Oh, so only things that you didn't make belong to you, but things that you made do not belong to you? Interesting theory, it's good to know such high order thinkers visit /..
Do you understand what a loan is? I wonder if you understand what it is, I think you don't. I can loan money to a business that I start and I expect to get the money back and to have a return on it. If the business is failing to provide a return within certain time frame I am going to liquidate the business piece by piece and return some of my original investment.
Obviously I am going to fire all of the employees. Tell me, oh wise one, who pays the employees if the business is not being productive, it's not making a profit? Who pays the employees if business is losing money?
Should employees be re-imbursing the employer in case the business is losing money rather than making money? Do you think people who want to get hired want to share in the success of the business by ensuring they do a good job or do you think they want to share in the success of the business by putting their own money on line?
Do you know that people can today be part of business and make or lose money with it by loaning money to business (those are called bonds) and that's where the money comes out of to pay the employees? Do you know that if the management stops doing their work properly the business can croak much faster than if any individual employee slacks off?
Do you realise that employees are just cogs in a machine that the investors purchase pieces of / hire in order to become productive by adding actual value to the inputs of their business so that something of higher value than the total sum of all the inputs is produced at the end, something that the market desires and pays for?
You think the profits are evil I bet, completely not realising that without profits there are no motives at all to risk any amount of savings to start/invest in/run a company?
You think without specialisation created by the capitalist society you'd have a computer to type your nonsense on today? The networks that together constitute the Internet? The power needed to operate all of this? etc.etc.
Curious, how do you stay so obtuse, do you have to make a concerted effort or does it come naturally?
Do you know why people become "wage slaves"?
They cannot save for themselves.
They cannot invest for themselves.
They cannot start businesses for themselves.
They cannot live without government stepping all over them.
"Wage slavery" is not a capitalism problem, it's not a free market problem, it's the exact opposite problem created by government - inflation, money price manipulation, regulations, taxes, all of this prevents people from saving on their own and doing their own thing not to be so called 'wage slaves'.
I am not talking about that of-course, I am actually talking about real slavery, where your labour is owned by the state and the state just decides to throw you some crumbs by not confiscating 100% of your productive output.
That's slavery.
"wage slavery?" AFAIC is a gov't created problem, nonsense otherwise.
The problem with that type of thinking is that you actually believe that in a free market society there will be no wealth created that in fact lifts people out of poverty and this is demonstrably not the case.
The fact is that USA lifted its people out of poverty exactly during the industrialisation, when the capitalism was done in a free market environment, all boats in fact were lifted. The problems that people experienced in the 19th century were caused by government, the Civil war and the attempts to introduce paper money as a way to inflate away debts, the resulting bubbles in real estate. That's what caused problems for the people of 19th century USA, not free market capitalism.
Free market capitalism gave American people of 19th century a much more prosperous society by the end of that century than ever existed on the face of the Earth up until that moment in time.
China, where the capitalism is actually allowed to exist within a more or less free market environment (I am not talking about the political system, but just ability to operate without being impeded upon by the gov't and at least a simple enough way to get them off your case - simple bribes with money, none of this lobbying crap) 350 Million people were lifted out of poverty in 30 years.
That's way better than what Europe did in the same period of time or what USA did (which is to say put people back into poverty with more government than ever).
No, I don't see it that way. With people not being oppressed by the government, with actual free market capitalism you have a wealth building nation.
It does not mean there will be no crime, but TODAY what do you have in USA? 3,000,000 people in jail, for what purpose?
Oh, you own anything at all, clothing, shelter, food, your skin, kidneys, eyes, lungs? Would you like to make it non-exclusive?
Rent seeking involves somebody using a position of power that others cannot escape, a government connection in order to force market participants into something that they otherwise would not engage in on their own volition.
That is rent seeking. You don't have any clue at all.
I must tell you how silly it sounds to hear you say that.
- that's because you completely misunderstand what is being said.
You think the cheap Chinese hands putting together your keyboard are the key to you having that keyboard? You think you are sold the keyboard by the cheap Chinese hands and some truck driver?
No, they are a part of a complex supply chain that is put together not by people screwing the keyboard together or tossing boxes in and out of a truck and driving that truck. It's not even the sales clerks.
The supply chain is built by investment capital, money. That supply chain is built to make money. That supply chain is a machine that is built by people who came in with money and wanted to make more money. They took the cheap Chinese hands that used to crush rock on pretty bad dirt fields, they contacted the companies that manufactured the tools, they rented or bought the space. They put together the entire conveyor like line that many many hands are part of.
