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I read your posting about the outrageous AIG bonuses – Wall Street’s Market ‘Wizards’ – Laughing all the way to the bank with the taxpayer’s money at [ https://www.welovecostarica.com/members/2119.cfm ] – and like most people, I agree with everything you wrote.
But what do you think about those Libertarian and right wing conservative ideas which promote what they call “free market capitalism”? Libertarians and conservatives dislike regulation and government involvement in anything, especially in business. You used to work on Wall Street did you not? Would you trust any country’s financial system to corporations or would you prefer to see some government oversight? The Federal Reserve is an idea right out of the Libertarian manifesto; turn it all over to private enterprise, let the market determine everything. Am I missing something here? Didn’t we just get a full dose of the results of free markets run amok?
I’m all in favor of well regulated capitalism but don’t agree that “greed is good” and certainly don’t agree that people who have been instrumental in losing hundreds of billions of dollars, who are bailed out by the taxpayer and then the people responsible for losing that money then receive million dollar ‘bonuses’ …. That is not right!
I have been an independent, results oriented businessman since 1987 – I have worked very, very hard (I write this at 8.30pm my time) and some years have been million dollar years and others have been less lucrative but, I know that the American way – the capitalist way – is NOT to compensate someone for losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
And why did Goldman Sachs – which had more than $100 billion in cash – receive a taxpayer paid “bailout” of $25 billion anyway? Can anyone answer that question?
After all of this, hasn’t it become crystal clear – AGAIN – that the ‘richest of the rich’ manipulate the government for their own private interests? One can only hope for a real revolution and I’m serious when I say this could get very, very nasty…
While I worked on Wall Street, I personally knew people at Drexel Burnham who left to join firms like Stratton Oakmont and I ‘thought’ I once knew the young man – Mark Hanna – who became the Chairman of Stratton Oakmont, he made tens of millions of dollars doing a SIMILAR job to what I was doing except they had a slightly different agenda…
My goal was to invest my client’s monies, to try and make money for my clients and in doing so, hopefully make a little money for myself.
Their goal was to take their client’s money and try to make as much money as possible for themselves and not even consider their client’s goals unless the client was a ‘whale’ in which case they got them in and out of deals before everybody else…
They (and other firms like them) repeatedly tried to hire me and had I joined them and ‘pitched’ the same low-priced stocks that they were pitching, I would have earned ten times as much but the difference was simple…. What they were doing may have been legal but it was not right and, I would not have been able to sleep at night.
My actions A: Always had the client’s best interest’s at heart B: Were always legal and C: Were always ‘right.’
What we still don’t get is that our present form of capitalism is simply unsustainable.
Our natural resources are limited and some experts believe we are fast approaching crunch time.
What we don’t get is that our present form of capitalism cannot continue to show double digit growth very single year? In fact we may have to become accustomed to business declining year after year…
What we must understand is that just staying in business is a good thing, that we should actually care about our employees, their families, our environment and the well being of our fellow man and that cooperation – not competition – is what will allow us to survive…
Isn’t that what the credit unions are all about in the USA? They’re doing just fine thank you very much indeed. Not a single insolvency ….
Don’t know if I answered your question but it’s the best my exhausted mind can come up with right now …
Scott Oliver – Founder
WeLoveCostaRica.comScott,
You live in a semi socialist country and are content with that. I think I can assume that you accept a certain level of socialism. I agree with that. This means a regulated economy. Socialsts believe the economy should be regulated and bent to serve the people. Capitalists believe people should be bent to serve the economy.I don’t see room for compromise here. Eventually we will have to choose between these two opposing forces. The root of all of the problems that the Costa Rican government has between itself and its people might be traced back to this conflict. Ownership of large companies creates the probability of corruption of government. Ownership of the public interests, the commons, is even more corruptive and disruptive. Libertarians and capitalists desire privatization of everything and a shrunken government. Let’s hope current events bury these ideologies for good.
Scott: You should ad a “share” button on these articles so we can upload to our facebook sites etc…I think this will also drive many new readers to your site.
Sprite, it is not true that the Federal Reserve is something that Libertarians or conservatives would support. The Fed is an abomination and anathema to free market principles. The key word here being “free”. You are certainly correct in your assessment that there is a battle between free market capitalism vs collectivism, and in the US, the Obama administration is veering hard left into Marxist territory at a frightening rate. Even Putin of Russia suggested that it would be a mistake for the US to go the socialist route, and that the US should learn from Russia’s mistakes. Central planning/command and control economies never produce the abundance that occurred in America. Yes, Costa Rica is a socialist country, so I will have to adjust to that as best I can; but it isn’t suffering from the lust for power that characterizes the US federal gov’t, so I look forward to being in a place where I believe I can live a quiet life without looking over my shoulder to see if big brother is lurking.
Costa Rica is as not subject to the constant pressure of corrupting corporate money as the US…so far. There may be corruption in the CR government but at least socialism’s stated goal is to benefit the citizens.
Capitalism’s stated goal is the creation of wealth with no implied fair distribution of that wealth. The free market is supposed to take care of that. In other words, the fox is left to guard the chicken coop.
