The Little Thread Which Grew - the Apollo '73 to Everything But

[afaceinthecrowd]

Nice, Face . . . as usual!

A good example of this is the current scenario with the US banking system. At the end of 2009 the FASB caved in to the politicians of Washington to set a fraudulent standard of accounting with respect to the valuation of bank assets.

What was going on was a debate on how to value the various "assets" banks held on their books . . . the revised standard that was going to come in would have valued assets at current market value . . . a standard called "mark to market."

Weeeellll, a vast amount of "assets," as in the alphabet soup of derivative instruments held on their books actually had no market value because no one would buy them as no one could trust the junk (we are talking primarily about the collateralized debt obligations based on US home mortgages many of which were the sub-prime type crap, etc., etc.) And the truth is, the mortgagees were defaulting like flies hit with DDT.

So, the political deal was struck at the end of 2009 to allow the banks to place any notional on these crap assets they chose. So, the fact now is that your CitiCorps and Bank of Americas of the world are showing on their books billions of $$$ of assets that are actually often worthless, at worst, or worth orders of magnitude less at best . . . in fact my insider informer types are telling me these big banks are actually insolvent but are only held together by accounting gimmickry.

The "profits" declared for the 1st quarter 2010 were only the result of being able to rewrite the value of the junk they have stuck on their hands. Of course the head honchos paid themselves lovely bonuses based on these profits!!

There's more on this . . . but this will do for now

R

Yep!

Nice summation Rog, as usual.

Your right on cue with the 2nd verse, same as the 1st:

The S&L meltdown was primarily caused by changes in Fed Statutes followed later by the Tax Code changes in ’86 re: accelerated depreciation write off’s and the Arabs opening the spigot and driving down the price of oil, which completed a closing vice on the main source of domestic capital backing up the negative cash flow REIT’s and Partnerships that a few months before were high return/low risk investments. Then the Fed's seized the commercial Real Estate Market "to protect John Q. Citizen" from what the Fed's had done and sold off everything for a fraction of the hard costs that it had taken to build and develop the properties a few months to a few years before. Fortunes didn’t go up in smoke, they were just moved around on the three card monte table and the tax payer ponyed up to sweeten the pot …and is still paying off…can you all say “National Debt”?

Face

 

[Hatshepsut]

Yep. Short-term profits.

Don't you just love senior execs in collusion with accounting types doing a "creative accounting" thing to make the numbers look good? Bonuses all around! WhooHoo! Bonuses, yes, but just for the seniors.

I was speaking with a friend last week who was going through this situation. The sales force was having a hard time collecting on bonuses due being behind thousands of dollars. Some of the force were having to get Payday loans, pay late fees and all that goes with not having enough money, even though bonuses, as due, would have given them more than enough.

It seems top management was holding back to make the spreadsheet look good for their own bonuses.

God if I had a nickel for every time I'd seen this.

Once at our large Embassy Suites Resort in the Disney area we had NO trash cans around any of the swimming pools. In the executive meetings it is the thing to come up with ideas ideas ideas. It was someone's brainy idea to get rid of the large metal mesh cans already surrounding the guest outside areas and game courts. They were deemed NOT aesthetic enough. Poof. Gone.

Time for departments budget review and bonuses. Well, they wouldn't get their bonuses if they were over budget. Hence, no new trash cans arrived.

Solution: Have busboys make more rounds of the pools picking up things in a rolling cart. But after one week payroll was cut back for more budget demands. Employees were asked to take some vacation leave. The busboys jumped on this first.

We were budgeted for landscaping. OK Great! Get it every 6 months whether needed or not. It is supposed to be in the budget. Direct overhead management has maintenance help dig up all the long grass and bushes and plants and flowers leaving massive holes in the now barren plots around the entire building. Huge safety hazard as well as ugly ugly ugly.
Ooops, time for another monthly budget meeting and corresponding bonuses. The mgr who has now landscaped his daughter's new home with our plant life decides not to issue the checks for the arriving landscapers. The ugliness went on for 6 months. Same mgr who got rid of the very needed and acceptable trash canisters.

