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"So even for people whose own circumstances have not much changed, the cost of the credit is going to rise. For an individual or business that falls behind on p
by logjam 18y ago
"So even for people whose own circumstances have not much changed, the cost of the credit is going to rise. For an individual or business that falls behind on payments or needs an increase in short-term credit because of the slowing economy, credit will be much harder to obtain than in recent years.
This is going to slow growth."
Bang. And there's the dirty little secret about our economy that the hard-core capitalists never mention. The theory is that in unfettered capitalism, those who take foolhardy risks are punished. What few mention is that the economy is so interdependent that the foolhardy decisions made by a few ripple through the entire system.
Now we all suffer for the greed and incompetence of a few.
This is why regulation is vital. Business people have shown over and over again that they are just as incompetent and inefficient, if not strikingly more so, than government.
Cooperation, rather than competition, is the higher good.
- anamax 18y ago> Business people have shown over and over again that they are just as incompetent and inefficient, if not strikingly more so, than government. And therefore the combination is more competent/efficient? It wasn't biz that gave tax breaks to banks to buy Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac stock. > This is why regulation is vital. All regulation is vital? Or is some regulation "vital"? And, what are the odds that we'll actually get "good" regulation as opposed to the crappy regulation that we have? (Note that some of the Enron-reform regulation caused some of the current problems. Oops.)
- gaius 18y agoBusiness people have shown over and over again that they are just as incompetent and inefficient, if not strikingly more so, than government. I'm old enough to remember the nationalized industries, British Gas, British Telecom, British Airways and so on. They became infinitely better almost overnight when they were forced to compete in the market rather than being subsidised monopolies. Cooperation, rather than competition, is the higher good. Even Marx didn't believe that, that's why he was always banging on about dialectic materialism. Name one significant scientific or technological advance that didn't come about through competition, even if it was only to see who could do it first.
- aswanson 18y agoMoon landing, arpanet...
- corentin 18y ago> Moon landing is the result of intense competition with soviet Russia. > arpanet... is the result of a competition between different contractors ultimately won by BBN.
- aswanson 18y ago> Moon landing is the result of intense competition with soviet Russia. debatable, but what about this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_probe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_probe and these: pythagorean theorem, sieve of erasthones, Clarkson-Erdős theorem,
- gaius 18y agoThe same Arpanet built to provide communications in the event of a war with the USSR? Hmm.
- corentin 18y agoAre you saying that, because the economy is so interdependent (by the way, why is it so?), it's better to centralize it even more? And if you assume that some individuals are greedy or incompetent (and it's a reasonable assumption I must say), how do you prevent them from becoming the regulators? > Cooperation, rather than competition, is the higher good. Cooperation works well with people willing to cooperate. It doesn't scale, though, so we have to rely on the next best alternative: competition.