Employment is a privilege, not a right or entitlement.
It's neither a right nor a privilege. It's a business transaction. If either party doesn't want to do the deal or continue the deal, they're entitled to end it.
. After all, you have to pay for a slave's upkeep, which will not be a dramatically different cost to that of hiring a worker on a living wage.
Thomas Sowell mentioned that just before the civil war, southern employers would hire Irish workers for jobs that were too dangerous to risk a slave. Slaves were expensive.
The trouble with using the GDP figure is that it counts war production as wealth. It wasn't until 1946 that we saw substantial increases in private investment again.
We had lassiez-faire prior to the 1930's, and along with that 7 depressions in a 50 year period, including the Great Depression and the Long Depression
Not quite. We have a long history of fraud by government-sponsored banks, starting with Hamilton's first Bank of the United States, which inflated the currency by about 75 percent in the first couple years of its operation. We also had the tariffs, and massive government giveaways to businesses that knew how to play the game. It was freer than we have now, but still far from true lassiez-faire.
Also, in the great depression, we had a massive increase in regulation that prevented recovery until 1946, when the end of the war meant that people weren't going to put up with micromanagement of the economy anymore. Roosevelt wasn't just plowing crops under, he was tossing people in jail for pressing a suit for 35 cents when the NRA said you had to charge 40 cents.
While I'm not certain AC was referring to Glass-Steagall, that is the most textbook example of deregulation that magnified this mess enormously. Apologies, but you are spreading misinformation here.
The repeal of the mandatory Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking is a red herring. Mortgage lenders were fraudulently representing the quality of the securities they were selling, and doing so with Fannie and Freddie's collusion. But the key is still that banks were able to benefit from borrowing below the rate of inflation, making dodgy loans, and reselling those loans through two government-created and government-backed companies to get them off their books. What's more, they were under government pressure to make those loans due to the Community Reinvestment Act.
I will also point out that before the Glass-Steagall restrictions were repealed, the savings and loans demonstrated that they could make dodgy loans already.
What should happen when so much money is being borrowed is that savings become more scarce, interest rates rise, and you have natural feedback mechanism to signal the scarcity or availability of funds to lend. By providing an endless supply of inflated money though, the Fed broke that feedback, and the result is this massive malinvestment and oversupply of houses and other goods.
The entire purpose of the Fed is to inflate the money for the benefit of the banks which own it. Any other ostensible purpose is nothing but propaganda. As for Greenspan's supposed refusal to regulate the credit default swaps market, that was never part of the Fed's authority.
The SEC has proven itself to be a complete waste of time, money, and trust
Precisely. Not only have they failed to do their job, the chances of any of them being fired for incompetence are miniscule. They'll probably get a bigger budget out of this debacle.
It's as true today as it ever was: If you want something done right you have to do it yourself.
Not exactly. It often suffices to have it done by someone whose incentives are in line with your own. Securities regulation should be done by people who stand to lose big time if they fuck up. Arthur Andersen was a huge company that did a dismal job of auditiing Enron; the upshot of their failure is that their partners lost billions in equity. It was the market that toppled that fraud, not the regulators.
We're trillions of dollars poorer because of an enormous swindle -- very successful for those who perpetrated it, and very very painful for everybody else.
You're right up to this point.
The swindle was only possible because of deregulation;
and this is where you go right off into the weeds again. Fiat money is the swindle, and it's only possible because the government forces us all to accept the loss of our purchasing power through inflation.
only the dumbest people, namely you
I've studied the matter, and you obviously haven't.
As for who's calling for deregulation, that's mostly coming from the people who were sounding the warning about this bubble for the last decade or so.
Read what I wrote again. I said our government shouldn't do it. If you want to volunteer to fight the Chinese in Tibet, or overthrow Castro, I'll heartily cheer you on. I might even give you a few bucks.
For example, sometime in the 80's they required that CEO pay rates be published, obstinately to shame the companies or outrage shareholders. Instead this lead to open competition in pay rates for CEO's, and CEO pay skyrocketed.
too bad the government we have now is far worse than the kind we overthrew...
Well, yes and no. George III was a tyrannical SOB, but his ability to directly oppress the people was somewhat limited by the technology available to him.
They were looking to get seats on the board until the Treaty of Detroit.
Yeah, I remember that, and the problem was that they wanted to get that control without risking their money. The right way to get a seat on the board of a corporation is to be elected to it by the shareholders. They could have bought enough shares to get a member on the board quite easily as far back as the 1960s.
