Why Max Keiser and Jason Hamlin are Wrong - Regulating Capitalism is Superfluous and Counterproductive
Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 7:05PM [Ed. Note: The following article written by Ed Bugos is Part 1 of 2 in response to Max Keiser and Jason Hamlin]
"This is not a time of radical, revolutionary politics. Not yet. Unrest, riot, dissent, and chaos notwithstanding, today's politics is reactionary. Both Left and Right are reactionary and authoritarian. That is to say, both are political. They seek only to revise current methods of acquiring and wielding political power. Radical and revolutionary movements seek not to revise but to revoke. The target of revocation should be obvious. The target is politics itself" -Playboy, March 1969
Bravo!
This is where I think we are. People are rejecting the “political means” altogether. They just don’t know it yet. They’re still vested in their ill-informed fantasies of the state. Statist fundamentalists are reacting by saying things like, ‘the market will not dictate government policy!’ Libertarians too, especially those on the ‘old right’, continue to cling to the night watchman theory of the state, and refuse to see how the night watchman became a prison warden, and how it can be no other way.
This is, of course, in response to a response of Jeff Berwick’s appearance on the Max Keiser show where Jeff challenged Max on the necessity of having the government play referee. Soon after, Jason Hamlin chimed in on Max’s side with this article.
Subsequently, as the argument went viral, Jeff was then defended by Stefan Molyneux, one of the premier thought leaders on the philosophy of freedom, in his excellent couchside chat video, which you can see here.
Obviously this issue has hit a chord. While the debate of the 1900s was mostly left-statist versus right-statist, we are now boiling it down to minarchists (minimal anarchists) to anarchists (no state).
For me, reading Max Keiser’s initial response to Jeff’s article ("Does the Economy Need a Referee") was irritating. How in the world could Max Keiser call Jeff a birdbrain when Max himself hails the teachings of Adam Smith as the father of all economics when so much has happened since Smith, and so much has been discovered about Smith to easily dispel such myths.
Two weeks ago we heard about 70 students marching out of a Harvard economics class to protest, “what they called a bias towards a destructive brand of free-market economics,” FT.com reported. They blame it for income inequalities, and were quoted saying “There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.”
You know what I thought? I thought there’s nothing I hate more than a bad defense for an argument I hold dear. How dare they, and Max Keiser, hold out Adam Smith as the best defense for a free market system. No wonder in some ways we are losing this battle. Smith is a good stick man because the fact is that he is easy to take down. There was a lot wrong with his work. Imagine putting Keynesian theory up against Mises or Rothbard. It'd be no contest. The fact that they don’t shows only that we are right. The establishment isn’t rejecting Mises and Rothbard because they know anything about them. It is simply ignoring them. It is doing this because it can’t refute them.
The irony is further amplified by the fact that the particular class they objected to was taught by a neo-Keynesian who is on record for recommending intervention after intervention (called stimulus) in recent years. What’s more, the university hosted a conference in 2009 called “The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology, and Consequences” aimed at trying to figure out why, since “everyone knows the current crisis amounts to a failure of the market economy, the stupid rubes continue to believe in it.”
The “rubes” being free market “fundamentalists” like yours truly. This university is one of the most influential distributors of bad economics in the world, and it has been that way for decades. It may have a great law program, or once did, but its economics program has always been biased politically to the left (on traditional left-right scales). The irony though runs deeper for me since one of my kin married into a family of public education bureaucrats who sent their oldest son to Harvard. Just in case you missed that, listen carefully: progressive liberal public education bureaucrats in Canada spend $150,000 putting their son through a private school in the US so he can learn about socialism – though he probably thought he was getting an education in free market economics like all those other students that walked out in protest earlier this month.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
Before we go further, let's ponder what exactly are OWS protestors upset about?
The actual issues brought up vary and often contradict themselves. But we can all agree that they are generally upset about the economic condition of the country – the unemployment, the war, their futures. Who is to blame? The popular vote seems to favor blaming Wall Street, which is why they are not marching on the richest state in the country (where the real 1% reside). Hint, Washington D.C.