Those hands are tiny cogs in a big machine, and the machine is the productive output of the people who put their money on line to create that machine. Every single hand and eye and body there is just a part of the mechanism that makes the owners of the property productive.
It's not some guy named Lee, who put the screws into that keyboard, it's the guy with the savings capital that hired Lee, gave him the screw driver, the screws, the place in front of the conveyor belt, ensured everything is running on time, that bills are paid, contracts are fulfilled, everything works together, clicks.
Like a complex piece of software that makes the software developer or an admin more effective by giving them to tools not to have to manipulate bits manually but by running complex commands on computer.
Do you think that when you run 'ls -lart' the information is brought to you by pixels on the screen, by the reading head of a disk, by the processor? The information to you is brought by the entire system that is the computer.
Remove the totality of the parts and you have nothing at all, but the reason there is a totality of parts is the market and the money that took the risk of increasing itself by giving the market that it may or may not want.
You have the keyboard in front of you, thus the market wants to make that transaction and make the money for the investor.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, ooh, one more of those.
Yes, the people who make about as much as you do... do what? They do their little piece, whatever is handed to them to do. They do what is managed for them to do in order for it to be the larger thing, the productive output of a company, none of it would have ever existed if it wasn't for people investing their savings into that and keeping their investments running that company.
Take their cut and add no value? Their cut is the company, their value is the entire productive output of the company. The company is just a mechanism, a machine that they built that makes their own labour much more productive.
Walmart gives you the cheapest products to buy not because any clerk a Walmart gives it to you, because the mechanism that makes the owners of WM so productive allows the entire supply chain to exist, to connect you to the suppliers who are hand picked for their ability to bring the lowest possible prices to the market. That's why WM owners are so wealthy - they give the most to the poorest of all.
are you slaves? What am I asking, people have voted their rights away long ago, when they promoted politicians that pushed for things like income taxes, business regulations, money manipulation, welfare state, etc. You are slaves.
Yes, the first block is known, etc. That's my point. The first block is known, it was known to the originators of the protocol before it was known to anybody else.
People with massive amounts of wealth have created the society that you enjoy, they are not living on your dime, you are living on theirs.
Every item in your hands was built and delivered to you by somebody with more money than you.
Every bit of energy you use was extracted, refined and delivered to you in a convenient manner for you to enjoy.
Every bit of infrastructure is either built privately or with money stolen from people's work and then companies still have to build that infrastructure. Obviously it is not a place for gov't to be involved, but neither is health care, insurance of any type, banking, finance, money itself, any type of business regulation (though regulation of an actual act of commerce is allowed, but that does not mean regulation of business itself).
Leeches? Those who live off of the world built by people that made tons of money and still want to take away disproportionate amounts of cash (they want cash, so they want assets liquidated) away from people who actually earned it.
All that money that is hiding somewhere, it is working somewhere else, not in your economy, but it's working somewhere. It's not just cash sitting idly and if there is some cash sitting idly, the world needs some real savings, and will need those especially badly when the shit hits the fan. Guess who will be providing the savings as investments to restart businesses, not you.
All the taxes, business regulations, the welfare state, all of this complete lack of rule of law, which has to exist in order for people just to be able to engage in proper capitalism: private ownership and operation of property, under a free market system: equality before law, non-discrimination against some individuals on behalf of others. All of this has moved the capital savings somewhere else and it's not working for you, you are not allowing it to work for you.
Leeches? The socialists, the welfare statists.
So you're saying it's ok for people who have a lot more money to not have to give back more to allow progression of our social system?
- not only is it 'ok' to ensure that your money is not stolen by a gov't, but if you are not doing it, you are complicit in a gigantic immoral and discriminating enterprise.
Everybody should stop paying all income taxes immediately, those that are not paying income taxes today wouldn't have to stop, they are already not paying them. Those who are paying them are discriminated against on a 'progressive scale', that's what it is.
Absolutely all types of 'social welfare' systems should be annihilated, stopped in their tracks dead. They will be anyway once the dollar crashes, it would be much better to see it happen because people's conscience and intelligence wake up, not because they have no choices left.
As to offshore bank accounts and trusts - that's what you get instead of investments going into businesses and increasing everybody's standard of living when you tax people's work, labour, incomes, wealth rather than taxing transactions based on consumption. It's immoral and reprehensible to have a social welfare state, I have seen a number of them collapse during my time here, hopefully I enjoy watching a few more collapsing.
It only takes about 1200 bucks to start an offshore company and open an offshore bank account, there is nothing about it that is illegal and there is nothing about it that requires you to be super wealthy.
It's a convenient way to do business around the world.
So some people claim they have a bomb to go through a security theatre zone faster? Where are they rushing to? Gitmo?