| Joined: | Wed Apr 11th, 2012 |
| Location: | Melbourne, Australia |
| Posts: | 525 |
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It's rather amazing to me that everybody wants a free ride and no one wants anyone to make really big money. I have yet to see anyone on welfare provide a job for anyone but the government lacky doling out his money. Who do you think actually creates most of the jobs that exist,the millionaires or the day laborers. I LIKE good ole free running capitalism and am not ashamed of it. I don't think profit is a dirty word and I don't in any manner feel I can dictate how much is enough. I don't hear any great hue and cry about the high remuneration that entertainers,atheletes and artists get yet anyone on Wall Street is fair game.
Actually Ken, I agree with most of what you've said here, I'm a capitalist I believe in wealth creation and have made the point about entertainers and athletes compared with CEOs myself before.
However there needs to some balance, I do not want to return to feudal times where a few people effectively own the rest and I feel that this is where Western society is in danger of heading.
I also believe that wealth is created by companies that do something of value, make something or provide a service of some kind. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, even WalMart would be good examples. Even bankers have a part to play here, by finding ways of funding ventures and providing avenues for investment.
However this is not what Wall Street does any more, they are now playing games with things like 'Derivatives' (a zero sum game where no wealth is created). They have consistently been found to be corrupt with numerous examples of market manipulation and insider trading, and there has been very little comeback. They are really no longer creating wealth, just redistributing what's left, and they are shuffling it away from Joe public into the hands of the ultra wealthy.
Across the break out of the global financial crises the top 1% of the wealthy in the US actually improved the wealth by around 20%, and then the UK and US governments performed large 'bailouts' with Tax payers (future) money (done on huge public debt-most of it not to China but to the same institutions they were 'bailing out'? by injecting cash into some that were failing, henc propping up the debts and assets of those that weren't) and most of that ended up in the same pockets.
The kind of capitalism that I believe in is the same thing most Americans would have understood that to mean in 1950s through to early 90s, the same thing that president Truman believed in and he set up successfully in post war Germany, (a legacy that is still doing well today). It's the same capitalism that the Rockerfellers believed in and for a modern equivalent Bill Gates who is doing some truly wonderful things with his wealth now he's retired from Microsoft. It's about generating wealth and making a worthwhile contribution to your society at the same time. The modern Wall Street mob in my view are closer to successful con men and fraudsters coming up with ever more compex and clever ways of moving money out of your pocket and into theirs but without adding anything to the pool. As a result most folk end up working harder and harder for longer and longer with a lot less to show for it.