We would not argue too much with this choice of address, but for the fact that there is confusion over the causal factors of current circumstances. You can divide the litany of potential causes up between two broad groups. Those who believe that the crisis represents a market failure – who think that free market capitalism is inherently unstable – and those who argue that intervention is the cause of the economic crisis.
Marx was the first to argue that the free market system is subject to crises. This should tip the reader off to the fact that there is scant evidence of the business cycle in the historical record before the 17th century. But, in any case, the Austrian School is the only school of economic thought which argues that recessions are caused by the machinations of a fractional reserve banking system with a protected monopoly on note issue, and supported by a central bank and legal tender laws. So the first thing that those Harvard students, and most protesters, do not know is that the cause of the economic crisis is not the particular character of the capitalist elite, but the coercive system that they use to expropriate.
And of course, we must emphasize the point that war and empire could never exist without a strong central government and central bank… no matter how much the capitalists wanted it.
So the things that the crowds are complaining about the most are enabled by the state.
The ultimate puppet master may be a banker in the private sector but he/she could not cause economic crises and war if it were not for his/her ability to tap into the coercive power of the state. If it weren’t for the state the Goldmans, or the Geckos, could not survive. The bubbles could not get so big. The busts would not last so long. The income inequalities would not be widening.
Okay, so the cause is the state.
Jason acknowledges that the government has been corrupted, and trumpets many of the causes that we and other libertarians favor too, including the need for a return to sound money.
He just thinks the “corporations” corrupted his referee. And he wants smaller government.
This is fine with us too. Any move in that direction would make us ecstatic and would definitely represent change. I’m not naïve enough to think we will achieve a stateless society in my life. Our dispute with Jason, however, is over the role of regulation and the referee in society.
Jason’s basic statement is that capitalism needs regulation. He is not against capitalism, he says, even though his premises suggest he may be. He simply feels that in order to make sure it serves the interests of society capitalism needs to be regulated by an all-knowing regulator.
Here is my list of his premises:
- Private enterprise shares in the blame
- Corporations have corrupted the politicians and regulators - not the other way around
- Bankers should not be allowed to regulate themselves (fox in charge of hen house)
- Capitalism is a dog eat dog system driven by profit motive above all else
- No historic precedent or proof that the markets can regulate themselves effectively
- Takes a dose of blind faith to believe that free market capitalism can regulate itself
- Market system is reactive as it puts MF global types out of business after the fact
- To “save the planet” from the onslaught of capitalism
- The utilitarian argument that the profit motive outweighs moral considerations
- Competition is backwards looking
- Unfettered capitalism would poison our food supply
- Everyone would drive too fast
- If a basketball game needs rules so does capitalism
- Natural monopoly myth
Forgive us if it is not thorough, but it is nevertheless representative.
To be sure, there is no way we can deal with all of Jason’s objections in one essay. There are simply too many. They are all worth answering though, and I am going to make a superhuman effort to answer as many as possible myself - still calling us lazy, Max?.
Part of the reason I will is that Jason did make an effort to keep it civil himself, unlike his protégé Max Keiser. But mainly, I felt that it would benefit many of our other readers as well. I have but a few minor personal criticisms of his style and approach.
The first is that his argumentation was not easy to structure. It was littered with “stick men”, which are basically arguments that he claims anarchist-libertarians hold. In truth they are made up of assertions that do not represent our views and/or misrepresent them, and in any case are easy to take down. This is a typical tactic in political debates. Sometimes it is because the user of the tactic does not really understand his opposition’s argument, say, because he’s never read about it from a genuine libertarian, but rather from someone who is simply hostile to the libertarian idea.
It doesn’t seem like Jason is the latter.
However, as an example, all through Jason’s essay on why capitalism needs a referee there was the presumption that our position favors no rules and regulations whatsoever. This is not true in the least. But it is a typical below the belt charge against “anarchists,” which is why many in the Mises community are beginning to adopt the phrase “private law society” to emphasize the point that our philosophy does not adopt lawlessness; it simply rejects legislation and dictums made by an all-knowing central planning agency. We believe this is an honest misunderstanding rooted in Jason’s indoctrinated belief that the only way to create rules, regulations and presumably law as well is by the state. I use the word indoctrinated deliberately here because this impulse (it does not qualify as an idea in my opinion!) is predicated on a Hobbesian Myth, which Hans-Hermann Hoppe wrote about here.
