How much is a police officer/fireman worth to you?

[benbradley]

Originally Posted by Shadow_Ferret

Well I do like pretty things. I like my city parks. I like my libraries. I like being protected from crime and fire. I like having the streets plowed of snow in the winter and the garbage picked up.

And I'm not afraid of taxes because they pay for all those wonderful things.


No. There isn't. The idea that we can all keep getting raises indefinitely is a strange one. The economy is one giant pyramid scheme. It worked just fine in the beginning when we first went from a barter system to a monetary one, but now it's starting to implode. It can't be sustained. You get a raise, that means the company has to raise it's prices to cover your salary, someone else then needs a raise to afford that company's product, that company in turn.... Not to mention the whole supply and demand goes to hell in a handbasket when there's some sort of natural disaster effecting food production, or a hiccup in the oil supply, or whatever.

If you want to blame it on taxes, feel free. But taxes aren't the problem here.

You must be looking at the link Don gave in post #9. But at least it gives full employment as more and more people are needed to operate the printing presses.

I can't wait to write a check using scientific notation.

[Yorkist]

Originally Posted by Chrissy

Re-regulation wouldn't be necessary if we'd let the bastards die from their own evil deeds.

It wasn't really evil deeds. It was bad controls. I call it eliteconomics, or: finance people who won't listen to accountants.

This is, basically, what happened (as I understand it):

In order to compete with the financial industry in Europe, the GOP led an initiative in 1999 to repeal the last bits of Glass-Steagall, which was a series of laws for the banking industry that were designed to prevent another Great Depression/credit crunch/run on the bank/etc. One key provision of these laws was a requirement to keep investment banking (stocks, bonds, etc.) separate from commercial banking (checking accounts, savings accounts, fees, mortgages, etc.) separate from insurance (including high-risk derivatives and "hedging" against those derivatives).

This enabled high-risk financial instruments to get attached to mortgages and enabled investment firms to gamble with depositors' funds - as in, the money in your checking and savings accounts.

It also enabled risky financial instruments to be packaged with good financial instruments and sold through the commercial side of the bank. In other words, the investment house could "hedge" with insurance so that they always made money, as long as things went well - but the depositors' money was at risk, as were all other financial assets tied up in the commercial side of the bank.

It basically enabled investment firms, commercial banks, credit card companies, and insurance firms to conglomerate into a general store of financial madness.

The argument against this is that if the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act had been responsible for the failure of our financial system, then Europe would have felt the heat before the U.S. did. This argument is dumb, because Europe didn't have a housing boom and bust. Many of those risky financial instruments were tied up with mortgages.

When Democrats and Libertarians agree on something, they're usually right. We can trace a large portion of this crisis to bad policy.

[Yorkist]

Originally Posted by Shadow_Ferret

You get a raise, that means the company has to raise it's prices to cover your salary

Well, theoretically at least, you get raises when your productivity level rises in one way or another. You increase in value to your institution as time goes on. And theoretically, the institution is always increasing its profit margin, either through cutting costs (through productivity gains) or selling more products.

With public institutions, raises are either tied to cost-of-living (i.e. inflation) or commensurate with seniority. Theoretically, its tax base is always increasing, as the economy grows and standards of living increase.

Prices aren't determined by costs. There's a relationship, but it's complex. Prices are not "set" by the seller; otherwise, we'd all be able to name our own salaries.

I don't necessarily disagree with your statements via a pyramid scheme; I just want to adjust the costing relationship.

ETA: The reason I keep harping on about this sort of thing in threads is that people seem to think that bad business is fraud, and that fraud is prevented by people just not being bad guys, and that if we just let "the free market decide" then surely these banks wouldn't be so stupid as to operate against their own self-interest like that.

The truth is that organizations aren't always good at operating in their own self-interest, and different parts of the same organization can have different goals. Business isn't always good at seeing the long-term goal or the long-term consequences, and their separate parts don't necessarily act in concert. And they particularly aren't good at doing so during boom times.

I was seeing the writing on the wall for the financial collapse around 2005, when I was 23 years old. How could anyone not know that balloon mortgages were unsustainable? Who in their right mind would choose to insure them? Why were banks changing names twice in one year? Why did you hear about "guaranteed" 10% annual returns? Gah. What happened?

I've always gone to a local bank. I like it when corporate HQ is within a few hours' drive.