It's all about their bonuses. It's all about seeming to have big ideas at the meetings re your department.

One food and beverage manager decided that the surrounding 5 pizza joints walking through our huge atrium to deliver to the rooms were getting way too much revenue from our guest consumers. He went to Dallas to learn how to run a Pizza Hut franchise right out of our room service area. Result was much less of the menu items which cost more were being sold. Other result was that room service employees were no longer making a grand a week. Other result was that room service became pizza handlers adding their own 17%. Other result was that mom's complained when gofer teens returned to the rooms with little or no change with pizzas costing more than expected. Other result was room service personnel were reprimanded. Other result was that they did it anyway. Final result was change of whole serving staff and obtaining new outside mgmt to solve the problem of crashed statistics on the customer service surveys.

Brainy ideas in the name of proving one deserves a bonus for making changes to save money in their departments. :confused2: So often these things are not thought through...or their state of financial emergency causes them to just talk out of their asses. But I guess they believe their jobs aren't secure if ideas aren't kicked out constantly.
Problems and solutions....once again.

 

[Ted]

The problem with the Fair Tax is that it is a sales tax. Sales taxes are regressive in that they invariably effect the lower incomes far more than higher incomes. Purchases for working class families are much less "discretionary" being dictated by necessity. Whereas the wealthiest families, "necessary spending" accounts for a much lower level of expenditure and they can easily divert their "discretionary spending" into socially non-productive "financial assets".

Having progressive tendencies, I favor something like a 40% tax with a standard deduction of 30K. Thus, families at or below 30K/annually pay no tax. At 50K/annual, the effective tax is 16%. At 100K/annual the effective tax is 28%. At 200K/annual the effective tax is 34%. And at 500K per annum the effective tax is 37.6%.

Taxes are easy to compute, having only two variables: standard deduction and maximum tax rate. The burden is easily shifted by adjustments to either deduction or tax rate. The taxes are "hyperbolic" in that even the wealthiest, no matter how wealthy, wind up paying something less than the amount determined by whatever has been defined to be the maximum tax rate (40% in the example).

However, taxes are unavoidable. Complex systems innately require the most "overhead". Taxes cover the cost of overhead. As societies & economies become more complex there "overheads" necessarily expand disproportionately. The only way to "restore a simpler model" is to down grade the complexity of the system. In terms of human society that means FEWER humans and/or LOWER LEVELS of technology. Neither is "politically popular" as a general solution, hence the problem.


Mark A. Baker

You don't really know what the Fair Tax proposes, do you?

Allowances are made for the poor so their living expenses are covered without taxation.

 

[Ted]

More Management Brilliance from the Prophets of Profit

Link

The Economic Collapse
Sept 26, 2010
The United States is rapidly becoming the very first “post-industrial” nation on the globe.  All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing.  It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution.
 
  It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes.  It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II.  But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America.  Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone.  Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period.  The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little.  Do you know what our biggest export is today?  Waste paper.  Yes, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us.  The United States has become bloated and spoiled and our economy is now  just a shadow of what it once was.  Once upon a time America could literally outproduce the rest of the world combined.  Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do consume more than anyone else in the world.  If the deindustrialization of America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?
 
Any great nation throughout history has been great at making things.  So if the United States continues to allow its manufacturing base to erode at a staggering pace how in the world can the U.S. continue to consider itself to be a great nation?  We have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world in an effort to maintain a very high standard of living, but the current state of affairs is not anywhere close to sustainable.  Every single month America does into more debt and every single month America gets poorer.

So what happens when the debt bubble pops?

The deindustrialization of the United States should be a top concern for every man, woman and child in the country.  But sadly, most Americans do not have any idea what is going on around them.

For people like that, take this article and print it out and hand it to them.  Perhaps what they will read below will shock them badly enough to awaken them from their slumber.    
 
The following are 19 facts about the deindustrialization of America that will blow your mind….