A significant part of the foundation for the modern democratic ideal of the state rests on the ideas of Hobbes and Rousseau. Hobbes wrote that society would not be possible without the state because every man is another man’s wolf. Note one of Jason’s premises that capitalism is a “dog eat dog” (despite any history of dogs actually eating other dogs) system driven by profit motive above all else. Obviously with this kind of thinking, chaos would reign without a peacemaker. In this thinking, there would be no cooperation without a coercive monopoly acting as a neutral arbiter of disputes between individual members of society.
But this is absolute nonsense and ignores many other economic discoveries in political theory.
For one, it rejects the idea that cooperation can be voluntary when we know otherwise. I could write a whole paper on what’s wrong with Hobbes’s thinking alone. Suffice it to say that he rejects the notion that humans can think long term, can see the benefit of cooperation and act on it, that there may be disputes between man and state, and that the real fabric that holds society together is the principle of the division of labor. Society is an organism based on a latticework of mutually beneficial relationships, not an organization forced into round holes by a coercive agent.
The state has always existed as a parasite on society, not its nucleus.
The Hobbes myth and Rousseau’s “general will” have been rebuked satisfactorily. However, because it forms the foundation of much political thought, including Jason’s, the idea of society making laws through any other kind of agency is simply not perceptible in their minds. They’d rather dismiss those arguments and assume their opponents are aiming for lawlessness!
So in this case Jason’s use of a stick man throughout his essay is part of a general and probably honest misunderstanding of our position. On the other hand, I take some exception to the fact that he lists off so many questions as if we were the ones that have never considered them. It is good that Jason has a barrage of questions, but there must be a name for this kind of tactic because in truth he must know it would take a book to deal with all of them. Everyone is entitled to disagree with our arguments in this essay, but it is unacceptable to dismiss them under the pretense that we don’t have any, and that we’re just reactionary anti-establishmentarians.
The fact is that there is no shortage of literature to answer all of Jason’s questions, and we will provide links to as much as we can. The Mises Institute itself has spawned mountains of it. Finally, Jason calls himself a libertarian. We take mild offense to that. Just a glance at his premises (listed below) should be enough to dispel any such self proclamations. Even his basic understanding of the concept of “competition” is misguided and backwards; calling it reactionary - compared with the state presumably?
And for one who claims to have read Mises and Rothbard we are surprised at his inability to grasp the unique method of the economic sciences as a causal realist discipline rooted in the discovery of laws by deductive synthetic a priori reflection. No one who has understood the enormous contributions of Mises in the epistemological foundations of economics as a science would ever look to the empirical data of history for proving or disproving an economic theory.
The market system does not waste; it ultimately economizes on our scarce resources. Have a realistic look at the conditions of the environment in socialistic societies. The pollution and waste is tragic in some of these places. Natives in these countries routinely clear cut and burn down vast amounts of forest that no one owns; they are too poor to care about the planet, a planet which as George Carlin points out would crush us in an instant if it wanted. Yes, technically speaking humans are attacking the environment by mixing their labor with it to produce capital and other goods or property to sustain themselves. But natives, animals and socialist societies are not the mythical custodians of the environment that water melon economists pretend they are.
BLAMING THE SYSTEM OF CAPITALISM, OR THE CAPITALISTS?
In many of Jason's objections he blames "private enterprise" and charged that Jeff and I don't recognize the blame that "private enterprise" should get in this scheme. For example, “…many of the free market capitalists and libertarians completely lose me when they fail to acknowledge the role that corporations and private enterprise have played in the deterioration of our political and economic systems. They see the government corruption and nothing else, as if wearing blinders to the entire other side of the coin. They make the case that the government is to blame for everything, while failing to acknowledge the role private enterprise has played in the meltdown of our financial system and political process. It is an odd form of intellectual denial.”
This is a problem that comes up quite commonly in the debate over the free market system. It stems from some misunderstandings. In the first place, it is not true. We totally acknowledge that the specific persons working in private enterprise share the blame. Our argument there is that they fear free market competition more than they fear our metaphorical referee, the state.