I think you’ll have little to get used to as far as Costa Rican socialism. You will have other more difficult hurddles to get over such as language and culture. I meet and talk with Ticos who fiercely defend the entitlements that socialsm gurantees them.
Don’t disparage socialism so much. A socialist country practically owns Uncle Sam’s a** right now. We better hope the Socialist Chinese don;t one day dump all our dollars on the open market.
Edited on Mar 20, 2009 09:22
Edited on Mar 20, 2009 09:25
I suspect that there is no resolution with you over these fundamental issues. You are committed to the collectivist world view and I am committed to free markets and personal responsibility. I am engaging in this discussion, not to convince you, but to possibly counter the blatant biases you display in your arguments. for example, the free market system is not designed to create “fair” outcomes, it is designed for those who wish to work and create products of value, and be able to exchange those products for something else of value. The collectivist model is based on the confiscation of the assets of the producer (capitalist) class and distribute it to those who are not productive or marginally productive. In the moral order that I subscribe to, this is known as theft.
Who decides what is “fair”. In all of the examples we see in history; communist Russia and her subjugated nation states, China etc, etc, there is a ruling elite who makes these decisions. Without exception, in all of these countries, the ruling elite exists at a higher standard of living, with exclusive privileges unattainable by the unwashed masses. Ones ability to succeed is based on who you know, and who can open doors for you. In the capitalist system, anyone with the will, desire, vision, work ethic can rise from humble beginnings and become successful, and yes, become fabulously wealthy.
Costa Rica will not be corrupt because evil corporations seek to bribe and manipulate, but because all human beings have weaknesses and vulnerabilities which can be used to advantage by businesses, special interest groups, political forces seeking advantage. It is so shallow to attempt to characterize the goals and intentions of capitalists as being unsavory; while the good intentions of the collectivist are always benign and altruistic. Give me a break.
Your side and mine will always disagree. We have at a root level different assessments of human nature and the expected results when that nature organizes itself in the form of government.
First of all, let’s stop using the term “wealth” and replace it with the term “resources”. Wealth implies resources in excess of what is needed. People need basic resources for survival. Nobody needs wealth. Capitalism’s stated goal is the creation of capital, which is wealth. Nothing more. Socialism’s stated goal is equitable distribution of resources for the benefit of society (hence the SOCIAL of socialism). Either we are going to be a social animal or simply declare that it is every man for himself (Libertarianism) and run off in all directions away from each other
Capitalism’s drive for excess wealth has raped the planet while creating hugely disruptive booms and busts over the last 200 years causing great suffering within it’s nations’ borders and outside them as well. We are now on the brink of a global climate disaster, much of which is due to the effects of relentless pursuit of ever increasing profit.
The latest mess is just that..the LATEST mess. This time, one can only hope people will have the revolution Scott referred to above and remove this evil once and for all. The only viable replacement we have for capitalism is socialism. Most of the world has come around to using it in varying degrees already, including Costa Rica.
And now I am going to ask YOU to give ME a break. Nobody becomes fabulously wealthy by their hard work and will power alone. Great wealth requires much more than just those things. It requires a network of connections to other wealthy people and a healthy infrastructure in which to do business, an infrastructure which is paid for and maintained by society’s main agent, the government.
You have succumbed to that great lie called the American Dream, created by the rich and powerful to keep people contentedly slaving away to support the wealthy control of all. We bail them out when they lose money, we pay for the roads and schools and bridges and wars which they use to increase and hold and continue their wealth..all at the people’s expense. And the people are just now awakening to this truth. There could be a terrible reckoning on the way. Then again, maybe not. People can be such cows sometimes.
Edited on Mar 21, 2009 02:35
Edited on Mar 21, 2009 02:40
Edited on Mar 21, 2009 02:42
The American dream is antithetical to the collectivist model, so your denunciation of it simply shows your bias and ignorance of the founding principles of America. Yes, people can be “cows” and that is what all collectivist governments rely on to keep themselves in power. I wish you would address the historical record of brutal repression and exploitation by the worlds collectivist regimes, and the fact that the ruling elite lives at a different standard that the lowly proletariat.
And don’t get me started on the hoax of man made global warming. Lets not forget that it was only 25-30 years ago that the “scientific community” was warning of a coming ice age. And you had crackpots like Paul Ehrlick (sp?) predicting the end of the world because of overpopulation. If you study the world wide “consensus”, you will see the obvious power play by the collectivist world governments to use this manufactured crisis to go after the producing economies and “tax” their wealth and redistribute it as they see fit. Standard operating procedure for the Marxist ideal of take from the rich and give to the poor, and enslave the poor in the process.
In 1860 a rather important man by the name of Thomas Jefferson said that:
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
Surely we have a small window of opportunity to address this issue right now, the taxpayer has bailed out the banks so why doesn’t the taxpayer own them?
The credit unions are doing very nicely amidst this chaos with clearcut laws and guidelines that stringently control their actions and the type of loans and investments they are allowed to make, so why not let people like that train more people to run our banks?
