Were the Robber Barons a myth

A lot of people look at the late 19th Century as a time when out of control capitalism led to the exploitation of the common people. This essay suggests that this is am myth.

We Just Sold Things People Want

From the Hullabaloo blog. 


Selling things people want

David Atkins

The Wall Street Perspective:

To put it bluntly, many on Wall Street still see the events leading up to the financial crisis as a case of banks having legitimately sold something - whether it be mortgages or securities backed by those loans - that someone wanted to buy.

Thomas Atteberry, a partner and portfolio manager with Los Angeles-based First Pacific Advisors, a $16 billion money management firm, says his success "wasn't a gift" and he had to work hard to get where he is. Atteberry says he understands the frustration many feel about income inequality. But he said the problem isn't with those who are successful, but rather our "tax codes and regulations."

There are many products and services in addition to spiking ARM mortgages, naked credit default swaps and BBB tranches of collateralized debt obligations that people want to buy. Also in demand are:

• Professional hitmen
• Professional sex services including underage prostitution
• Animal crush videos
• High grade heroin
• Weapons grade plutonium
• Fire insurance on our rude neighbor's home
• Currency counterfeiting machines

Why does Big Government insist on restricting the flow of goods and services people want to buy with pesky tax codes and regulations? It's so unfair to the successful pimps, drug kingpins, arms dealers, mafia dons and human traffickers who have worked hard to get where they are.


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Cafeteria conservatism and the New Testament

The treatment of wealth and poverty in the New Testament fail to rule out all conservative positions as unChristian, but some versions of it strike me as unacceptable. For example, the ethics of Ayn Rand and the ethics of Christ simply can't be reconciled. Greed is not good.

You can't, as a Christian, say that the wealthy are wealthy because they deserve to be, or that a system that helps the rich get rich and allows the poor to get poorer is acceptable. Eric Cantor, for example said that he thought his role was to help the people on top stay there. That has to be un-Christian.

You can make the argument that helping the poor is perfectly good, but using the coercive powers of government to do so is to do it in the worst way. But it does seem that if you accept the laissez-faire argument, you can't turn around and back out of use the government to help your favorite industry. You can't oppose welfare and the support corporate welfare. I don't even know what disentangling the government from the economy would even look like. IF the government is going to help someone, it has to be the people on the bottom.

What I especially dislike is the kind of cafeteria conservativism that appeals to conservative principle so long as they serve the purposes of the big businesses that fund Republican campaigns. But that is what usually happens when you elect conservative candidates.

Watching the Republican debate last night, the argument seems to be that they kept arguing that markets have a regulating effect on economics, and on that account is should be preferred to government regulation. So, if businesses are profitable, they will create jobs. But, corporations are not national entities, they are international entities. And while workers' rights are guaranteed in America, they are not guaranteed in the Third World. At present, businesses have no incentive to create jobs in America. In fact the tax code actually supports outsourcing. So, as far as I can see, just letting capitalism run its course will NOT create jobs in America. Quite the reverse.

Does Gordon Gekko understand, or misunderstand, capitalism in this famous movie speech?

Can you believe in capitalism without making greed a virtue?

How?

The Roberts Court extends the rights of personhood to fetuses? No, corporations.

This was the Supreme Court that was supposed to tell us that fetuses were persons, or, at least, to permit states to decide that fetuses were persons. Instead, they decided that corporations were persons. Of course the very idea of incorporating involves your not being treated as a person in at least one important sense; LLC means limited liability corporation, which means that people can't go to jail for what the corporation does.

In the present political climate, conservative Republicans always get the part of their agenda done that benefits the big corporations. Fetuses don't make campaign contributions. Corporations do. 

Democratic and Oligarchic Capitalism

The way I look at it, capitalism is at its best when it is democratic, when anybody can enter the field with a new idea or new product and be successful. If we are trying to change to non-traditional energy sources, then I would hope for a fresh field day for innovative entrepreneurs. That's when the pressures of competition actually will pressure even greedy bastards in business to do things that benefit the common good. Capitalism is at its weakest when it becomes oligarchic, when a few entrenched companies have taken over the field, and may in fact be in collusion. That is how I see the oil industry today. Of course, oligarchic capitalists will try to hold on to their position, and use government to preserve their postiion. . The banking industry, with the "too big to fail" companies, which prevailed upon a Republican-dominated government to do the most socialistic thing our government has ever done, would be another example of oligarchic capitalism. It's my hope that acknowledging global warming might give a shot in the arm to democratic, as opposed to oligarchic capitalism.

Free Market Economics and the Too Big to Fail Policy

The basic principle of underlying free market economics, I take it, is the view that when there is free competition businesses will have to behave in ways that benefit the general public. The reason why this must be so is that every business operates under the threat of failure.

But what happens when so much of our economic infrastucture depends upon the success of particular businesses? Two solutions are:

1) Businesses too big to fail must be bailed out by government to prevent infrastructure damage

or better yet

2) Businesses must be prevented by government from becoming too big to fail.

But these two solutions are socialistic in nature. The first of these measures, which was taken under the Bush administration, strikes me as a much larger step in the direction of socialism than Obama's public option.

Free market philosophy, it seems to me, requires this:

3) There is no such thing as a business to big to fail. If they go belly-up, let them go belly-up. Somehow, neither party was willing to accept this. Which suggests to me that we have to start looking for conservatives with a lantern, at least in Washington.

The 1968 Ford Pinto memo

This is pretty awful. It proves that capitalism is hopelessly corrupt and must be replaced by communism. Just kidding. But how should we be protected from these types of abuses.