#1 The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001.  About 75 percent of those factories employed over 500 people when they were still in operation.

#2 Dell Inc., one of America’s largest manufacturers of computers, has announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an investment of over $100 billion over the next decade.

#3 Dell has announced that it will be closing its last large U.S. manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in November.  Approximately 900 jobs will be lost.

#4 In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide.  So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States?  Zero.

#5 According to a new study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, if the U.S. trade deficit with China continues to increase at its current rate, the U.S. economy will lose over half a million jobs this year alone.

#6 As of the end of July, the U.S. trade deficit with China had risen 18 percent compared to the same time period a year ago.

#7 The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000.

#8 According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.

#9 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output.  In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.

#10 Ford Motor Company recently announced the closure of a factory that produces the Ford Ranger in St. Paul, Minnesota. Approximately 750 good paying middle class jobs are going to be lost because making Ford Rangers in Minnesota does not fit in with Ford’s new “global” manufacturing strategy.

#11 As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing.  The last time less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.

#12 In the United States today, consumption accounts for 70 percent of GDP. Of this 70 percent,over half is spent on services.

#13 The United States has lost a whopping 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

#14 In 2001, the United States ranked fourth in the world in per capita broadband Internet use.  Today it ranks 15th.

#15 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.

#16 Printed circuit boards are used in tens of thousands of different products.  Asia now produces 84 percent of them worldwide.

#17 The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States.

#18 One prominent economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.

#19 The U.S. Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty and according to them that is the highest number of poor Americans in the 51 years that records have been kept.
So how many tens of thousands more factories do we need to lose before we do something about it?

How many millions more Americans are going to become unemployed before we all admit that we have a very, very serious problem on our hands?
How many more trillions of dollars are going to leave the country before we realize that we are losing wealth at a pace that is killing our economy?
How many once great manufacturing cities are going to become rotting war zones like Detroit before we understand that we are committing national economic suicide?

The deindustrialization of America is a national crisis.  It needs to be treated like one.

If you disagree with this article, I have a direct challenge for you.  If anyone can explain how a deindustrialized America has any kind of viable economic future, please do so below in the comments section.

America is in deep, deep trouble folks.  It is time to wake up.

 

[nw2394]

The Economic Collapse
Sept 26, 2010
The United States is rapidly becoming the very first “post-industrial” nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing. It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution.

It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II.

Sorry Ted - I like you - but when you quote stuff like this it pushes my British buttons. Ths U.S was NOT the forefront of the industrial revolution. First sentence from Wikipedia on the subject:

"The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transport and technology had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions starting in the United Kingdom, then subsequently spreading throughout Europe, North America, and eventually the world."

And as far as WWII is concerned, the already overly fat American arse needed the Nips to give it one almighty kick before the good ol' U.S. of A would do the decent thing and join in - and had it not been for primarily for the Brits and, yes, her then Empire - plus - ye gods - the Soviets, there wouldn't have been much left of the rest of the world to f***in' well save.

/rant off

As to the sentiment of the rest of the article - yes - no doubt there is much in it - but you could pretty much substitute Europe for every time it says America and see much the same picture here as well.

Nick

 

[Ted]

Sorry Ted - I like you - but when you quote stuff like this it pushes my British buttons. Ths U.S was NOT the forefront of the industrial revolution. First sentence from Wikipedia on the subject:

"The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transport and technology had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions starting in the United Kingdom, then subsequently spreading throughout Europe, North America, and eventually the world."

And as far as WWII is concerned, the already overly fat American arse needed the Nips to give it one almighty kick before the good ol' U.S. of A would do the decent thing and join in - and had it not been for primarily for the Brits and, yes, her then Empire - plus - ye gods - the Soviets, there wouldn't have been much left of the rest of the world to f***in' well save.

/rant off

As to the sentiment of the rest of the article - yes - no doubt there is much in it - but you could pretty much substitute Europe for every time it says America and see much the same picture here as well.

