You claim to be against crony capitalism, but what regulations would you put in place to prevent it?
Certainly we can't trust Democrats or Republicans to protect us from crony capitalists. Both parties are equally subservient to their corporate masters.
If you are against regulation, which you seem to be, and you believe that all regulation ultimately works to the benefit of crony capitalists, then you have no workable plan to rid cronies from the system.
Gelinas does have some good ideas IMHO of what types of regulations we need to maintain the free market as a free market, and protect it from the cronies that have driven it over the cliff.
Click here for some good ideas about how to keep free markets free in reality and not just in some theoretical alternative universe where libertarians frolic with the leprechauns and unicorns under rainbows:
IMHO, there is nothing humble about you, that’s why you’ll be proud to know that you are the first person who has responded to my post with an insulting remark. I realize that is something that I shouldn’t tell you... but take it as a gift... a badge of honor to wear with pride.
Believe it or not, I read a lot (nowhere near as much as you, that goes without saying). As a matter of fact, I just ordered another book this am that someone else on FR suggested I read... it has big words and lots of pages, so I’m kind of nervous. No unicorns though, darn it. :( Amazingly, that other person was able to persuade me to read that book without resorting to name calling or belittling me first... go figure!?!
I will read Ms. Genlinas’ book and decide for my know-nothing self if it is possible to legislate morality. Would regulations have kept the rating agencies from rating CCC debt as AAA? Hopefully I will learn in Ms. Gelinas’ book that legislating morality is possible. (Many wise men have said it cannot be done, but they can’t hold a candle to your wisdom, I’m sure)
The entire point of my post is that the free market did not cause this crisis, government meddling in the free market did. You can shoot me down all you want, but when the free market system is daily being attacked by those who would replace it with even more crony capitalism/socialism and communism, it does not hurt to stand up and say something.
As you already know (because if it occurs to a simpleton like me, then you were born knowing it), we haven’t had anything resembling a free market in this country in a very long time... yet we have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of regulations... and we continue to have crisis after crisis.
After listening to several recent interviews of Ms. Gelinas, I do not see where she and I would disagree. The government should stop bailing people out and let them fail, but since they force fed the market trillions of dollars in liquidity that was then leveraged up 1,000 fold through derivatives, now, the gov’t is in a little bit of a rock and a hard place... the old closing the barn door after you have lit it on fire and let all of the horses out dilemma, if ya know what I mean.
But back to the point of my silly little post, who put the trillions of dollars of liquidity out there in order to make everyone feel rich when they weren’t in the first place any why? The government did to buy votes and engineer society.
I stand by my boilerplate statements. If the government had not done the things I listed, there is no way we would have arrived at this catastrophic point. We will always have financial crises, but not of this magnitude if the market is allowed to work. The gov’t caused the problem, which makes turning to them to fix the problem kind of moronic, but what do I know?... nothing!
Anyhoo, thanks for the back and forth. I wish you the best being you. Knowing it all must be a heavy cross to bear.