Free market doomed us all?

SkynetV4 said:
One prime example I like to use is Rafael Trujillo, one of the nastiest dictators in the Caribbean. This cat ruled the country with an iron fist: you had to ask for permission to marry, to move in, out and within the country, you either worked for him (he controlled most companies to ensure the smooth running of the country) or you didn't work at all. Abusive? Sure, it is abusive. Yet according to the accounts I have read about him, he wasn't a corrupt man. An blood hungry asshole, yes, but an incorruptible one. The man dies and the country reaches democracy, and it goes to the fucks. The wealthiest Caribbean country became one of the poorest again.
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Someone wrote in this forum: "There are no bad or good governments, only bad and good leaders"

its a question of probabilities, and in general there is much less corruption in democracies.

Your example reminds me those kids that parents never let them drink, go out, etc. At 1st opportunity, because of a live of privation, they go berserk..
 
Heh, about the crisis: wish Poland accepted Euro together with the Czechs and Slovakians - right now we're fucked, since the exchange rates are soaring.

I hate my country.
 
LogisticEarth said:
What creates these bubbles is NOT the free market. It's the manipulation of the markets by governments and central banks. Free markets have thier ups and downs, but we've been tinkering with ours here in the US ever since Woodrow Wilson. We ignore the realities of production, supply, and demand. Then, as it's doing now, it all collapses in our face.
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You couldn't be more wrong.
The sole reason for the collapse is the lack of gov-control over the banks. Since some time now they were allowed to lend money they don't own. Thus creating ridiculous amounts of virtual money. This means that the rate of real money and check money (don't know if this is the correct english term, "Giralgeld" would be the german term) is totally out of balance.
The feds allowed the banks to lend money they don't have. To people (meaning, other banks) that also only have check money but no real security. This lending was all good and nice because everybody (meaning the bank system) was profiting, because they practically "printed" cash themself. The subprime mortgage crisis however made the link to the real economy and start a chainreaction. First bank did not have enough real money, just check money which might be lended too, and couldn't pay the others anymore..
Thats why their are still huge amounts of money in the big companies bilances which make all their numbers go red. And thats why we are all fucked, the money system is totally wasted. I might agree with you that the gov aid is not helping, maybe even making the problem worse (by creating even more dept), but the alternative would be a total breakdown.

I personally hope that the feds and govs have a clue about how bad the system is at the moment..and that they create the new debts with the purpuse of giving the decline some time, so that social stability is granted. So that maybe the next ~20 years suck with recession and stagnation, but afterwards, with a reformed money system which is based on real values, we have real growth.

If they continue this huge bubble of dept, the next (if their is one) crash will be even worse, meaning for you: Everything you own, you do not really own.
 
well said. If anything proved that a "free" market can be a serious issue then it is the crisis that we have now which was caused by a large extend from banks and their limitless speculations.
 
"We're all Socialist now." -ish

Tremble mortal capitalist as the wrath of government intervention is descend upon thee! *bwahahahaha*
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That's how I see in this crisis.........government are offering stimulus plan, bail out, nationalization, etc etc to jolt the crap out of the economy to revive it.

Guess we need a bit of both attribute from free market and central government controlled economy which is a pragmatic way of managing the economy.
 
Free markets are neither good nor bad. It's not a moral issue at all.

Free markets have purely selfish motives. If anything morally relevant comes out of them, it's just a side-effect.

The problem with the free market as-is is, essentially, that there's less incentive for long-term planning the more money you're dealing with. A middle-class company has to plan for years because it can't take too many risks -- a large financial company OTOH is based on taking many risks, the risikier the more profit can it make.

It's not the fault of stupid goons not doing their job properly. The problem is systemic. Everyone did exactly what they were supposed to do. Reality just didn't agree.
 
The problem was partially about giving folks incentives to trade in debt, and making debt easy.

It used to be that the banks should be careful about giving credit away. And some of those loans were unsustainable and the banks should have known better.

