Rick Lowe
I think the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) crowd are protesting at the wrong door and about the wrong thing. They should take their protest to the White House and Congress.
It's Crony Capitalism they should be protesting, where business people and elected officials use the public treasury as if it belongs to them. Capitalism is a profit and loss system, where businesses fail and succeed. And this is not to be confused with what the Bush and Obama administrations did with the bailouts of of the financial industry.
Mind you, they (the political class) might have felt obligated as it was government prompting that caused the bad mortgages in the first place.
But I digress.
Capitalism, is described by the Routledge Dictionary of Economics as being:
- A socioeconomic system of production using roundabout methods of production (Bohm-Bawerk's capital theory).
- An economy based on private enterprise.
- The use of markets and not planning to allocate economic resources.
- Production motivated by the profit motive.
Nowhere in that description do I see private/government partnership or collusion to keep each other afloat at the expense of the taxpayer.
In addition, Capitalism is the very system that has provided the OWS crowd with the tools they're using to disrupt the economy.
Destroying Capitalism will no doubt have an even more deleterious impact on the lifestyle of the OWS crowd as well as the rest of us.
As noted, I think they're knocking at the wrong door.
You might enjoy this article entitled Smash Capitalism and You Destroy Civilisation.
Say what you will our socialist friends, capitalism can never be completely destroyed.. The most centrally planned economies of of the former communist block of the USSR and Eastern Europe all had thriving “black market” where scarce goods were exchanged or bought or sold.. Cuba is another example where street capitalism is thriving.. In all cases these centrally planned economies failed and gradually became capitalistic..The only real growth in India under its four five-year plans was from a prosperous private sector.. When central planning was dropped, the economy of India took off as the capitalistic system began to allocate capital based on return on capital invested as opposed to government central planning priorities..
Sad to say that today there has NEVER been a national five-year plan that has ever been implemented despite the millions of dollars the World Bank wasted on technical assistance for economic planning..Scarce resources will always be allocated by the return on investment principle.. Whether a business firm is making an investment decision to build a new plant or an individual investor is making a decision to buy a stock or bond for his personal portfolio, the invisible hand of capitalism is always at work.. Investment risk is fully accessed and rates of return are estimated against the risk spectrum.. Then and only then is capital invested seeking a rate of return consummate with the degree of risk..
Some may think profits are a dirty word, but no one ever seems to turn it down.. Even the OWS gang are a creature of capitalism and most are so stoned they do not realize it.. Unfortunately, capitalism is often taught in our colleges and universities as a system of economic exploitation.. It is characterized as unfair and unjust to the factor of labor input.. What they neglect to tell students is that capitalism, far from being a perfect system, has been the driving force for the creation of national growth over the last five hundred years.. No other economic system know to mankind has done so much for so many.. Every other economic system has failed the test of economic prudence and efficiency.. In the final chapter capitalism rises again to be the driving force to economic prosperity..
Rick may I suggest that political cronyism today perhaps is far more worse than crony capitalism.. The OWS characters are a product of American educational indoctrination and have no real analytical capabilities to comprehend the difference.. When will students learn that it is not the degree that counts, but the ability to use reason and analytical skills to solve real life problems..
Today in the Bahamas our population sports all kinds of fancy educational degrees which in many cases are not worth the paper that they are printed on.. Yet, when they interview for a position of responsibility, their so-called academic achievements fall far short to qualify.. Upon closer examination most of these part-time degrees are awarded by third-rate degree factories whose primary business is to sell such degrees to the general public.. Guess this is another example of buyer beware..
Exactly Tradewinds: \When will students learn that it is not the degree that counts, but the ability to use reason and analytical skills to solve real life problems.. \ But the problem is our educational system indoctrinate and manipulate our students. It’s only brainwash. It’s a dumbing down. The solution, no school should be finance by the government, might the best school win. As you might know, more and more people want to do homeschooling.
Here a nice interview with Peter Shiff with people at OWS.
Merci Liberty but lets us not forget that a student with little if any self-esteem has no real interest in academic learning.. It is the old proverbial saying “that you can take a horse to water but you cannot make him drink”.. The wisdom to learn is engendered through positive character development.. Sadly this is something that the Ministry of(mis)Education has never understood..