And fraud can be perpetrated by anyone at any level of an organization. Fraud occurs due to motive, opportunity, and lack of internal controls. The problem with the conglomeration of the banking, financing, and insurance industries is that there were no longer enough controls. It made an environment easy for fraud to occur, and banks and security firms also got too big to fail.

[Chrissy]

Originally Posted by Yorkist

It wasn't really evil deeds. It was bad controls. I call it eliteconomics, or: finance people who won't listen to accountants.

Whether it was evil or stupid, my real point was the "let them die" part. Anyone smaller would have had to.

Regulation is always deemed the solution: we've got to keep businesses from doing bad/wrong/financially inadvisable things! Yeah, OR we could let them die, as is the natural consequence. Think of what else we could be doing with those tax dollars. Feeding and sheltering the poor, for example.


ETA: Ironically, this just popped into my inbox:

Let Unsound Money Wither Away

Mises Daily: Friday, July 13, 2012

<snip>

The solution is to treat banking as any other business and permit it to operate on the free market — a market completely free of government guarantees of bank deposits and of the possibility of Fed bailouts. In order to achieve the latter, federal deposit insurance must be phased out and the Fed would have to be permanently and credibly deprived of its legal power to create bank reserves out of nothing. The best way to do this is to establish a genuine gold standard in which gold coins would circulate as cash and serve as bank reserves; at the same time the Fed must be stripped of its authority to issue notes and conduct open-market operations. Also, banks would once again be legally enabled to issue their own brands of notes, as they were in the 19th and early 20th century.

Once this mighty rollback of government intervention in banking is accomplished, each fractional-reserve bank would be rigidly constrained by public confidence when issuing money substitutes. One false step — one questionable loan, one imprudent emission of unbacked notes and deposits — would cause instant brand extinction of its money substitutes, a bank run, and insolvency.

It's so radical it just might work.

/derail (and I think we should share the title of Tangent Queen! )

[Diana Hignutt]

Originally Posted by Shadow_Ferret

Well I do like pretty things. I like my city parks. I like my libraries. I like being protected from crime and fire. I like having the streets plowed of snow in the winter and the garbage picked up.

And I'm not afraid of taxes because they pay for all those wonderful things.


.

You made a lot of assumptions in the paragraph that I don't quote above, but I'm more interested in what I did quote.

So, you like pretty things, and you're okay with me having to help you pay for them, at gun point if necessary, whether I want them or not?

But, you'll say I get the benefit of the pretty things whether I want that benefit or not, and that makes it okay somehow.

I do not want the benefit of thugs with guns hassling me (or making you feel safe), I do not want the benefit of destroying the environment because regional sewer plants are cheaper (though far more destructive than lots of little plants), I do not want the benefit of groups of people who think they're better than me telling me what I (a supposedly free person in the capital of liberty) can and can't do, I don't want an empire and endless wars against improper nouns, innocent people, and "rogue states", I don't want 1984 style surveillance, I don't want state run indoctrination programs, I don't want a system that rewards corporate corruption and greed.

I'm sorry, I don't. And it's fucking sad that you think I should, and that I should be grateful for the few decent things I get out of the deal, and ignore the rest, the evil done in my name, with my money. I'm not down with that.

[Don]

Originally Posted by Diana Hignutt

You made a lot of assumptions in the paragraph that I don't quote above, but I'm more interested in what I did quote.

So, you like pretty things, and you're okay with me having to help you pay for them, at gun point if necessary, whether I want them or not?

But, you'll say I get the benefit of the pretty things whether I want that benefit or not, and that makes it okay somehow.

I do not want the benefit of thugs with guns hassling me (or making you feel safe), I do not want the benefit of destroying the environment because regional sewer plants are cheaper (though far more destructive than lots of little plants), I do not want the benefit of groups of people who think they're better than me telling me what I (a supposedly free person in the capital of liberty) can and can't do, I don't want an empire and endless wars against improper nouns, innocent people, and "rogue states", I don't want 1984 style surveillance, I don't want state run indoctrination programs, I don't want a system that rewards corporate corruption and greed.

I'm sorry, I don't. And it's fucking sad that you think I should, and that I should be grateful for the few decent things I get out of the deal, and ignore the rest, the evil done in my name, with my money. I'm not down with that.

And in addition...

[Plot Device]

This "free market" bullshit --at least the brand being peddled by today's business sheisters-- needs to be shown for what it is, which is not just total bullshit but SUPREME bullshit, and I dare say UNAMERICAN bullshit.