This accusation by Jason is typical of the objections to free market arguments by the way. It is typical because it is another stick man. He says we blame the government, and not capitalists. If that were true he would be right; but it is not true.
Granted, maybe we shouldn’t complain so much about the address of the ows protests, since Wall Street does have a hand in it the way it is at present. But we do it to emphasize the fact that the problem is not the free market system, which seems to be lumped in with “the capitalists”. There is a difference between blaming a system or an ideology and blaming specific people or classes of people. But this problem often stems from confusion over the definition of capitalism.
It is not defined by money or greed. These things exist independent of a free market in goods – it is possible to be greedy for power, knowledge, or love. And indeed what many anticapitalists really object to is wealth and power. And they think that dishonest fiat money represents this. But just because someone earns a profit or makes money does not make him representative of the system we refer to as "free market capitalism." In other words, just because someone works in the private sector (as opposed to the public sector) does not make him a friend of the ideology of freedom, classical liberalism or libertarianism. It especially does not mean that they have to like “competition.” Many of our readers know from experience that as you succeed in business and establish yourself it would be nice if you could protect what you’ve created from competition.
Nobody wants to constantly have to compete to protect his/her livelihood. Often, especially when everyone else is able to do it, he lobbies the state to regulate his industry; to subsidize, regiment, protect or otherwise restrict competition, which they hence argue hurts their consumers. I know. It sounds ludicrous when stated like that. That’s why they couch it in euphemisms and ideology – they’ll never say ‘we are restricting competition or raising the barrier to entry for your own good.’
Almost every industry in America has been cartelized in this manner - usually by the established second raters losing out to the up and coming revolutionizer. Books have been written about the abuse of antitrust law in this way. The truth is that free market capitalism – unfettered competition – benefits the young because it offers them more opportunity to achieve great things.
WHAT IS CAPITALISM?
First, you should know, the term “capitalism” comes from Karl Marx. It was never regarded a system so much by the classical liberals, and it was intentionally made out to sound exploitive, because Marxism presumed class conflict, the exploitation theory and the primacy of wages doctrines.
The system of production in a free society is anarchistic, and contains elements like the division of labor, freedom of association, cooperation, and free exchange. Life is exchanges, said Carlos Montabaun. This is a common theme in the definition of free market capitalism by the Austrians, “Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government… for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence.” — Murray N. Rothbard, The Logic of Action (1997)
Voluntary “...exchanges bring about the market. The market is precisely the freedom of people to produce, to consume, to determine what has to be produced, in whatever quantity, in whatever quality, and to whomever these products are to go. Such a free system without a market is impossible; such a free system is the market" -Mises
“The market economy is the social system of the division of labor under private ownership of the means of production. Everybody acts on his own behalf; but everybodys actions aim at the satisfaction of other peoples needs as well as at the satisfaction of his own. Everybody in acting serves his fellow citizens. The democracy of the market consists in the fact that people themselves make their choices and that no dictator has the power to force them to submit to his value judgments.” - Mises, Human Action
My dictionary defines capitalism as, “An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.” But this definition is lacking in a lot of respects. It is too broad. It doesn’t say anything about putting economic power in the hands of the consumer, voluntary exchange, etc. I only include this definition to demonstrate how inadequately mainstream understands it.
CAPITALISM IS A DOG-EAT-DOG SYSTEM DRIVEN BY PROFIT ABOVE ALL ELSE
This, again, is not true. There is a popular Canadian television show called the Dragon's Den where entrepreneurs meet a number of financiers to sell their idea (I know, I was surprised to this was on the socialist government television channel!). But, even one episode of Dragon's den will reveal this lie. One particularly harsh "dragon", named Kevin, is routinely harassed by the other capitalist dragons for not having a moral compass. This is another stick man. Capitalism is a system of voluntary social cooperation based on property and mutually beneficial exchanges in property titles, contract, freedom of association and so on. The profit motive does not rule above all else. That is a simplistic stick man. The socialists have long tried to demonize capitalism as a doctrine that is hostile to liberty and the subsistence of common laborers. Capitalists add capital to the efforts of labor that increases labor's real wages. Their relationship is not rooted in hostility. Competition too is not quite like it is in a hockey game, where there is a loser and a winner. Jason's objection here demonstrates that he lacks any understanding of what a free market system really means.
