Originally Posted by Sini
I can't think of a solution to financial markets, when you start talking to people they fall asleep, think you are nutter, or both. It is too abstract, as such any measures to rebalance the system is impossible to socialize. Not even 2009 crash made any difference.

Consequently, I think the only way is to ago around this problem. If there is enough wealth, then parasites won't kill the host by siphoning some of it off.


I think the scale has gotten too big. I used to agree that as long as enough wealth was created, the existence of some parasitic activity, while unfair and aggravating, could have minimal impact on the bigger picture. No longer.

It's so big, it is causing too much collateral damage. Even the commonly-known-but-much-panned corporate practice of only giving a shit about the next quarterly report largely stems from our monetary policy woes. If you don't keep that share price up, and keep your outward numbers good, its all too easy for some asshole to come in and leverage a couple billion buyout or other shitty manuever basically for free. It was a lot different when the Wolves of Wall St had to draw from a finite pool of capital and pay a real price for that money. Now, companies have to result to insane management and bookkeeping practices just to guard against gross fuckery enabled by free money. Sure, there are other factors at work there, but I believe it all rooted in the monetary aspect.

When it starts impacting general society to the level where large corps become less efficient, it should be obvious to everyone that there is a problem. That's even without going into the social effects of economic dislocation.

Even ignoring the wealth-maintenance aspects required to enable a true middle class, a dislocated worker who stashed away merely 200$ a month in savings at 8% for the 20 years he was stably employed will still have over 120k to fall back on and deal with the dislocation. A guy who did the same at 1% will have around 55k to fall back on. Never mind the people who buried themselves in consumer debt at 16% all those years, who will end up on Section 8 and/or the trailer park if they don't quickly find equivalent employment. (and who will then, apparently, proceed to vote for people who maintain the power of the cliques that maintain the policies that created the type of monetary policy that helped put them there)

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Which brings me to your other point, that there isn't anything to be done for it because social acceptance of solutions is impossible. I agree. I genuinely think that the USA as we know it is not long for this world, or at least the version that I grew up with. A hundred years from now, the concepts of "Democracy and Republics" will also likely be eliciting guffaws from schoolchildren who wonder how a whole society could be so braindead, much like we used to laugh at people who followed and died for kings in ages past, simply cause their daddy was a king, when we were in gradeschool.

Note that is by no means what I want to happen. Its just what is going to happen. I predict that whatever China morphs into will become the academically accepted model state for the forseeable future, and the collectivist view will win out, where power cliques of technocrats control the lives of the masses. At least until space colonization becomes a thing, I expect the lights of both personal liberty and representative governance to dim. Maybe in the future, hindsight will give a clear enough picture to posterity to enable them to understand where we structurally went wrong and make corrective measures that last longer than 200 years.

Some will no doubt think my view is extreme. What is extreme however, are the demands reality ultimately places on us.

For who could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him? - John Locke (2nd Treatise, sect 57)