The problem is not so much that the market is free. A totally free market is potentially dangerous because the folks that produce shit don't really care about the consequences. Heroin, afterall, was a consumer product before it became banned. So was cocaine. Then ... hey, this is some addictive shit! Today, we have a similar problem with opiates being sold as pharmaceuticals.

The problem with the free market is that it allows everyone to act for their self interest and we expect them to show some responsibility.

But the lesson of history is that people are less responsible and more self-interested rational actors.

We can punish people and try to deter bad behavior by law (but then, there goes the free market), or we can try to pass laws to prevent this kind of shit from going down- and thus spare those folks that had nothing to do with this fiasco from getting fucked.

We're slipping into depression because a the system created incentives for people to do some pretty stupid shit.

Step back and think of why we have governments and states. Despite all this normative crap about what governments should be, lets think about what good governments are.

Government exist either to allow a certain class of bastards to get rich off the sweat of others.
Or
It creates and regulates markets so that people can prosper.

But either way, government redistributes wealth or offers opportunities for people to accumulate wealth.

WHen government exist to allow some bastards to grow wealthy- kings, absolutist dictators, etc., than we frequently get pretty crappy government.

When governments oversee markets, ideally we allow people the opportunity to accumulate wealth. We may also try to redistribute wealth so that we maintain levels of social and economic equality- based on the idea that what is best for society is best for the members of society.

For the past 8 years we've had a government that believed in generally unregulated markets (see banking) and destroying the functionality of the state (Katrina, Iraq policy, crony capitalism and patron bureaucracy).

So no surprise we're in crash. Anyone buying a house over the last few years should have seen this one coming. Way overvalued because it was too easy to get credit.
 
JR Jansen said:
A completely free market (a-let them do what they want-market) is also a bad thing for the consumer. Granted, by competition, prices go down, but it also creates opportunities for companies to make sub standard products and/or include dangerous ingredients in their products.
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Right, the state does such a great job at telling us what is dangerous. Pot is bad, alcohol is great. Smoking is good, oh wait smoking is no longer popular, let's get moral and put 200 % lifestyle taxes on smokers.

We have a huge information network, so why the hell do we need an incredibly inefficient state to tell us what is healthy and good? It's not like the state comes up with any of the information, and when it does it is always completely arbitrary and based in belief and morals and not in facts (all recent presidents believe in talking man in the sky. is that not evidence enough?).

The US does not implement a free market; the market has tons of regulations that distort it from optimality. New rules can only help when the system has already been messed up by previous rules. The way it should work is that the banks who failed must be allowed to die, and the people who can't pay their loans can't keep their houses. Instead the US government has decided to mess everything up further by not allowing things to happen.

One big thing that is often overlooked (but noticed by an earlier poster) is that countries are from free markets because the government has monopoly on the currency. They can decide to print money and therefore money has no real meaning. It is very abstract and difficult to understand the meaning of money and assets when the value of a particular currency is not decided by the people. The banks can loan money from the federal reserve, but what does that money represent?

SkynetV4 said:
My problem with free market is that it allows people with enough money to circumvent laws and buy off government officials to get away with murder scot-free.
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In any case government officials are bought off by themselves. Everybody acts in their own interests, regulations or otherwise. Representative democracy is a bad system for the reasons you describe, and direct democracy is quite bad also. A state can never make things fair. Its only task should be to uphold a set of constitutional laws (with the law being that you can under no circumstance commit violence to anyone else, violence in a generalized sense). What you describe is a failure of socialism and a big state, not of the free market.
 
i found this show to be interesting, educative and at same time fun. Can´t get better. :P

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tda0-cDyD0U[/youtube]
 
Crni Vuk said:
yeah like Poland has not seen enough crisis the last 50s years!
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Oh shaddap, at least you're not being invaded by Germany and Russia AT THE SAME TIME while the French and the Brits just stay put like retards behind the Magnot Line while Poland yells for them to FOR FUCK SAKE GO FOR A OFFENSIVE WE'RE HOLDING THEM!! :twisted: :lol: :westernbetrayal:

But who knows what will happen tomorrow? I would recomend planting mines on the border and stocking anti-tank ammo, just to be on the safe size.
 
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