NATURAL MONOPOLY MYTH
Monopolies do not actually occur on the free market unless we are dealing with a geographically limited resource or something like that. The idea that monopolies can be created in a free market is a stick man that comes from a misunderstanding of how the market system works. The definition of monopoly is the ability to restrict output and raise prices. If you think about a free market system, there is no way anyone is able to do this without the help of the state.
Dickensonian monopolists do not exist in the real world. They always have to compete. The cases of antitrust have always targeted some great monopolist but the definition of monopoly used by the state in this context was that a single company had a great share of the market. It didn't matter if this share was in retreat or not either. The fact that one company had a greater market share than the others was all that was required to help the second raters - selling lower quality products at less competitive prices - use coercion to check the leading company… leading because it is giving consumers what they want better than the competition.
WHO REGULATES THE REGULATOR?
Jason Hamlin stated, “Competition as the referee is backwards-looking, reactive and ineffective, especially when the buyer does not have access to all of the relevant information needed to make decisions.”
Jason just cited the case against regulators: the knowledge problem. It is the regulators that are backwards looking, reactive and ineffective.
The fact that the buyer doesn’t have all the information is irrelevant. Neither does the regulator!
Regulating the free market system is superfluous. When it comes to the economy the whole idea is that the free market is a better allocator of scarce goods and capital because it allows a rational calculation of means. The mechanism that regulates the free market is truly democratic. Unlike your votes, every dollar really does count in the free market. The consumers, through their purchasing votes, dictate profit and loss; they dictate which producers make it or break it; and no one is supposed to bail out the losers or else the mechanism breaks down. Unlike the political system of democracy, in which 51% (or less in reality) can dictate everyone’s shoe size, the free market system can and does make shoes to fit every individual’s needs…at least where competition remains unfettered.
A central planning body cannot calculate (unless aided by a market). I personally can't believe it is 2011 and I even need to point this out after decades of history of collapsing central planning. Moreover, the central planner is subject to no checks. It is not accountable to the consumer. Likewise, a regulator appointed by this rigid 51/49 political process, rather than by consumers, is accountable only to the central planner. It is a rigid and simplistic coercive apparatus used to second-guess the consumer’s vote at his/her expense.
If you’ve ever thought about it you’d realize that government regulators are by definition always behind the curve. Something happens that’s blamed on the market system, like, say, the Chinese start knocking off condoms and it results in an epidemic of pregnancies in Alabama. The American authorities are in an uproar. They locate the flaw. They realize that the market failed us. All we needed was a bigger regulator to check every box before it passed customs.
The domestic condom makers can probably pass the extra cost of the regulator on to the consumer –provided it is effective in reducing the supply of condoms in general. But, either way, someone has to pay. After a few years something else happens. This time it was a local operation from Kansas, producing another population bubble, say, in California. Or maybe it is another kind of fraud, involving some kind of condom CDO issued by Wall Street that went bust.
The point I’m trying to make is that almost by definition regulators are fighting the last crime; they can never be as efficient as the market in checking corruption; they can only aid and abet it.
Corporations have corrupted the politicians and regulators -not the other way around
If you understand what the state is and that the political process is simply a means of personal enrichment, for both capitalists and socialist intellectuals alike, you see that the political means is corruption by definition. What is corrupt about serving goods and services to the masses? How can a business man operating under the free market competitive environment be corrupt? He may be personally corrupt, but why does that matter to the consumer? The kind of people that go into politics and government are the kind who like wielding power - that's the kind that succeed at any rate. Competition in politics guarantees it, ironically. The whole apparatus of the state is in our political theory corrupt because it does not have an original right to the fruits of your labor.