I'm not sure that they're dishonest so much as incompetent. The problem with a regulatory agency like the SEC though, is that it gives people a false sense of confidence, so they don't do their homework to check up on the people they give their money to. If the SEC didn't exist, then people would rely on auditors who stand to suffer disastrous consequences (like Arthur Andersen did) if they fuck up.
I would expect that after their failure to catch Bernie Madoff, the SEC will not lose anything; they won't have to fire any of the clowns who were asleep at the switch, and they'll probably get their budget increased.
Unions could still serve a useful purpose, if it weren't for the way that government colludes with unions. If they were subject to the rule of law (like, really prosecute anyone who beats up a worker who declines to join), there's nothing intrinsically wrong with people forming an organization for collective bargaining.
If a wiser group of people had run the UAW over the last fifty years, they could have bought the US automakers outright.
No, I have learned, and you should too. Government interference in markets, particularly inflation of a fiat currency, causes boom and bust cycles. It's been that way since the Roman empire started clipping their coins and plating silver over bronze slugs.
We're trillions of dollars poorer because the Fed's inflation drove a long period of malinvestment, which must be corrected.
This attitude that the US should get involved in other countries' affairs is ludicrous.
The US government shouldn't get involved in other countries' affairs. That being said, it's perfectly legit for private citizens (American or others) to complain about anything they find unjust, boycott the vendors involved, etc.
I'm betting the reform that will ultimately happen in China, will ONLY come about after such a revolution.
Well, I hope that the Chinese can overthrow their government with as little bloodshed as possible. I figure it will happen when the party loses the ability to suppress internal communications. They imagine that building the great firewall will help them keep a lid on it, but they're wrong.
My grandfather, who grew up working on a farm and fled to work in a shipyard as soon as he could, would dispute that. In fact, if I showed your remarks above to him, he'd probably say something along the lines of "let that ignorant bastard freeze in the dark."
Foreign steel producers had a far more significant advantage over the US than the modernity of their equipment: their unions didn't fight tooth and nail against technological innovation.
I cannot believe you really think reducing regulation would magically fix the banking crisis.
I offer no magical fix for the banking crisis. That's something I leave up to lying politicians who see every crisis as an opportunity for another massive power-grab. The crash is in progress; the banks and many other businesses have failed, and they should be liquidated. Until and unless that happens, the pain will only continue, just as it did in the USA in the 1930s and in Japan throughout the 90s.
Actually, special investment vehicles, debt-backed borrowing, and other moronic financial maneuvers are what got us into this mess,
You're ignoring the moronic financial maneuver at the bottom of it all, which is that the Fed has been flooding dollars into the market at interest rates below the inflation rate for decades now.
irresponsibility and genuine ignorance are what got us where we are
Especially blind trust in government and the Federal Reserve.
It was the market that brought Enron and Worldcom down, not the regulators. Same with Bernie Madoff. The incompetent management of the wall street banks should all be out panhandling, but Nooooo: the legislature stepped in and handed them 800 billion dollars of freshly-inflated money that they didn't earn so that they could continue business as usual.
Never mind that if you're a subsistence farmer, the Chinese government can seize your land at any time.
Governments suck, you'll get no argument from me on that point. Nevertheless, most of the people who go to work in factories in China do so because they choose to, just as our ancestors left their farms to work in factories here.
You must be joking, we were DEREGULATED into this mess.
Nope. Regulations kept being added during the Bush administration, just like they were in every administration since the end of World War Two. See Sarbanes-Oxley, for example.
Good regulation would have prevented the mess.
That's what central planners have been claiming for as long as they've existed, and they've always been wrong. See the collapse of the Soviet Union for the textbook example of an overregulated economy collapsing. See the Great Depression, particularly the National Recovery Act, for the textbook example of how regulation can prevent a recovery.
Slashdot Mirror
Employment is a privilege, not a right or entitlement.
It's neither a right nor a privilege. It's a business transaction. If either party doesn't want to do the deal or continue the deal, they're entitled to end it.
-jcr
. After all, you have to pay for a slave's upkeep, which will not be a dramatically different cost to that of hiring a worker on a living wage.
Thomas Sowell mentioned that just before the civil war, southern employers would hire Irish workers for jobs that were too dangerous to risk a slave. Slaves were expensive.