Nick

No offense intended.

We used to teach history here in the States and we know where the Industrial Revolution started.

It was WWII that caused us to ramp up over here in a major way.

I have been meaning to apologize to my Brit friends and associates over our idiot president's disrespect to Queen and country. If you want to send that bust of Churchill back I will ensure it a safe home until I can place it in the White House where it was originally intended.

 

[CarmeloOrchards]

frivolity

Larry The Cable Guy has the answer






Everyone concentrates on the problems we're having in our country lately: Illegal immigration, hurricane recovery, alligators attacking people in Florida . .
Not me -- I concentrate on solutions for the problems -- it's a win-win situation.

* Dig a moat the length of the Mexican border.
* Send the dirt to New Orleans to raise the level of the levees.
* Put the Florida alligators in the moat along the Mexican border.


Think about this:


1. Cows
2. The Constitution
3. The Ten Commandments


COWS
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track a single cow, born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow.

THE CONSTITUTION
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq ...why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore.

THE 10 COMMANDMENTS
The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse is this -- you cannot post 'Thou Shalt Not Steal' 'Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery' and 'Thou Shall Not Lie' in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians, it creates a hostile work environment.

 

[nw2394]

I have been meaning to apologize to my Brit friends and associates over our idiot president's disrespect to Queen and country. If you want to send that bust of Churchill back I will ensure it a safe home until I can place it in the White House where it was originally intended.

Yuh - well - it would probably look better than busts of some recent incumbents. Churchill was a great war leader - but not so much in peace time. We all have our goods points and our not so good ones!

 

[CarmeloOrchards]

Coming Attractions:

 

[Hatshepsut]

Coming Attractions???

More to come............

.......waiting.

 

[lkwdblds]

Good thinking Ted!

A Pleased Creditor is, perhaps, an ideal scene for the Dir. of Disbursements. The measure of the creditor's pleasure is how much credit he is willing to extend. In that case, credit extended vs credit used would be one possible stat.

There could be other possibilities, this one just off the cuff.

Often neglected with the usual idiot conditions assignments in an org, your stat is very dependent on what someone else is doing on their post. The Dir. of Disbursements can work his ass off, yet if there is no or inadequate GI the stat for that post will eventually crash through no particular fault of the Dir. of Disbursements.

Paragraph 1. Good thinking Ted. That would solve the dilemma in a non Scientology company. However, in Hubbard's policy there was no purchasing allowed to me made by buying items on credit. All items were paid in full by check (or cash) at the time of purchase. Thus if the Org needed a big ticket item such as a Xerox machine, for say $3,000, the FP committee would do set asides, putting aside perhaps $300 a week until the item could be purchased for cash. Hubbard was not interested in either paying interest or colletcting interest. There were some Org accounts, such as the Building Fund which might have $5,000 or $10,000 in them, equal to $25,000 to $50.000 today. Hubbard policy was to leave the money in a checking account and not put it into savings and earn interest on it.

At the time, the Savings and Loans were paying around 5% per year on savings accounts. I toyed with the idea of transfering the Building Fund money into an interest bearing account in my own name. At the end of every quarter, I would transfer the $5,000 back so the statement at quarter's end would still show $5.000 but my own account would now have $62.50. I would continue doing this every quarter, picking up $62.50 plus accrued interest per quarter. At the end of the year, I would have around $255 in my account. I could keep this up indefinitely and still the Org's money would stay intact. I seriously toyed with doing this but chickened out. I figured that I would be caught eventually and would be declared even though the Org never lost a penny.

Paragraph 2 - It is tough to figure anything out. I gave my best idea in my earlier post which you quoted.

Paragraph 3 One week, Kitty, my Senior, went through treasury and asked each staff member if their stats were going to be up on Thursday. I answered "No Sir, it doesn't look like it." She challenged me and I said that the Org had a low GI last week and consequently not many bills were okayed for payment by the FP committee.