The correct meaning of a "free market" isn't that of letting business people run willy nilly and do whatever the fuck all they want. The original idea of a "free market" is to prevent the king from invoking his royal privilege and passing butt-head ridiculous laws which do nothing more than favor one business owner over another. Such as ... perhaps the king's nephew has a spice trading company, so the king passes a whole slew of very uniquely crafted laws meant to strangle a competing spice trade company and allow his nephew's spice trade company to prevail. Favoring your nephew is where we get the word "nepotism" from. So the original philosophy of "free markets" is one which is anti-nepotism and meant to prevent any sort of unfair favoritism in the marketplace.

This nifty catch phrase of "free market" is being grossly misused and misreperesented by many MANY evil nephews out there who are disingenuously pretending that the spirit of "free market" is one of absolutely no constraints whatsoever. They are perpetuating this false religion which claims that the magical fairies who alone are able to bestow upon us the ever-elusive prize of a utopian balanced economy cannot work their wonders on the GDP if any sort of restrictive laws are in place. All we have to do is repeal repeal repeal and then the fairies will come back to Wall Street, sprinkle their glittery dust all over the DJIA, and all will be well again. But we must first take that step of faith and go ahead and repeal everything that's possible to repeal.

That and this banana in my ear is keeping the aligators away from Sesame Street.

[Don]

Originally Posted by Plot Device

This "free market" bullshit --at least the brand being peddled by today's business sheisters-- needs to be shown for what it is, which is not just total bullshit but SUPREME bullshit, and I dare say UNAMERICAN bullshit.

The correct meaning of a "free market" isn't that of letting business people run willy nilly and do whatever the fuck all they want. The original idea of a "free market" is to prevent the king from invoking his royal privilege and passing butt-head ridiculous laws which do nothing more than favor one business owner over another. Such as ... perhaps the king's nephew has a spice trading company, so the king passes a whole slew of very uniquely crafted laws meant to strangle a competing spice trade company and allow his nephew's spice trade company to prevail. Favoring your nephew is where we get the word "nepotism" from. So the original philosophy of "free markets" is one which is anti-nepotism and meant to prevent any sort of unfair favoritism in the marketplace.

This nifty catch phrase of "free market" is being grossly misused and misreperesented by many MANY evil nephews out there who are disingenuously pretending that the spirit of "free market" is one of absolutely no constraints whatsoever. They are perpetuating this false religion which claims that the magical fairies who alone are able to bestow upon us the ever-elusive prize of a utopian balanced economy cannot work their wonders on the GDP if any sort of restrictive laws are in place. All we have to do is repeal repeal repeal and then the fairies will come back to Wall Street, sprinkle their glittery dust all over the DJIA, and all will be well again. But we must first take that step of faith and go ahead and repeal everything that's possible to repeal.

That and this banana in my ear is keeping the aligators away from Sesame Street.

I absolutely agree with the bolded, and most of your historic explanation. But just as foreign policy requires we look at events prior to 9/11, economic policy requires that we look at events prior to the last couple of decades.

There hasn't been anything even remotely resembling a free market since 1913, when the U.S. government declared a monopoly on the creation and manipulation of the one product that makes up half of every market transaction. The last vestige of the free market disappeared in 1971, when Richard Nixon closed the gold window, finally "legitimizing" the dream of every tinpot dictator since the dawn of time, the ability to create the "wealth" of Croesus by declaration. Even earlier, governments created the legal fiction of corporations, entities that shelter individuals from the consequences of their actions. Let's not forget the legislation that permitted loaning out non-existent money and gave it the clever name "fractional-reserve banking," when the proper term is fraud.

All of the current actions of Wall Street are built on the crooked financial foundation that government has laid down over the last 100+ years.

Of course, the solution to all these government actions is to give the government more power.

[clintl]

Did Heinlein use his brain at all when he talked about politics? Because that is about the stupidest quote ever - even worse than the polite society quote.

I'll take being forced to buy something over being kidnapped and tortured any time.

[Diana Hignutt]

Originally Posted by clintl

Did Heinlein use his brain at all when he talked about politics? Because that is about the stupidest quote ever - even worse than the polite society quote.

I'll take being forced to buy something over being kidnapped and tortured any time.

And you're okay with being kidnapped and imprisioned if you don't buy what the government is forcing you to buy? Or others? You're okay with others being kidnapped and imprisioned if they refuse to buy what the government's selling, even if you're okay with it? Is there even a difference? Really?Because I'm tired of paying for the murder of innocents, I am not willing to buy that anymore. And if I refuse to pay for the murder of innocents all over the world...I will be taken away (kidnapped) by thugs with guns (police) and imprisioned.