-jcr
The trouble with using the GDP figure is that it counts war production as wealth. It wasn't until 1946 that we saw substantial increases in private investment again.
-jcr
So what examples of true lassiez-faire do you have?
Hong Kong and Singapore are probably about as close as it gets.
-jcr
We had lassiez-faire prior to the 1930's, and along with that 7 depressions in a 50 year period, including the Great Depression and the Long Depression
Not quite. We have a long history of fraud by government-sponsored banks, starting with Hamilton's first Bank of the United States, which inflated the currency by about 75 percent in the first couple years of its operation. We also had the tariffs, and massive government giveaways to businesses that knew how to play the game. It was freer than we have now, but still far from true lassiez-faire.
Also, in the great depression, we had a massive increase in regulation that prevented recovery until 1946, when the end of the war meant that people weren't going to put up with micromanagement of the economy anymore. Roosevelt wasn't just plowing crops under, he was tossing people in jail for pressing a suit for 35 cents when the NRA said you had to charge 40 cents.
-jcr
While I'm not certain AC was referring to Glass-Steagall, that is the most textbook example of deregulation that magnified this mess enormously. Apologies, but you are spreading misinformation here.
The repeal of the mandatory Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking is a red herring. Mortgage lenders were fraudulently representing the quality of the securities they were selling, and doing so with Fannie and Freddie's collusion. But the key is still that banks were able to benefit from borrowing below the rate of inflation, making dodgy loans, and reselling those loans through two government-created and government-backed companies to get them off their books. What's more, they were under government pressure to make those loans due to the Community Reinvestment Act.
I will also point out that before the Glass-Steagall restrictions were repealed, the savings and loans demonstrated that they could make dodgy loans already.
What should happen when so much money is being borrowed is that savings become more scarce, interest rates rise, and you have natural feedback mechanism to signal the scarcity or availability of funds to lend. By providing an endless supply of inflated money though, the Fed broke that feedback, and the result is this massive malinvestment and oversupply of houses and other goods.
The entire purpose of the Fed is to inflate the money for the benefit of the banks which own it. Any other ostensible purpose is nothing but propaganda. As for Greenspan's supposed refusal to regulate the credit default swaps market, that was never part of the Fed's authority.
-jcr
The SEC has proven itself to be a complete waste of time, money, and trust
Precisely. Not only have they failed to do their job, the chances of any of them being fired for incompetence are miniscule. They'll probably get a bigger budget out of this debacle.
It's as true today as it ever was: If you want something done right you have to do it yourself.
Not exactly. It often suffices to have it done by someone whose incentives are in line with your own. Securities regulation should be done by people who stand to lose big time if they fuck up. Arthur Andersen was a huge company that did a dismal job of auditiing Enron; the upshot of their failure is that their partners lost billions in equity. It was the market that toppled that fraud, not the regulators.
-jcr
We're trillions of dollars poorer because of an enormous swindle -- very successful for those who perpetrated it, and very very painful for everybody else.
You're right up to this point.
The swindle was only possible because of deregulation;
and this is where you go right off into the weeds again. Fiat money is the swindle, and it's only possible because the government forces us all to accept the loss of our purchasing power through inflation.
only the dumbest people, namely you
I've studied the matter, and you obviously haven't.
As for who's calling for deregulation, that's mostly coming from the people who were sounding the warning about this bubble for the last decade or so.
-jcr
Read what I wrote again. I said our government shouldn't do it. If you want to volunteer to fight the Chinese in Tibet, or overthrow Castro, I'll heartily cheer you on. I might even give you a few bucks.
-jcr
For example, sometime in the 80's they required that CEO pay rates be published, obstinately to shame the companies or outrage shareholders. Instead this lead to open competition in pay rates for CEO's, and CEO pay skyrocketed.
Classic example of unintended consequences.
-jcr
too bad the government we have now is far worse than the kind we overthrew...
Well, yes and no. George III was a tyrannical SOB, but his ability to directly oppress the people was somewhat limited by the technology available to him.
-jcr
They were looking to get seats on the board until the Treaty of Detroit.
Yeah, I remember that, and the problem was that they wanted to get that control without risking their money. The right way to get a seat on the board of a corporation is to be elected to it by the shareholders. They could have bought enough shares to get a member on the board quite easily as far back as the 1960s.
