Showing posts with label free market. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free market. Show all posts

Monday, March 10, 2014

A conservative discovers externalities

It's always shocking when a free market conservative discovers that enterprises externalize their costs in order to profit at the expense of society:

What some of us haven’t considered is the possibility that the biggest subsidy of all is being able to pump pollutants into the air with no accountability.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/03/08/3981103/climate-change-is-a-conservative.html#storylink=cpy
But kudos to those who finally do.

Hmm, what could happen if he'd question his other long-cherished assumptions?

Maybe we're better off with him trying to explain reality to the wingnuts who wouldn't reelect him.  I know they won't listen to me.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

No way to change the climate


Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

There is simply no answer the teabaggers, denialists, oil tycoons, and wingnuts will ever accept.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Virtue of self-delusion



Drastically at odds with the Christian Bible, yet the Republican Party claims to be based on both. Debased, more like it.

A self-described Christian who holds at the same time the morality of Jesus and the contradictory "virtuous" selfishness of Ayn Rand must believe, among other absurdities, that every charism from god to human must stop there and not be shared with any other human.

The Christian conservatives I know don't actually believe Rand's philosophy. They are often altruistic within their own circles, and their churches are often valuable social welfare providers. Why is it that they adopt her anti-altruism extremism in regard to every economic issue?

Friday, May 10, 2013

Capitalist paradise

In a perfect Ayn Rand world, Sohel Rana ought to go Galt if he's regulated by the little people of government. Far better to keep hands off job creators and let their workers decide whether a factory is a safe enough place to alienate their labor!

Authorities in Bangladesh now say the building was illegally constructed, with permits obtained through political influence. The owner, Sohel Rana, now in jail, was illegally adding upper floors to structure at the time the building collapsed, officials said.
If 1,000 people die because greedy bastards like Rana have bought off the government, for economic libertarians, that's just the occasional cost of freedom, collateral damage in a capitalist paradise.

When an industrialist exploiter corrupts government, that's a failure of government, no doubt. But it's a feature of the extreme form of capitalism that Randian libertarians advocate, in which everything is for sale and the "free" market corrects excesses.

Sometimes, the market mechanism takes lives of the proles. But who cares about them? Certainly not Rana Sohel.

The thing we comfortable, lazy Americans may not have noticed is that we live in a nation whose government has been thoroughly corrupted by the moneyed elites. Little by little and sometimes in big hunks, wealth has bought up every institution it could.

The plutocrats think their incipient fascism is by definition right and moral. Even if a few (thousand) have to die.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Monday, November 26, 2012

The wealthy want to steal your retirement

It's really that simple:

[T]he deficit scolds aren’t giving up. Now yet another organization, Fix the Debt, is campaigning for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, even while making lower tax rates a “core principle.” That last part makes no sense in terms of the group’s ostensible mission, but makes perfect sense if you look at the array of big corporations, from Goldman Sachs to the UnitedHealth Group, that are involved in the effort and would benefit from tax cuts. Hey, sacrifice is for the little people.
Like private pension funds before them, that's where the money is. You own it, and you should make sure that anyone who covets it for their already grandiose private fortunes does so at risk of being pilloried - or worse.

This is serious, people. The rich want to reduce the rest of us to penury so that we're easier to control and so they can have extra billions they don't need or deserve on top of the billions they already couldn't possibly spend in a dozen lifetimes.

Wingnuts - and, for example, the completely smarmy and duplicitous ad from JPMorganChase on one of the NFL games today - claim that plutocracy is free enterprise. The only thing free about it is the freedom of the moneyed players to lift your bank accounts without any chance of prosecution. Au contraire, they'll be honored as lynchpins of the economy.

Update (11/28): When they keep theirs and arrange for ours to be taken away to avoid paying even a smidgen of their fair share, that's stealing. Eventually, we serfs will rise.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Hope you're ready for Hurricane Sandy



'Cause if Mitt Rmoney has his way, some "entrepreneur" will rip you off  for food and water after every natural disaster. Profiteers, man, the new ruling class.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Criminal enterprise

When did mortgage lending become a criminal enterprise?