Hamlin is stating that the market system is reactive by putting MF global types out of business after the fact... but, this is how the market system works. It puts bad businesses out of business. It must be acknowledged here that the cause of MF's troubles is the manipulation of interest discussed earlier. In a stateless society there would be no economic crisis, at least not one so large. There would be no John Corzine's. There would be no pressure on MF and others to take big risks. In this sense competition does work against the interest of society but only because of the way the system subsidizes and encourages the high rollers. Jason is using current events - which we claim are caused by the state to begin with - against free market capitalism. As if.
BANKERS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO REGULATE THEMSELVES (FOX IN THE HENHOUSE)
Agreed; but free market competition and free market judicial agencies would provide a better check than a referee that is from the outset bought and paid for by the banking industry. Naturally the market is imperfect. Of course this is true. It is no big surprise that a system of production tailored to cater to the masses, rather than an aristocratic elite, is not always going to produce the best quality solutions.
We aren’t claiming that the free market system is a panacea for every ill, but only that it is going to produce much more happiness for everyone than a centrally planned unaccountable oligarchy.
In every industry where it is allowed to work its magic the free market system will relieve scarcity and offer the best check against corrupt practices that is available. And it is accountable. If you are looking for an explanation of the corruption of people like those who run the Goldman’s and the Morgan’s and blame them for the economic crises then look no further than the fact that they are not subjected to competition, but instead, they lobby for more regulation. They lower their heads and accept the greater burden of regulation as if they were taking a punishment. But that’s how they’re fooling people. Not only are they raising the cost of competition, but also, since they have less competition, guess who the regulator really works for? The people who pay the bills! And ultimately that means the consumer and taxpayer.
It is no coincidence that the following quote was chosen for the front of Molinari’s book, “The interests of the consumer of any commodity whatsoever should always prevail over the interests of the producer.” - Molinari
The nub of it is this. The state cannot be a referee. From the moment it lifts a finger to interfere in industry it takes economic power out of the hands of the consumer and puts it into the hands of the producers…to be split between both labor and capitalists, who together rape the consumer.
Thus regulating capitalism is like controlling a regulator; and usually it is not an improvement, but rather an impairment of opportunities that raises the cost of innovation and restricts competition.
Most every economic crisis that is in the front pages today is caused not by the operation of the free market system, which is nothing but voluntary exchanges, but rather it is the interference in that system that causes it. Comments like, ‘we have to do something to boost the economy’ are the problem. Government cannot produce wealth. And it is a poor regulator. It was never meant to be a regulator, especially not of economic affairs. It is the 20th century progressive liberal that has fashioned it after such an impossible aim. History tells a different story of man’s use of state.
Not only is it redundant to regulate a free market system, it is also counterproductive.
[...to be continued tomorrow]
Reader Comments (9)
In his latest essay above, The Vigilante has ratcheted-up my understanding of recent events.
Click! "…'acquiring and wielding political power. Radical and revolutionary movements seek not to revise but to revoke … politics itself' [-Playboy, March 1969] … People are rejecting the “political means” altogether. They just don’t know it yet. They’re still vested in their ill-informed fantasies of the state. "
Click! "… nothing I hate more than a bad defense for an argument I hold dear. … The establishment isn’t rejecting Mises and Rothbard because they know anything about them. It is … ignoring them … because it can’t refute them."
Click! "Here is my list of his premises" [Superb tactic of actually listing another's premises.]
Click! "The state has always existed as a parasite on society, not its nucleus."
Click! "The kind of people that go into politics and government are the kind who like wielding power - that's the kind that succeed at any rate. "
-- Peter
Thailand
Peter4@allmail.NET
.
If the government was strong and moral, it would not matter how much the bankers or corporations lobbied, they would get nowhere fast. The government has all the power and all the guns. Our first priority must be to "CLEAN UP THE GOVERNMENT" the rest will just follow. Trying to clean out corporate greed with a corrupt government is like trying to clean a wound while bathing in a vat of shit.....
All governments inevitably progress to tyrannies. Freedom is always reduced. Demands made are always greater. The ink wasn't even dry on the US Constitution before the government it created began trashing it. Even if we could return to a government identical in size and scope to the one of 1787, it would not matter.
The Keiser-Berwick drama seems to come down to a basic difference in outlook between those adherents of the classical liberalism of the Founders represented by the Constitution, where liberty couples with responsibility, and those adherents of anarchism, where liberty is disordered.