-jcr
I'm not sure that they're dishonest so much as incompetent. The problem with a regulatory agency like the SEC though, is that it gives people a false sense of confidence, so they don't do their homework to check up on the people they give their money to. If the SEC didn't exist, then people would rely on auditors who stand to suffer disastrous consequences (like Arthur Andersen did) if they fuck up.
I would expect that after their failure to catch Bernie Madoff, the SEC will not lose anything; they won't have to fire any of the clowns who were asleep at the switch, and they'll probably get their budget increased.
-jcr
Oh please internet tough guy, walk up and call somebody on the street a "twat". You might just get your teeth pushed down your throat.
heh.. You're the one threatening violence from the cover of anonymity, and you call me "internet tough guy"?
Now, I suggest you shut the fuck up.
Think you can make me?
-jcr
Unions could still serve a useful purpose, if it weren't for the way that government colludes with unions. If they were subject to the rule of law (like, really prosecute anyone who beats up a worker who declines to join), there's nothing intrinsically wrong with people forming an organization for collective bargaining.
If a wiser group of people had run the UAW over the last fifty years, they could have bought the US automakers outright.
-jcr
you still haven't learned.
No, I have learned, and you should too. Government interference in markets, particularly inflation of a fiat currency, causes boom and bust cycles. It's been that way since the Roman empire started clipping their coins and plating silver over bronze slugs.
We're trillions of dollars poorer because the Fed's inflation drove a long period of malinvestment, which must be corrected.
-jcr
This attitude that the US should get involved in other countries' affairs is ludicrous.
The US government shouldn't get involved in other countries' affairs. That being said, it's perfectly legit for private citizens (American or others) to complain about anything they find unjust, boycott the vendors involved, etc.
-jcr
I'm betting the reform that will ultimately happen in China, will ONLY come about after such a revolution.
Well, I hope that the Chinese can overthrow their government with as little bloodshed as possible. I figure it will happen when the party loses the ability to suppress internal communications. They imagine that building the great firewall will help them keep a lid on it, but they're wrong.
-jcr
This change is not for the benefit of the people.
My grandfather, who grew up working on a farm and fled to work in a shipyard as soon as he could, would dispute that. In fact, if I showed your remarks above to him, he'd probably say something along the lines of "let that ignorant bastard freeze in the dark."
-jcr
Foreign steel producers had a far more significant advantage over the US than the modernity of their equipment: their unions didn't fight tooth and nail against technological innovation.
-jcr
I cannot believe you really think reducing regulation would magically fix the banking crisis.
I offer no magical fix for the banking crisis. That's something I leave up to lying politicians who see every crisis as an opportunity for another massive power-grab. The crash is in progress; the banks and many other businesses have failed, and they should be liquidated. Until and unless that happens, the pain will only continue, just as it did in the USA in the 1930s and in Japan throughout the 90s.
-jcr
We were deregulated since the 80's.
That's simply incorrect. Anyone who's ever worked in banking can tell you that it's one of the most highly regulated industries we have.
please stop spreading misinformation.
Right back at you, AC.
-jcr
Actually, special investment vehicles, debt-backed borrowing, and other moronic financial maneuvers are what got us into this mess,
You're ignoring the moronic financial maneuver at the bottom of it all, which is that the Fed has been flooding dollars into the market at interest rates below the inflation rate for decades now.
irresponsibility and genuine ignorance are what got us where we are
Especially blind trust in government and the Federal Reserve.
It was the market that brought Enron and Worldcom down, not the regulators. Same with Bernie Madoff. The incompetent management of the wall street banks should all be out panhandling, but Nooooo: the legislature stepped in and handed them 800 billion dollars of freshly-inflated money that they didn't earn so that they could continue business as usual.
-jcr
Never mind that if you're a subsistence farmer, the Chinese government can seize your land at any time.
Governments suck, you'll get no argument from me on that point. Nevertheless, most of the people who go to work in factories in China do so because they choose to, just as our ancestors left their farms to work in factories here.
-jcr
You must be joking, we were DEREGULATED into this mess.
Nope. Regulations kept being added during the Bush administration, just like they were in every administration since the end of World War Two. See Sarbanes-Oxley, for example.
Good regulation would have prevented the mess.
That's what central planners have been claiming for as long as they've existed, and they've always been wrong. See the collapse of the Soviet Union for the textbook example of an overregulated economy collapsing. See the Great Depression, particularly the National Recovery Act, for the textbook example of how regulation can prevent a recovery.
-jcr