Kitty jumped all over me as being reasonable and gave me some ridiculous tirade, asking me to assign all the people in Division II a condition of Danger for not bringing in enough income and charging them with endangering my job. I said that it was ridiculous to do that and she started screaming at me to go over to the Reg Office, and start bypassing the reges and wearing that hat myself. I went over to the Registrars office to start doing that. About a half hour later, Irene Howey walked into the reg office and saw me trying to reg someone and asked me what the hell I was doing. I told her Kitty ordered me to bypass the reges. Irene told me that was crazy and she would order Kitty to craming and for me to get out of the reg office and go back and work on disbursement business. More fun and games circa "1973"!
Lakey

 

[clamicide]

I was in this movie, but I can't remember what part or what I did. I just remember there were a lot of desks and I was in the secretarial pool. I've never seen the movie all the way through to see myself in it. I only know I was in it because I get a residual for $10.00 once a year when it's shown or sometimes its every other year, so I've been getting these residuals for something like 43 years now. It's been a long running movie.

Holy frog-jam! That is actually one of my fave movies of all time for some reason. What a trip!

 

[gfyork]

Just setting the record straight.

Seeing as this is what you truly mean, just say it:

"I want the poor & working classes to pay a disproportionate share of taxation as wealth is a privilege accorded to few and is entitled to be indulged."

Taxing everyone at "the same rate" is only "fair" in libertarian fantasies. The reality of life is that costs associated with the basics of living are inflexible at the low end. There are minimal physical requirements which MUST be maintained in order for life, much life an acceptable life, to be maintained. In a civilized nation there are fiscal costs associated with those minimal physical limits. Those costs are disproportionately burdensome on those with limited means, i.e. the poor & working classes.

Nor, do "free markets" provide miraculous means of altering income at will. So called "free markets" are quite useful at distributing existing supplies of products among would be purchasers in a RELATIVELY efficient fashion. However, the relative efficiencies are FAR FROM "perfect" and any number of NON-ECONOMIC factors preclude "free markets" serving as reliable determinants for public policies beneficial to the community as a whole.

[In simple math terms "free markets" can be useful tools for "local optimization" of resource distributions. They aren't good for purposes of "global optimization" generally, especially in the face of non-economic social factors such as are commonly met with in any HUMAN COMMUNITY. Global optimization is a much different problem generally from local optimization. Those who ignore such distinctions make foolish and inappropriate over-simplifications in their assumptions.]

A "pure flat tax" when considered as a genuine policy proposal rather than as a purely theoretical teaching construct is simple evidence of its proponent being wholly divorced from any actual reality.


Mark A. Baker

Mark,

I generally enjoy your posts and, even when I don't, particularly, I am rarely moved to reply simply because I disagree. I'm generally fine with folks disagreeing with me -- perhaps because I have had rather a lot of experience with that phenomenon.

But. (You knew there was going to be a 'but' didn't you?) I've been a libertarian even longer than I was a scientologist and I do hate to see people get the wrong idea about us critters. Libertarians, that is.

I've highlighted in red and reddish brown the only two sentences I care to protest. The first implies that libertarians favor a flat tax. I'm sure that some folks, who style themselves 'libertarians' do, in fact, favor a flat tax. Of those who do, some probably favor it thinking it the lesser of many greater evils, or as (possibly) being less 'taxing' on them personally.

Whatever. I'd hope no one gets the idea that genuine libertarians actually favor _any_ 'tax' whatever that they have not explicitly agreed to pay. This comes from our general allergy to the 'initiation of coercion.'

The second point I've highlighted, re 'free markets,' hinges on the same point: ANY departure from a 'free market' involves the initiation of coercion. That is, it requires someone who is willing (and able) to interfere with that market: either by forcing people to make trades that they decline to make or by forbidding people to make the trades they prefer.

I'd guess that the person who's willing to claim that they have so much better vision and knowledge (not to mention good-will) that they should be entrusted with the ability to interfere with the 'free market' in order to make it work better is likely conning us and is certainly conning himself.

Best,

G.

