techstepgenr8tion wrote:
monty wrote:
So do you think that this is just another boom-bust cycle of capitalism? We have seen periodic depressions and collapses of credit all through history - not something unique to one party in one country. Is it inevitable that shaky debt accumulates in the financial system and eventually leads to a chain reaction of defaults? Can markets function perfectly when they depend so much on humans, who are quite imperfect? Can markets be more enlightened than the herd instincts of NTs?
I'd like to sit back and watch how this turns out. More and more people are arguing that yes, recessions are even necessary and the more government tries to manually patch them (like now) the more it just delays the inevitable and makes the situation worse (let alone just leaves it for the next set of congressmen/congresswomen or presidents to clean up.
I wish I could really definitively say I had an absolutely clear idea on who's right but even the experts of the experts can't even decide - which in my mind is really sad. If it is true that this is just our reality and that periodic recessions are a necessity and its the best we can summon out of an economic system - it means that our culture has horridly misadvertized life and what life is about; not that I didn't know that already but this just means its even gone a shade deeper than I'd thought.
I'm starting to think that the most stable economy would actually have a social component. It would be a free market, but have strong social taboos against greed and gluttony (being defined as taking a whole lot more than you need, ie having a $900 million a year income while your secretary is paid $50,000 a year, which was the case in many hedge funds). If a society had strong social taboos against greed and gluttony, and some way to remove the offenders from the greater society such as banishment to the desert or something, then it could work. If a person steps out of line, the rage of the public either forces them back in or forces them out.
This is the way most of the Old West mining camps in the US were run-there was very little official government or law enforcement, so societal rewards and punishments such as ostracization and the threat of being hanged were heavily relied on to keep people in line. And it mostly worked, despite occasional abuses. I think that the mining camps were as close to a true anarchist society as humanity is likely to ever come. Some mining camps had such short lives that nobody bothered to organize a governing council or police force. Rhyolite, Nevada, comes to mind. Blair and Goldfield were nearby and also were populated for only short periods, although Goldfield did have a marshal.
Americans tend to focus on either the society or the economy and ignore interactions. A society in which a fortunate few can grab billions for themselves while the masses have their wages slashed so the few can grab even more money is not healthy or stable. That's why I want the system to collapse, because it's profoundly sick. It seems to reward excessive greed and ruthlessness, to the point of sociopathology, at the expense of everything else, even the wellbeing of the general population. It doesn't seem to matter that most of the population relies on donated food to survive while a lucky few have more money than they could ever spend yet want more. As far as the elite are concerned, the poor should drop dead if they're gonna be so "ungrateful" for the crumbs they get-they could wipe up the crumbs so that everybody else gets zilch, how would the poor like THAT? That is not a healthy philosophy.
29 Sep 2008, 7:42 pm
