Comments on: Casting Blame, Part II

By: Lost & Found

Lost & Found — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:50:54 +0000

Go on, Barry. Most of the people are stuck with ignorance.

By: Lost & Found

Lost & Found — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:37:47 +0000

Ooops. I meant to write “entities”, of course. My apologies for the typo.

By: Lost & Found

Lost & Found — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:35:30 +0000

Hey, Jamie. You would have quite a case in point IF one would deem banks as being government entitities. They are not, by the way. Private market participants. And just look at the sheer numbers. Really, really big figures of wealth they have stolen and are stealing from the common man with the help of the government that supports all this bailout crap.
Wolves dressed as sheeps are them bankers, the crown of the free market. Hahahaha.
And when push comes to shove, it won’t probably help a lot when John Doe has a cell phone or is able to type a comment on the internet.

By: forsakem2

forsakem2 — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:26:18 +0000

They are still trying to turn base metal into gold.

It don’t happen the nearest they can get is having somebody else who is daft enough to pay the price.

By: James R

James R — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:23:31 +0000

Lost & Found: re-read my quiz and ponder again what doesn't work: government, or the free market. Here's something else for you to ponder. Pull out your mobile phone and look at it. 30 years ago, that device was the size of a briefcase and cost thousands of dollars per month to operate. They were the playthings of the über-rich; ordinary people couldn't possibly afford them. But today, thanks to the competition and choice that the free market brings, mobile phones the size of a deck of cards—that have battery life and features that were the realm of science fiction 30 years ago—are given away for free. Tell me, with a straight face, that you believe the government could have taken a technology that was once the privilege of the über-rich, improved it a thousandfold, and made it a commodity item. (Can you not appreciate the irony that the technology you are using to dismiss the free market was not only created by the free market, but could have only been created by the free market?) The one and only reason why you, me, and a great percentage of the world's population don't live lives of backbreaking, soul-crushing poverty is thanks to the free market. All of the woes that people in ignorance attribute to the free market are in fact the direct result of government interference in the free market. If you really think that the free market doesn't work—that we should just let the government [continue to] run the economy instead—you might as well just slit your own throat now. It'll be faster, and less painful.

By: Lost & Found

Lost & Found — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:42:19 +0000

Free markets don’t work because there are no responsible people to operate them smoothly. It’s that easy.

By: Lost & Found

Lost & Found — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:50:27 +0000

Bingo

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:34:33 +0000

Keep it up, James R. I had a number of similar thoughts while reading the Ritholtz essay, but you’ve articulated them better than I could have in all probability. Nevertheless, give Ritholtz his due. He parrots what the liberal media wants to hear, which gives him public attention, which in turn makes him money. At the end of the day, people like him are the root of the problem, just like the 535 graspers and their staff that work on Capital Hill. How do I know that? I once worked there as and later as an investment banker. Been there and seen it.

By: James R

James R — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:14:49 +0000

W. MacKenzie: the Federal Reserve exists because an act of Congress chartered it. The seven members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. And there is a giant revolving door between the Federal Reserve and government—the most recent example being Obama’s tapping Tim Geithner (the then-current President of the New York Fed) to be the new Treasury Secretary.

I’ll grant you that in theory, the Federal Reserve is a private institution. But in any practical sense, to claim that the Federal Reserve is “private” and “independent from government” is laughable.

The Federal Reserve is merely another branch of our bloated, interventionist, meddling, incompetent government. That is why my “quiz” treats it as being part of government: because it is.

By: James R

James R — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:06:31 +0000

TC: complaining about the ability of private institutions to corrupt the government is like complaining about the ability of flies to locate a giant stinking garbage dump.

The bigger government becomes—the more pies it has its grubby little fingers in—the more powerful it becomes. Power inevitably corrupts, no matter how many laws and regulations attempt to prevent it.

The Founding Fathers knew that a small and limited government was necessary to a proper and free society—but they knew all too well the inevitable tendency of government to grow in both size and power. They tried as hard as they could to chain government and bind it to the Constitution, but the American people became complacent and lost their vigilance.

And thus, some 200 years later, we find that we have surrendered many of our personal liberties (and virtually all of our economic liberties) to an ever-growing leviathan government that is strangling our economy and our freedoms with its incompetence and corruption.

“Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.” – John Adams, April 26 1777

We should all be ashamed at what we, in our complacency, have permitted government to become.