 

[FoTi]

Geez....and I used to love pumpkin pie. Oh, well.....there went my appetite for my favorite Thanksgiving dessert.

 

[FoTi]

Holy frog-jam! That is actually one of my fave movies of all time for some reason. What a trip!

Holy frog-jam....

Never heard that expression before.

 

[CarmeloOrchards]

Coming Attractions???

More to come............

.......waiting.

 

[Hatshepsut]

Oh, my.
I like to keep things Disney clean.

___Pinocchio

 

[lkwdblds]

The meeting is set for tomorrow not the weekend.

I like this krytonite example.

Hey, Lakey, where's the pictures of your weekend?

Hats - The get together is on for tomorrow night. It was never going to be on the weekend. I am glad you like the kryptonite analogy. I also used the analogy of a vampire being exposed to sunlight which I think is equally apropos.

I wish there was something simple to say to a registrar which would make them bolt and retreat from the room. Maybe one could say that they were a drug dealer and that all your money came from the sale of drugs. Do you think that would work? I doubt it, a Registrar going for money is like a bloodound following the scent of an escaped convict. Nothing short of killing the bloodhound will stop it from pursuing the scent it is tracking and the same is true for a registrar whose scent is the smell of money.
Lakey

 

[CarmeloOrchards]

Hats - The get together is on for tomorrow night. It was never going to be on the weekend. I am glad you like the kryptonite analogy. I also used the analogy of a vampire being exposed to sunlight which I think is equally apropos.

I wish there was something simple to say to a registrar which would make them bolt and retreat from the room. Maybe one could say that they were a drug dealer and that all your money came from the sale of drugs. Do you think that would work? I doubt it, a Registrar going for money is like a bloodound following the scent of an escaped convict. Nothing short of killing the bloodhound will stop it from pursuing the scent it is tracking and the same is true for a registrar whose scent is the smell of money.
Lakey

Drew Johnston was locked in a room with reges once. he asked for a cigarette. he lit it, and then proceeded to push it at one of the reges' eyes until hey opened the door.

 

[lkwdblds]

Very skillful way to engage someone in a friendly debate

Mark,

I generally enjoy your posts and, even when I don't, particularly, I am rarely moved to reply simply because I disagree. I'm generally fine with folks disagreeing with me -- perhaps because I have had rather a lot of experience with that phenomenon.

But. (You knew there was going to be a 'but' didn't you?) I've been a libertarian even longer than I was a scientologist and I do hate to see people get the wrong idea about us critters. Libertarians, that is.

I've highlighted in red and reddish brown the only two sentences I care to protest. The first implies that libertarians favor a flat tax. I'm sure that some folks, who style themselves 'libertarians' do, in fact, favor a flat tax. Of those who do, some probably favor it thinking it the lesser of many greater evils, or as (possibly) being less 'taxing' on them personally.

Whatever. I'd hope no one gets the idea that genuine libertarians actually favor _any_ 'tax' whatever that they have not explicitly agreed to pay. This comes from our general allergy to the 'initiation of coercion.'

The second point I've highlighted, re 'free markets,' hinges on the same point: ANY departure from a 'free market' involves the initiation of coercion. That is, it requires someone who is willing (and able) to interfere with that market: either by forcing people to make trades that they decline to make or by forbidding people to make the trades they prefer.

I'd guess that the person who's willing to claim that they have so much better vision and knowledge (not to mention good-will) that they should be entrusted with the ability to interfere with the 'free market' in order to make it work better is likely conning us and is certainly conning himself.

Best,

G.

Nice going Gary, your skill and tact in opposing MAB is very chivalrous. You duplicate his point of view, select out in color print the two areas where you are in disagreement and then politely make your case. To me, this is material for people's debating hats. "How to debate a well informed and worthy opponent with respect" by Gary York. This info needs to be absorbed on most of the other threads going on ESMB. So many of them degenerate into name calling and four letter words bashing the opponent's character.

Nice going Gary!
From the other Gary