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In a mathematical sense, how is what has happened with the US banks any different than living under a monarchy where the king can take risks at the expense of t
by chimi 14y ago
In a mathematical sense, how is what has happened with the US banks any different than living under a monarchy where the king can take risks at the expense of the ruled? Isn't escape from this kind of tyranny the reason the first colonists left England?
I'm feeling very John Galt here. 10% of the country is getting unemployment. N% additionally is getting subsidized rent, subsidized farmland, subsidized food, subsidized corporations and banks.
I'm an Entrepreneur and I need every penny. Every penny I keep is reinvested into a business that creates value for the world. HFT doesn't create value for the world. Food Stamps. I don't get bailed out when the weather is bad and my garden dies. I don't have any debt. I don't have a car payment or a house payment.
I'm responsible -- and I'm starting to wonder, really, what's in it for me? We are in a drought and our city has banned outside water usage. We can't fill pools, wash cars, or even water our garden, yet, last night, I go for a walk with my wife and what do I see? Two little kids playing in a big pool of fresh clean city drinking water. People don't care enough.
How are we going to fix our society? It's broken fundamentally. It's like people have disconnected from their role in a larger group of people around them. We get food from a store sold by someone we only know by a plastic name tag. We don't grow anything. We don't know anyone except those who work in the next cube and our family and friends who we don't really depend on unless we are a struggling recent college grad who can't find a job and moves home and those stories are mostly not enjoyable tales told by the disgruntled.
The banks have caused immeasurable suffering to millions, tens, no HUNDREDS of millions of people, perhaps even BILLIONS of people -- and the only banking employee arrested or tried or even simply just stopped from doing what they did to cause that pain is a programmer who took some code from Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs itself was cleared of ANY wrong doing in this mess: http://www.keyc.tv/story/19239634/goldman-sachs-cleared-in-subprime-investigation http://www.keyc.tv/story/19239634/goldman-sachs-cleared-in-s...
We have to fix it. It has to be fixed. We can't keep going down this road, but I don't see anything really changing. Why isn't anything really changing? Why aren't we having serious existential conversations that really deeply change our society to one that will not collapse?
Do we really think telling the banks to do it will work? Do we really still trust them?
I'm really dismayed by all this.
- rayiner 14y agoAt the core of our problems is the John Galt mentality. The idea that you do all these things and other people are mooching off it. The idea that we're anything other than the highly complex and completely inter-dependent society that we really are. If you're an "entrepreneur"... you didn't build that. Your employees are the result of subsidized education. Your customers get to your location driving on subsidized roads. Your electricity, water, sewage, etc, is all subsidized infrastructure. You depend on subsidized legal infrastructure to mediate your interactions with other businesses and customers. If you're a tech business, then 90% of the theoretical foundations of your business are the product of subsidized research. You can't create wealth without community. The only real "John Galt's" in the world are primitive hunter/gatherers. Romanticized portrayals aside, these people have no wealth--they constantly live at the edge of death. You're not John Galt. You're privileged to live in a sophisticated, organized, interdependent community.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- twoodfin 14y agoIf you're an "entrepreneur"... you didn't build that. Your employees are the result of subsidized education. Your customers get to your location driving on subsidized roads. Your electricity, water, sewage, etc, is all subsidized infrastructure. You depend on subsidized legal infrastructure to mediate your interactions with other businesses and customers. If you're a tech business, then 90% of the theoretical foundations of your business are the product of subsidized research. This isn't an argument. It's rhetoric. If it were an argument, it would attempt to establish the criteria for deciding whether a particular set of government programs and the means for paying for them were ideal. Surely there must be some level of democratically ordained wealth redistribution that would qualify as "mooching", no?
- rbanffy 14y agoThe reasoning is flawless. You need to spend less effort to train your employees because they enjoyed a certain level of schooling (which, chances are, you enjoyed too). If you don't need to build your own roads it's because everyone paid for a shared road system. You don't need to enforce laws yourself because your taxes support law enforcement. Of course, people who pay less taxes have (or should have) the same enforcement as you do but that's because of one other thing - that the law applies equally (or, again, should apply equally) to everyone. As it should, John Galt or not. "John Galt" is about self-entitlement. Is about ideas without regard who actually executes them. This community, I thought, understands the fact that ideas, without execution, are worthless. And execution, without employees out of a vastly interdependent society, is a whole lot harder.