Nope.
Why yes, free trade is a bad idea. But that’s another debate.
There comes a time, perhaps during the richest period of wealth in one of the richest nations in history, where instead of asking that question, you instead ask why anyone should be in that position in the first place and how to fix it.
Perhaps the fat-cat employer should relocate his place of business to better accommodate this employee’s commute.
I think that’s what this thread is about, and there have been lots of ideas, some put forward by me. But the point is this isn’t something new.
Then I can’t help you.
Who knows if you can or not? You posted a number. Try making an argument and we will see if you can help.
Hell, even companies tell employees that they are responsible for their careers now. Very few even pretend to want loyalty. But jumping ship every time you get a 5% raise may not be very productive either.
Can’t argue with that. Ditto when companies hire thugs to intimidate workers.
That makes an already imbalanced situation more imbalanced. Employers can fire workers who don’t show up for any number of reasons, but not showing up during a strike - which should be official in the sense it is voted on by the workers - is the only bargaining chip they have. If an employer gets this out of the contract, there will never be another fair negotiation. What would happen is that workers would come to work but stage a slow-down, or even semi-sabotage things by, for instance, not noticing a defective product is passing by. That is worse for the company and its customers. In a strike both sides are losing money which is an incentive to bargain. That goes away in your system.
Maybe you should read Adam Smith. The goal of capitalism is not success and well being of all members of society. Now it does a pretty good job for the most part, but you need to give us a model where capitalism inevitably leads to an optimal society. Regulation is all about keeping short term gains that capitalist will go after from hurting society.
To expand on the answer of 2008 bankers, in order to maximize returns to shareholders, just like they should, engaged in riskier and riskier behavior. Until, as was inevitable, the whole thing collapsed and tens of millions of people were hurt. Capitalism does not look that far ahead. If regulators had been on the ball and said that though we know preventing you from making these loans hurts the bottom line but needs to be done for the good of society, we’d be in far better shape today.
Especially when you can still get a 3% raise from most employers most years…not all, but most.
'Hole on there Hoss. You just stated that Free market economics (of which capitalism is just one subset) cannot be accepted unless it optimizes social welfare.
- That’s unprovable either way.
- I’ve got dollars to donuts you’d excuse far more “un-optimal” outcomes in your pet economic dreamhome than in whatrever you dislike.
- You failed to define “success”
- You conflate complete lack of law with less rules than you think needed, so that you can attack anyone who disagrees with certain regulations or with the amount of regulation as if they wanted anarchy, without defending anything.
- You assume that any economic regime can provide what you want, and by God you’re going to demand it and curse the obviously evil people who are not giving it to you, even though it’s not clear that it can even be improved upon at the moment.
I’ve also got more money laying down that you don’t really know any of these answers.
Except that the regulators you so fondly love, with their sweeping powers, didn’t do this. They encouraged the markets to expand, and in fact pushed them on ahead. The government you want to rule the markets is the same one who colluded in creating the bubble and sustaining it.
In short, you see one segment causing problems (and even there it was only the last actor in a long chain of them), blame that segment for the whole problem because it suits your preconceptions, and heap prise on another problem-causing segment of the chain of events, because it suits you to ignore their role. In fact, you want to give more power to the very people who caused the crisis as much as the bankers. In fact, you’re just running up against a human issue, and handawving it away because its inconvenient to accept that (amazingly enough) impossible problems are impossible.
But hey, when you’ve already handwaved away all economic problems and demand the proponents of anything you dislike to prove it’s the perfect solution or you dismiss them, why not ignore the limits of time and space as well.
that’s not an accurate portrayal of what happened. First off, many of the loans were repackaged Fannie May loans which were driven ultimately by the government as part of an exercise in social engineering. Second, those mortgages were backed up by derivatives which again were approved of by government regulation. Had our own legislators heeded the warnings on both the loans and the derivatives we wouldn’t be in this mess.
The role of financial sheriff (by government) is fine but politics should be removed from the process as much as possible. There’s no room for social engineering or supporter favoritism when constructing financial regulations.
This is misleading. For starters, the idea that CRA was responsible for the housing mess has been pretty thoroughly proven false. CRA loans and securities still outperform private Alt-A and subprime loans. Also, the GSEs didn’t wind up in the subprime mortgage business due to the CRA or attempts at social engineering. They did it because they needed the cash flow in order to stay competitive with private mortgage companies, who at the time were making billions and dominating the mortgage market.
For the second part, though the securitization of mortgages and the resulting derivatives were approved by regulators, there was no nefarious or political overtones. They weren’t turning a blind eye. In my opinion, the same holds true for the rating agencies and the bond traders themselves.
After reading a few books on the crisis, its become pretty clear that there was very little intentional deception on the part of regulators, raters and trading desks. The answer, the cause if the whole mess, is much more simple and much more scary: Except for a handful of people, nobody knew what the fuck they were doing. Nobody really knew what they were buying or selling. The models used to asses the risk of the loans and bonds were fundamentally flawed.
Actually, it’s a theorem.
You’re right of course. The capitalists own the government right now, so regulation is ineffective. I’m not sure, however, that the solution is to continue optimizing the conditions that lead to capitalists being able to own the government. What solution do you propose?
They were not turning a blind eye to mortgage signings that were clearly illegal? There are clear rules about the requirements for mortgage loans that are widely alleged to have been violated in tens of thousands of loans. Just what would constitute “turning a blind eye” if that didn’t?
But the people who were betting the entirety of Merrill Lynch and AIG on mortgage bonds weren’t the ones writing the mortgages. They were several steps away from that, which is entirely the problem.
For a starter I would strongly recommend Lewis’s “The Big Short,” which in a neat twist is written from the perspective of the few people who DID know what was happening. The ignorance they run up against is truly, truly amazing, and Lewis makes a special point of talking about the employees of bond agencies (Moody’s, S&P) as being especially… well, stupid.
I never mentioned CRA, I referred to Fannie Mae which goes much farther back. It’s still in crisis mode.
While I agree with this that is not what I said. Congress was specifically warned about problems with Fannie Mae and derivatives and did nothing.
Writing the illegal mortgage loans was bad, that’s one level of crookedness. The guys at Goldman Sachs who were selling mortage-backed securities to their customers (pension fund managers, etc.) and telling them they were good buys, then turning around and buying CDOs that were based on the assumption that the mortgage-backed securities would fail … cause they knew they would. That’s fraud, too! There’s enough blame for everyone!