Money is the oil that keeps the economic engine running and clearly it’s too damned important to allow greedy and unethical Wall Street shysters and cretinous politicians to get involved.
Scott Oliver – Founder
WeLoveCostaRica.comScott, I couldn’t agree with you more. What most people don’t know is that the financial system in the US ceased to be ruled by free market forces in 1913, when the Federal Reserve came into power, which is simply a cartel with the full force of US law supporting it through the legal tender laws; which, as you know Scott, forces the people to accept the fiat money of the cartel. Some call it the Mandrake Mechanism, whereby the politicians need money for wars, stimulus packages, S&L bailouts, so they write a “check” to the Federal Reserve and presto, a trillion dollars springs into existence out of thin air, which gets “deposited” into commercial banks, who then through fractional reserve practices, in turn create more “money “ out of thin air. The general practice is that the banks can create $90,000,000 in new loans for every $10,000,000 they have on deposit (which are just digits in a computer program). I read part of a Supreme Court decision which stated that “the US banking system is an instrumentality of the Federal Government…”
Roosevelt wreaked even more havoc on the system with all of his new deal collectivist programs and Nixon sealed the deal by finally giving the cartel what it had been attempting for decades, by taking us permanently off the gold standard. As long as we have fiat money, backed by legal tender laws, with the cartel of collectivist bankers and politicians in bed together, with the taxpayer on the hook to bail out their mistakes, the whole system is hopeless. That is one of the main reasons I am leaving America, and taking a defensive position with my assets. America has become a system of economic fascism, which is one form of socialism. Here is a great article which explains this better:
The whole history of the Federal Reserve and the collectivist forces that created it can be read in “The Creature From Jekyll Island” by G Edward Griffin and can be purchased at:
http://www.realityzone.com/creature.htmlThere is a good interview with Ed that recently appeared in The Daily Bell and can be read here:
http://www.thedailybell.com/bellPage.asp?nid=332“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few”.
Wendell PhillipsHmmm . . . Just which Thomas Jefferson are you referring to, Scott, not the third President of the United States who died in 1826, I assume? Writing that, or anything else, in 1860 would have been beyond even his substantial talents.
Yes, David it was that Thomas Jefferson. There was little beyond his talents in terms of understanding Liberty and all the forms of Tyranny that strive against it.
Banks, like health care, roads, bridges and education, should be part of the commons and owned and directed by the people, the government. That is socialism or collectivism as some call it. It works in most of the world and it could work in the States as well. Conservative corporate autocracy is stopping our progress in that direction. Why is that bad?
The corporate autocracy just took our money again in the billions. Sweden also put forth money to its banking system to save it but they took control of the banks, They nationalized them. And why not? The citizens bought the banks.
In the States, the banks just took our money and kept it. We have no controlling interest. They pass out huge bonus checks to themselves with a tiny portion of this money but that is just a sympton, not the problem. The problem is that our butts have been and are still owned by the corporate autocracy.
Edited on Mar 24, 2009 04:35
sprite, the United States, like any other community, must make a decision whether its mission is to serve the legitimate needs of all its citizens or to serve just the wealthy and powerful few. When the government funnels everyones’ money into the pockets of a few already supremely advantaged individuals, as it does very often, then it has made and is acting upon that decision. Whether you’re talking about grossly expensive no-bid contracts awarded to insiders, pork barrel projects that benefit no one, tax policies that disproportionately favor the already-overfavored, indemnification of the inept, or other means of funneling money upward, the government that is already in the hands of the few has spoken.
For proof of what I say, one need look no farther than the government’s own data on two things. First, there is the transfer of wealth upward to the highest micro-stratum of the economic ladder in the past thirty or so years. Second, there is the grossly disproportionate share of the economy’s increased wealth which has gone to those same folks in that same time. At a macro level, the U.S. economy has grown impressively in the past thirty years or so, but those not already very advantaged have not benefited significantly.
The sad part of this picture is that there’s plenty to go around. No one (certainly not I) is suggesting that hard work and creativity should not be richly rewarded. But as a society the U.S. needs to find ways to assure that everyone benefits at some reasonable level and that minimum human needs are met. When twenty percent of America’s children grow up in poverty, something’s wrong. When eighty-seven million (87,000,000) Americans were without health insurance at some time last year, something’s wrong. When the infant mortality rate in the U.S. is greater than that of some developing nations and longevity is less, something’s wrong. When our public buildings and transportation infrastructure are is near-ruin, something’s wrong.
We don’t need to dispossess the wealthy to meet these needs; we just need to make some reasonable allowance for them. We need to find ways to spread the benefits of the American economy just a little more broadly. Sadly, we’re not.
None of this is to suggest that there should be just one standard of living in the U.S. Of course success should be rewarded, but do the successful also need to be further propped up by the rest of society too? When Jack Welch (former CEO of General Electric and a reknowned cost cutter (mostly on the backs of employees)) divorced his wife, it was revealed that they belonged to eleven(!) country clubs — eleven! Ken Lay, the wizard of Enron (who stole billions out of electricty consumers), owned homes all over the country. And they’re hardly unique.
Can this be right in a country where one in five children is underfed?
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