[clintl]

If you're talking about tax evasion, yes, I am. Tax evaders are stealing services the rest of us are paying for.

[Diana Hignutt]

Originally Posted by clintl

If you're talking about tax evasion, yes, I am. Tax evaders are stealing services the rest of us are paying for.

Are you enjoying the wars, ecological destruction, 1984-style surveillance, and corporate charity, you're paying for? I'm not.

[Greenify13]

Originally Posted by Don

Of course, the solution to all these government actions is to give the government more power.

And sadly there are too many that don't see this!
Thanks (seriously) for sharing that pic, I totally have to share it with my husband...knowing him it'll end up on his office wall in no time.

[benbradley]

Originally Posted by clintl

If you're talking about tax evasion, yes, I am. Tax evaders are stealing services the rest of us are paying for.

There's health insurance as required by Obamacare, which they're being nice about and only charging a "penalty" (which has just been ruled to be a tax) if you don't buy it.

So yes, either you buy health insurance, or you pay an extra tax, else you're a tax evader.

[Shadow_Ferret]

Originally Posted by benbradley

You must be looking at the link Don gave in post #9. But at least it gives full employment as more and more people are needed to operate the printing presses.

I can't wait to write a check using scientific notation.

No. I didn't follow his link (didn't even notice it). This is something that I've wondered about for a good 40+ years. The free market system, or whatever it's called, has never made sense to me. Never seemed sustainable.

[Don]

Originally Posted by Shadow_Ferret

No. I didn't follow his link (didn't even notice it). This is something that I've wondered about for a good 40+ years. The free market system, or whatever it's called, has never made sense to me. Never seemed sustainable.

That might come as a surprise to the 50% of the world's workers that are employed in the underground economy, or grey markets, or System D as it's referred to in the article in post 19, which are about as close to free markets as you'll find on the planet today.

It would probably also come as a surprise to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which expects that two-thirds of the world's workers will be thus employed in 8 short years. The fastest creator of jobs is that market, as the EOCD points out.

By 2020, the OECD projects, two-thirds of the workers of the world will be employed in System D. There's no multinational, no Daddy Warbucks or Bill Gates, no government that can rival that level of job creation. Given its size, it makes no sense to talk of development, growth, sustainability, or globalization without reckoning with System D.

When politicians claim there's a light at the end of the tunnel, what they fail to tell you is that it's the onrushing train of the underground economy; that is to say, free markets outside the control of governmental entities.

[clintl]

Originally Posted by benbradley

There's health insurance as required by Obamacare, which they're being nice about and only charging a "penalty" (which has just been ruled to be a tax) if you don't buy it.

So yes, either you buy health insurance, or you pay an extra tax, else you're a tax evader.

Except there's not really an additional penalty for not paying that tax. If you're getting a refund, the IRS simply deducts it from your refund. If you're not getting a refund, the IRS does nothing if you don't pay it. So it's the reddest of herrings to bring that up.

[clintl]

Originally Posted by Diana Hignutt

Are you enjoying the wars, ecological destruction, 1984-style surveillance, and corporate charity, you're paying for? I'm not.

Everyone has objections to some government spending. Almost no one has objections to all government spending. The thing is, a lot of those tend to be different things for different people. There's a remedy that doesn't evolve tax evasion - vote and try to get elected the people who have the same spending priorities as you do. And if a person can't do that, it probably means that person's priorities are not in line with the majority, which gets to have its way in a democracy.

[Chrissy]

Originally Posted by clintl

Everyone has objections to some government spending. Almost no one has objections to all government spending. The thing is, a lot of those tend to be different things for different people. There's a remedy that doesn't evolve tax evasion - vote and try to get elected the people who have the same spending priorities as you do. And if a person can't do that, it probably means that person's priorities are not in line with the majority, which gets to have its way in a democracy.

Ah, but that's where it gets really fun. The majority are under the impression that they have exactly two choices, and that those two choices are actually different.

[clintl]

They are different.

[benbradley]

Originally Posted by clintl

Except there's not really an additional penalty for not paying that tax. If you're getting a refund, the IRS simply deducts it from your refund. If you're not getting a refund, the IRS does nothing if you don't pay it. So it's the reddest of herrings to bring that up.

"You don't have to pay the tax, because it has already been taken out of your paycheck."