It seems unfair to cast Keiser as a central planner because he feels, in a very classical liberal sense, there is some role for and a purpose to government. The Constitution established ordered liberty: a delicate area between repressive force of government and anarchic, individual free will.
If my memory serves, Berwick admitted he is an anarchist in the now (in)famous interview with Keiser.
One thing I'd like to hear some of these commentators address is whether or not a Government assuming debt in the name of the people is a legitimate practice. I see "sovereign" debt, coupled with infinite amounts of debt-based currency, as the primary cause of what ails us.
A small group of people sit around making deals amongst themselves and claim we have a responsibility to cover their debts for them (a claim that is perpetuated by the media they own and that was built through Government subsidies and coddled by Government agencies/departments).
Look at the EU! Government replaced by the same people who created the instruments that ramped up the debt, that destroyed the economy, that negatively impacted the lives of countless millions, and that received billions in tax breaks and free money - all because they paid off those who assumed the debt so they'd use assumed Government "authority" to release their drone-like enforcers upon us when we cannot pay what they demand (for our own good). At least we still have a (pretend) middleman here in the US, but the facade has worn about as thin as a puff of smoke.
The Circle Jerk Debt Machine brought to you by The GovBanksterCorp Cartel™
Govt = God
Politicians = Clergy
Constitutions/Statutes/Regulations (i.e., "Law) = Bible/Divine Commandments/Word of God
Citizens = Sinners
Taxes = Tithing
Disobedience to the Law = Sinning
Fines/Imprisonment = Penance
Statism really is an irrational belief system--JUST like religion. Just like religion, it sees people as being born with "Original Sin"... people are inherently 'bad' and need the guiding hand of God-Govt and its ministers here on Earth.
They are delusional in that they really do believe the entity called "govt" exists separately from the people who run it. "Govt. isn't bad, its just the people running it."
They even delude themselves into separating made-up LEGAL TITLES ("Executive/President", "Congressman/Representative", "Senator", "Judge", "Regulator", etc.) from the HUMAN-BEING wearing the title. "I don't like Obama, but I respect the office of the Presidency."
And, MY FAVORITE: Who gets BLAMED when things go bad? You guessed it: Sinner-Citizens! JUST like religion: everything good is credited to God while everything bad is OUR fault. "Its our fault for not upholding the constitution and/or electing better govt. officials."
Just like any religion, there are numerous sects, cults, and dogma. And, w/i these sects and cults, there are schisms and disagreements over how to "interpret" the word of God-Govt. Endless numbers of people claim to know the ONE and TRUE God-Govt.
For the Keisers and Hamlins of the world, "Regulatory Democracy" is the one, true god...and they are the ones who know the true interpretation of this god's word! If only Max's and Jason's will could be enforced over all of society...!
I'm to the point where I almost consider statism to be a mental disease.
Secondly, once government forbids regular legal action against specified groups, the market regulation-risk of liability suits-is gone and it is no wonder that there is a cry for regulation. What does one expect when groups of people are placed above the law?
It should not come as a surprise that a program such as Dragon's Den appears on "socialist" television-the transaction taking place would be fantastically risky in a free market, since all of the "financiers" would be placing every cent of their personal wealth at risk to back some hare-brained "entrepreneurial" idea-with no liability limitation whatsoever. The flip side, fortunately, is that those with actual business ideas could implement them much more easily without the need of going hat in hand to some preposterous "financier".
Since one cannot have corporations without a government-I fail to see the argument.
great info, and definitely beneficial advice... but, personally, i believe that you can see in these vast array of topics from the alternative press & movements, for example, the rising interest in going back to the gold standard, investing in gold and the gold market for sound currency stability due to the collapsing american dollar, and there are plenty of people who are out there searching for a good source for information on mining, gold, and precious metal stocks... the best source that i've personally found states that it's free stock alerts, "scour the Mining and Precious Metal universe to find stocks that are on the verge of breaking out or that are undervalued"... check them out at http://www.MiningStockAlerts.com if you happen to be one of those people out there searching for truly profit-gaining results in the mining stock field. :)