I truly love the blog written and administrated by Francis W. Porretto. You have to be an intellectual to go there and enjoy it. I don't give a royal rat's ass if you think I'm a snob or some elitist for saying so. Go there now and read this rather genteel piece.
Quite frankly, the reason the country is falling into the sorry state it's in is because the vast majority of people think there is some kind of honor to be had in being non-intellectual. In short, you are proud to be a stupid moron. You are proud that you think you are somehow cool because you never cared about politics. Politics is now causing your life to be a freaking nightmare and you wonder how in the hell you are going to survive. You blame Wall Street and anybody smarter than you who knows how to make money in the intellectual marketplace of the real world.
You didn't want to spend any time figuring out how the system works and you didn't want to work to understand that politics is the very thing that enables greedy people to game the system.
So now what do you think is the smart thing to do? Occupy Wall Street? Bring the whole thing crashing down? Great. Then what? How much time have you invested in understanding how to set traps in the forest? Do you know how to start a fire with nothing more than some sticks and leaves. Because that, my imbecilic friend is what you are working for. Yep. Demand that all the people who've ever made any money trading on Wall Street or NASDAQ or done anything to make money by typical investment tools have to give up everything they've ever made and hand it to you and all the people who wouldn't know a profit from a profit margin.
Destroy it all. Tear the whole system down to YOUR intellectual level and then see what you get.
Gasoline will still magically be available at the corner store. Your cell phone will still work, somehow.
McDonald's will still be serving up fries and quarter pounders. You don't know how, but you trust it will happen. You are like the guy who treated me with contempt the other day when I came into your store and you were too involved with whoever you were texting on your phone. You forgot that the reason your business exists is to provide something for the customer.
I'm the guy who knows how to hunt and fish and make shelters. I don't want to see society collapse, but there is a part of me that understands that it is inevitable. That you deserve to be punished for your contempt of the free market system that created your cell phone and all the stuff you take for granted every damned moment of every day.
I'm the guy that you better hope you never run into after you get your wish of the Wall Street collapse. I'm the guy who is going to rub your sorry nose into all the damned stupid ideas that you had about being so proud of not knowing who your congressman was.
Free markets don't actually make much of anything. I agree that the stupid is cool notion is being pushed a bit much. I am going to have to disagree however about the notion that financial speculators are responsible for cell phones, complex derivatives are responsible for the availability of gasoline, and day traders being responsible for me living in something other than a forrest.
ReplyDeleteYES certain kinds of investment and capital movement are partially responsible for all of those things. Money made available by venture capitalists did lead to a lot of innovations in the tech industry, and industrialists before them funded the construction of much of the industry necessary to bring us out of an almost completely agrarian society. There is a large difference however between making money available to entrepreneurs in the form of VC, and originating bad loans, packaging them into complex derivatives, and writing any inherent risk off the books once those derivatives have been sold. Lack of oversight at credit rating agencies made this all possible. That's "free markets" for you. No government manipulation of fiat currency did not do this. Central banks did not do this, and Barney Frank did not do this. Allowing banks to operate as they will and making securities ratings a pay for play affair did this.
Do I go around holding signs? No. Do I think so called "free markets" cure anything? No. Do I think the government should be in charge of everything at all? No I don't think that either, but a mixed market works. "Free" Financial markets don't. No there is no invisible hand here. The market mechanism necessary for an invisible hand assumes a negative correlation between supply and demand at all price levels, and thus a negative feedback loop. In financial markets the correlation is often positive, and thus any irrationality in pricing is only magnified. This is a fundamental feature of capitalism, whether completely free market, or mixed market.
Again, as for your point about being apolitical, apathetic, and so on... On that I completely agree. I know who my congressman is, and I don't go around "occupying" anything.
Don't pretend the day traders made everything we have though. There is finance and there is finance. One form leads to innovation, the other leads to catastrophe. No amount of quotes from Ronald Reagan will change that.
Okay, I'll bite. I guess I should feel honored that my blog has attracted the attention of a somewhat sentient troll and so I'm going to answer this one piece by piece.
ReplyDelete"Anonymous" above said: "Free markets don't actually make much of anything."
How freaking stupid can you get. Free markets are the ONLY thing that produce ANYTHING. This was proven by the early settlers that came to this continent and it was proven by the former Soviet Union and it has been proven by the North Koreans.
To come here and make a statement like the one above, I would expect you to provide some sort of empirical evidence. Got any?
Forcing people to "invest" in markets where the investors know that there is no return on investment is pure bullshit. The only people with such power are politicians. Nobody who had the choice over the long haul wanted to "invest" in derivitives.
I can look at the players and history and know that the only people who were in favor of the things that were done in the housing market and elsewhere, where those who were "invested" in the Cloward and Piven strategy.