Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual (human) rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
I think the problem is that the government doesn’t know HOW to PROPERLY regulate the economy to help spur growth. Sometimes the government just needs to learn when to back off. Cutting taxes isn’t going to do anything anymore. You cant really lower interest rates because they are practically zero as is.
What about letting loose of the arbitrary reins of control the government has hold of. For instance, legalize marijuana. The drug, in of itself, is no worse than tobacco and alcohol. Legalization would do many things. It would open up an entirely new market to legitimate tax paying citizens. It would create thousands of jobs. Portugal has had great success with it. They also saw a substantial decrease in the consumption of hard drugs after they legalized marijuana.
Thats just one example of how we can get the economy going again. We just need to reevaluate why we make certain things illegal or off limits. If there is no good reason for it, then legalize it, tax it, and regulate it. We cant try and create a fake demand like FDR did in the New Deal. We just need to satisfy actual demands.
Reading Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon is never dull. Now, I warn you this author does not believe in brief articles, when he tackles a subject he intends to throttle and utterly subdue it. This is a fine article on risk mangement. Enjoy!
James Pilant
Friday I have never thought of myself as a person who takes risks. On the contrary, I view my actions as cautious and calculated, since I am not likely to engage in some activity until I judge it to be a sure thing. But others see things otherwise. Some years ago I was talking to a financial adviser and I was taken up … Read More
Luke H. Lee has a friend, John McCoy, who wrote him a letter as an endorsement. I include the first two paragraphs of the letter. I hope you read the rest by clicking on the link.
It has become customary to bash big government, and for good reason. Government gets in the way when it tries to interfere with the private sector. But things got so bad in 2008 that everyone turned to the Fed, the Congress and the President, and his Treasury Secretary, to do something to avert the train wreck we all saw coming. They did do something; and most people were grateful, including the business community and the financial community. But in allowing them to intervene as they did, we – and I mean business leaders — shirked our responsibilities. It was our mistake in the first place. Now it is the turn of the business community to take drastic steps. We need to start by telling our government leaders, “Thanks, but no thanks” to their further efforts to jumpstart the economy. They simply don’t know how to do that, and why should we expect them to do what they are not designed to do?
So, what is the next step on the road to recovery? The first step is a painful one; it is the recognition that we in the business community erred. What kind of error am I talking about? I am talking about a failure of imagination. We pride ourselves in the business community for our ingenuity, our creativity, our willingness to think outside the box. We have done nothing of the sort. If we had, we would have avoided this train wreck long ago.
Mr. Lee is interested in solutions to global problems and he worries that a dangerous downturn is possible. So, reading his web site, Realizing A Better World, might well be a good step for you.
James SaftJames Saft writing on his blog discusses the strange bailouts of Ireland and Greece. “What’s strange?” They are unsustainable. They are disastrous. They are a bandaid that won’t hold. This essay uses the word, bizarre. That is correct.
So let’s recap, because this is truly bizarre: Lenders to Ireland or the other troubled states won’t take a hit now but if they stick around until 2013 then they will take losses along with the taxpayers. Oh yeah, and the current round of bailouts are aimed at seeing Ireland and Greece through the next couple of years, at which point it will become extremely dangerous to lend to them, as their economies will have shrunk, their debt burdens bloomed and private lenders will be on the hook.
To add to this, the European Stability Mechanism, the name of the new fund, will be senior to all creditors except the International Monetary Fund, meaning that in the event of a bankruptcy it would be paid first. Ratings agency Fitch looked at this provision and quite rightly said that it might lead to lower ratings on shaky euro zone sovereigns.
The only way you could make this policy mix work was if you could find a very rich lender with no ability to conceptualize the future. Hmm, let’s see a rich entity with limited ability to fully imagine a future state – it must be the European Union!
Few private lenders will stick around, they will sell their bonds and the only buyers will be the EU or ECB, which itself as it understands this predicament is hugely unwilling to play along.
Germany and France are both so unwilling to both have principles and pay for them that they are refusing to act on proposals for common European bonds and are expected to resist moves to increase the size of the European Financial Stability Fund, the vehicle now being used for bailouts.
Okay, do you get it? These aren’t solutions. They are designed to tide things over until someone new is in office to take responsibility. And especially, they are designed to appear as decisive action when they are nothing of the kind.
It is important that both Greece and Ireland elect new governments charged with challenging these horrendous plans that smack only of disaster. Those countries deserve better, and their citizens should demand better terms. These are sovereign nations not American homeowners subject to the whims of banks.
Let democracies exert the power of the people, the one and only thing that banks fear.
