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This article makes it sound like laissez-faire capitalism is the problem, and yet simultaneously places blame on Goldman Sachs, which happens to have intimate,

This article makes it sound like laissez-faire capitalism is the problem, and yet simultaneously places blame on Goldman Sachs, which happens to have intimate, corrupt ties with the Federal Reserve and and the US government. I think the problem is actually not capitalism, but government, because government is corrupted by special interests (like Goldman Sachs) and thus the law is heavily abused for the good of those who have done the most corrupting at the expense of everyone else. I believe the more fundamental problem is that there even exist central institutions with enormous amounts of power, like the Federal Reserve or the US government. Even if such institutions start out benevolent, they will inevitably be corrupted, because the temptation is so great. The only way to remove the corruption is to decentralize everything that gets corrupted, making corruption impossible. Consider that democracy is an example of decentralization. Bitcoin, the web, and the internet are further examples.

jtannenbaum 15y ago
The cycle of "it's not big business, it's the government" and "it's not the government, it's big business" leads absolutely nowhere, as evidenced by hundreds of years of zero progress with problems like those brought up in this article. The real problem is culture. It's people. It's not some subset of people that you aren't a part of and should be ashamed of themselves. It's everyone. Corruption isn't created by the "greed of capitalism" or the "power of big guvmint", it's perpetrated by people; self-centered, unskeptical, uninformed, closeminded, dirty people around the world who are just as human as you or I; you can't blame problems on a particular idea like capitalism or lobbying or this or that political party and say "yea, we just need less of that in the world and everything will get better". We need smarter, more sensible people. That is the only, only, only solution. And it's not achieved through current public education, by the way.
- Astrohacker 15y ago
  Our smarts and sense are limited by our genes. What you're calling for is a whole new species.
- turbojerry 15y ago
  The problem is not culture, the problem is criminality. When banks sold MBS and CDOs with AAA ratings claiming they were solid investments which they knew were not and in some cases they were shorting them, that was fraud. When rating agencies, governments, central banks and regulatory authorities helped them, that was conspiracy to defraud. When LEOs looked the other way that was conspiracy too. The whole system is rotten, there can be no reset without removing all these criminals from our societies, unfortunately historically this only happens when the victims of the crimes become angry enough to remove the criminals from power by force of arms or the system collapses in on itself like the USSR, neither of which is a good solution.

jtannenbaum 15y ago

The cycle of "it's not big business, it's the government" and "it's not the government, it's big business" leads absolutely nowhere, as evidenced by hundreds of years of zero progress with problems like those brought up in this article. The real problem is culture. It's people. It's not some subset of people that you aren't a part of and should be ashamed of themselves. It's everyone. Corruption isn't created by the "greed of capitalism" or the "power of big guvmint", it's perpetrated by people; self-centered, unskeptical, uninformed, closeminded, dirty people around the world who are just as human as you or I; you can't blame problems on a particular idea like capitalism or lobbying or this or that political party and say "yea, we just need less of that in the world and everything will get better". We need smarter, more sensible people. That is the only, only, only solution. And it's not achieved through current public education, by the way.

Astrohacker 15y ago
Our smarts and sense are limited by our genes. What you're calling for is a whole new species.
turbojerry 15y ago
The problem is not culture, the problem is criminality. When banks sold MBS and CDOs with AAA ratings claiming they were solid investments which they knew were not and in some cases they were shorting them, that was fraud. When rating agencies, governments, central banks and regulatory authorities helped them, that was conspiracy to defraud. When LEOs looked the other way that was conspiracy too. The whole system is rotten, there can be no reset without removing all these criminals from our societies, unfortunately historically this only happens when the victims of the crimes become angry enough to remove the criminals from power by force of arms or the system collapses in on itself like the USSR, neither of which is a good solution.