The coming plutocracy

[redsamurai]

One of my favorite scenes from "Hell on Wheels" is when Durant berates his engineer for building the railroad in a straight line when the government is paying him per mile.
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so basically the govt offered what would seem a perfectly reasonable basis for payment...miles of track laid, and this guy berates his engineer for not taking advantage of that buy gyrating the path of track and/or laying out on land that wasn't necessary just to make extra cash. And this unethical business practice was purely the fault of the govt? Are you claiming entrapment java? In this case at least you can definitely make the claim that some naive dipshit in the govts payout dept didn't realize he was setting up his employer to take a bath....or maybe he did cause he got PAID OFF by the private sector. Either way your example bolstered my argument.

 

[javaguru]

so basically the govt offered what would seem a perfectly reasonable basis for payment...miles of track laid, and this guy berates his engineer for not taking advantage of that buy gyrating the path of track and/or laying out on land that wasn't necessary just to make extra cash. And this unethical business practice was purely the fault of the govt? Are you claiming entrapment java? In this case at least you can definitely make the claim that some naive dipshit in the govts payout dept didn't realize he was setting up his employer to take a bath....or maybe he did cause he got PAID OFF by the private sector. Either way your example bolstered my argument.

You're missing the source of the problem. The government has no profit motive and no pricing mechanism because they can steal as much as they want. If you read some history of the era Senators demanded their home town and their cronies towns be linked to the railroad to enrich themselves. Senators and representatives bought land and enriched themselves based on their inside knowledge of the rail line. If you're a psychopath, where do you go, private industry where you are heavily controlled or government where you can break the laws at will?

 

[redsamurai]

actually if you're a psychopath you go the prviate sector java...that's been concluded.



Psychopaths on Wall Street - Ronald Schouten, MD, JD - Harvard Business Review

One in 25 business leaders may be a psychopath, study finds | Science | guardian.co.uk

The Shocking Statistic About Psychopaths On Wall Street - Business Insider

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/fables-of-wealth.html?_r=0

 

[redsamurai]

and we had one of those guys right here at EF..he ain't been around for awhile but you can guess.

 

[javaguru]

Public private partnerships, research the history. Profits are private and the politicians get jobs as "consultants" making millions.

 

[redsamurai]

Public private partnerships, research the history. Profits are private and the politicians get jobs as "consultants" making millions.

waddya wanna know about the revolving door? i know all about it. You still seem to think that govt is my "personal jesus"...it isn't, even if it weren't rife with corruption I would put it where it belongs as well as put the free market where "it" belongs. There's places where capitalism and the profit motive have no business and there's places where govt has zero business except insuring the punishment of unethical business practices.

 

[javaguru]

waddya wanna know about the revolving door? i know all about it. You still seem to think that govt is my "personal jesus"...it isn't, even if it weren't rife with corruption I would put it where it belongs as well as put the free market where "it" belongs. There's places where capitalism and the profit motive have no business and there's places where govt has zero business except insuring the punishment of unethical business practices.

Define "unethical" and where does the free market have no business?

I don't have health insurance, I'm very healthy but I pay out of pocket every year to see my doctor, I get a 50% discount because I pay cash.

 

[redsamurai]

Define "unethical" and where does the free market have no business?

I don't have health insurance, I'm very healthy but I pay out of pocket every year to see my doctor, I get a 50% discount because I pay cash.

Ethics in business is continually evolving because business is evolving, so there is no consummate definition. The easy ones are like the Enron or Libor scandals...or the Madoff scams. Under a completely free market those kinds of Ponzi schemes would run rampant and people would skip off to Bermuda with a coupl mill. Couldn't touch em. There's plenty of grey area for sure....are server farms making millions of transactions a second "ethical"? I dunno the answer to that because people still don't know the full ramifications of these technological changes. What i do know is the market "will not" police itself in these areas. Capitalists always propose this inherent "self correction" within the market, but that is solely dependant on consumers making rational choices within the market. When you have these new financial tools being employed into an already obscure system that even the best economists in teh world can't fully understand, the rational choice of consumers is taken away because no one can understand fully what they're consuming. In a less complicated case, some of Madoffs clients were incredibly intelligent people and actually in economics/finance. They had no idea what he was doing because they can't fully investigate something like that. You basically find out you're being duped once it's too late.

 

[javaguru]

Ethics in business is continually evolving because business is evolving, so there is no consummate definition. The easy ones are like the Enron or Libor scandals...or the Madoff scams. Under a completely free market those kinds of Ponzi schemes would run rampant and people would skip off to Bermuda with a coupl mill. Couldn't touch em. There's plenty of grey area for sure....are server farms making millions of transactions a second "ethical"? I dunno the answer to that because people still don't know the full ramifications of these technological changes. What i do know is the market "will not" police itself in these areas. Capitalists always propose this inherent "self correction" within the market, but that is solely dependant on consumers making rational choices within the market. When you have these new financial tools being employed into an already obscure system that even the best economists in teh world can't fully understand, the rational choice of consumers is taken away because no one can understand fully what they're consuming. In a less complicated case, some of Madoffs clients were incredibly intelligent people and actually in economics/finance. They had no idea what he was doing because they can't fully investigate something like that. You basically find out you're being duped once it's too late.

The Madoff Ponzi scheme continued for decades because he was blessed by the SEC as a legitimate government controlled entity. I invest in S&P 500 mutual funds, a private entity, because I'm not an expert nor do I know anyone I can trust to beat the market based on the fact they have an inside track to Washington. Research the money made by the last three presidents after they left office, it's a racket.

 

[redsamurai]

and where does the free market have no business?

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amywhere where the profit motive can collapse or severely damage a cohesive society. It didnt' use to be this way but food is quickly becoming an area where collectivist cultivation of will become a necessity. Our current food chain is irreperable, it serves merely to infect us. It offers no nutrition because the food companies have squeezed their margins so hard over the last several decades that they can literally grow "something" and call it food. Because people by and large no "nothing" about nutition they see some carbs and protein on teh package and think hey, that's all we need right? Carbs and protein are utterly positively useless without the micronutrients to assimilate them. It's the micronutrients that tell the body what to do with the macro nutrients. Without micronutrients you're just ingesting "matter". Your body will process this matter, at an energy cost to you, but return to you virtually nothing. If the meat industry didn't inject beef with vitamins and minerals, a massively inefficient way to deliver those nutrients, eating meat would be less than a zero sum gain. You would literally expend more energy digesting meat than you got back out of it.