Rarely do you see a politician quite this honest: Last Wednesday, just hours after securing the position of chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., told the Birmingham News that “in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”
Well, let’s all lick some boots. Millions of Americans in foreclosure, the middle class stuck dead center in a disastrous financial calamity caused by the banks, massive wrongdoing apparently endemic in the financial sector, but don’t worry at least one of our dear Representatives has the right idea.
Let’s serve the banks. Wow, that worked so well in the past.
It’s just another version of Rod Serling’s “To Serve Man.” Want to buy a cookbook, anybody? We’re going to fry up consumers and, in fact, we’re going to rotisserie whole communities, barbecue States and lightly sautee small nations. All so that the banks can feel served. It makes you glow with pride doesn’t it?
Jayaraman Rajah Iyer comments on one of my recent posts. Being down with a sinus infection (it’s still hanging on), I wasn’t able to do it justice in my comments, so now I remedy that by letting you all see it as a direct post.
James Pilant
Yes all nations are in the wrong track. Quote from my book:”When the priority is already set, the hungry man accepts
the inevitability of the human race which is non-reacting,
non-acting, non-responding, inert-like entity. The change that
is needed from a Government to shift the gear from
advanced technology and space exploration to a mundane
agricultural economy is a process very tough to implement in
a short notice, even if one realizes that more than a billion
people are below poverty line. Nuclear submarines,
armaments, security initiatives of trillion dollar valued
business enterprise have precedence over morality and
therefore prudence is what the government feels they should
adopt. Not because it is not the priority but effecting change
in increasing the arable lands, increasing the yield per
hectare, linking satellites facilities for better farming,
conclusion on Genetically Modified seeds, advanced
agricultural machinery, increasing the total agricultural
production etc. involve a clear long-term strategy of many
years to implement.
“The new pledge to commit $20 billion to global
agricultural development.. has the potential to dramatically
improve the livelihoods of more than 700 million of the
world’s poor living in rural areas, so says Catherine Bertini,
former executive director, UN World Food Program; and Dan
Glickman, former secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture.”
$20 billion is a minuscule amount, given the defense
expenditure and the estimated sum tax evaders who have
effectively squirreled away between 7 and 11 trillion dollars
in safety deposit boxes and offshore bank accounts, as
Lesley Curwen reports in BBC, it gives the state of
affairs of the economy driven by forces beyond the control of
the world governments. Agricultural production gets stagnated for years but world, if ever takes cognizance of
increased production in agriculture, then the society as a
whole has to be brought into action. The canvas is much
larger, expansive, broad and comprehensive in its strategy
to execute. Without involving many in the society it is
conceptually difficult to materialize major results.”
Recent visit by Obama to India has again pushed defense equipment for sale that would at the most protect a few jobs. India is stagnated at 300 million tonnes agricultural produce for too long and there seems to be no strategy to scale up to 500 million tonnes. Leadership is very much needed lest those who remain hungry takes the leadership in their hands – at the street level.
Nearly half of elderly Americans will face a future with at least one year below or close to the poverty line, according to a new study that showed a huge racial divide in prospects for the elderly.
Mark R. Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said the results of his research contradict popular beliefs about the economic stability of America’s elderly population.
“We have an image of the elderly as doing pretty well,” he said, adding that data spanning 35 years does not support that assumption.
Nobody is safe. Nobody is secure. We face an economic future in which those that have created value, those that have worked for a living, are just pawns in a game of financial monopoly.
Since the origin of Christian social ethics in the late 19th century as an Anglo-American academic-ecclesial discipline, economic problems have been at the center of our profession’s concerns. Christian ethics was born during the days in which the contrast between the vast prosperity of the industrial barons and the vast suffering of those who worked for them became unbearable. The moral concerns that drove early Christian ethics helped contribute to the regulation of industrialization’s excesses during the Progressive Era. The same social compassion supported the creation of a modest social safety net during the Depression and New Deal era.
As a Christian ethicist, I stand in a tradition that both rejected communism as an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism and recognized very early that the only way capitalism would or should survive was through legal regulation of its worst excesses. I don’t say moral regulation because, as Reinhold Niebuhr taught us in his formative work Moral Man and Immoral Society, huge group entities and social structures do not respond to moral suasion. If you are asking a corporation — or a group of corporations, or an entire economic structure — voluntarily to act in such a way as to limit profit, you will fail. You will have to coerce it to do so under the power of law or some other countervailing power, such as the organization of labor.
First, you should go read the whole essay. Gushee posts only after much thought, and since a Christian perspective on business ethics is much rarer than I would have believed, this is important writing.
Second, he is right that large economic units only react to force. The idea of a self regulating marketplace is only partially a reality at the best of times.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.