Some lenders are aggressively pitching loans to seniors who cannot afford the fees associated with them, not to mention the property taxes and maintenance. Others are wooing seniors with promises that the loans are free money that can be used to finance long-coveted cruises, without clearly explaining the risks. Some widows are facing eviction after they say they were pressured to keep their name off the deed without being told that they could be left facing foreclosure after their husbands died.
In a market characterized by asymmetrical information, the layering of the industry allows conscienceless, high pressure salesmen to fool their marks into taking on more risk, without the constraints of putting their own money at risk.

Then again, the secondary market for mortgages is filled with players who are just as savvy as the high pressure brokers. These investors know their interests are protected by foreclosure, so they don't care if the mortgage is sound for its intended purpose. Win-win!

Maybe it's always been this way.


Sunday, February 12, 2012

Political bankruptcy

Republicans want to return to disastrous policies because they would then have to admit the emptiness of their ideas and their own uselessness in solving any national problem bigger than changing the diaper of some busted Wall Street institution:

The economy didn't just crash under a Republican president, it crashed under Republican policies. It crashed with low taxes. It crashed with deregulated markets. It crashed with huge restrictions on union activity. It crashed with massive cuts in environmental regulations. It crashed with lowered trade barriers. It crashed with big fat Pentagon spending.

They got what they wanted. They got CEOs with no limits on their wealth. They got banks with no limits on their "creativity." They got trade agreements that guaranteed manufacturing could be moved to the dirtiest, cheapest, most desperate source available. They got massive cuts in capital gains taxes and equally large boosts in the wealth they could pass along in estates. They got everything they said would make us all wealthy. They got record oil and gas drilling. They got record giveaways of public land. They got everything they said would create jobs. They got the middle class to shoulder more, more, more of the burden so that those beautiful job creators would be free to work their magic.

They can't say the economy crashed because taxes went up, because they didn't. They can't say that the economy crashed because there was a raft of new regulation, because there wasn't. They can't blame it on "union thugs" or Saul Alinsky or the guy who writes Happy Holidays cards at Hallmark. They can't blame it on a president who was elected when the world was already in free fall. Only, of course they do. They say it because they have no choice.
I've hit some of these themes for a long time, but I don't think I've ever hit them as well as Mark Sumner on DailyKos. Go read the whole thing.

Monday, December 26, 2011

The Times deigns to permit the L-word

The American Enterprise Institute, which calls its employs scholars but pays them to create propaganda, created the bullshit lie that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial meltdown.

 Peter Wallison, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, [has] almost single-handedly created the myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis. His partner in crime is another A.E.I. scholar, Edward Pinto, who a very long time ago was Fannie’s chief credit officer. Pinto claims that as of June 2008, 27 million “risky” mortgages had been issued — “and a lion’s share was on Fannie and Freddie’s books,” as Wallison wrote recently. Never mind that his definition of “risky” is so all-encompassing that it includes mortgages with extremely low default rates as well as those with default rates nearing 30 percent. These latter mortgages were the ones created by the unholy alliance between subprime lenders and Wall Street. Pinto’s numbers are the Big Lie’s primary data point.

Allies? Start with Congressional Republicans, who have vowed to eliminate Fannie and Freddie — because, after all, they caused the crisis! Throw in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which, on Wednesday, published one of Wallison’s many articles repeating the Big Lie. It was followed on Thursday by an editorial in The Journal making essentially the same point. Repetition is all-important to spreading a Big Lie.
AEI and the Wall Street Journal know they're lying. They know that Fannie and Freddie were late to big profitable rape and pillage started entirely by private, market-based institutions.

But they lie repeatedly just the same. Oh, yeah, the Republicans too.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Free range advocates


If the world is their pasture, it must also be their toilet, right?

Click image for full Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal Constitution cartoon.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Is that a mutation?



Click image for full Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Judas Oscariot

 I have no idea whether "The Social Network" will win the best picture Oscar.  Maybe it already has.  I don't watch award shows.  The producers have the gall to broadcast a 3-hour ad for Hollywood and still to lard it with ads for cars and beer and boner pills or whatever.  Awards shows are tedious, besides.  If they'd just show the 100 best trailers and the 100 sexiest stars, then I might watch.

I don't know whether Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook, but I do know that he is a villain.  Practically everything he has ever done with the site proves that.  Repeated privacy violations, followed by insincere apologies (as evident from the next violation/apology cycle), have steadily removed privacy.  At this point, I assume that anything I ever do on FB is recorded and available to FB's marketing partners.  They've already been caught targeting users based on their private messages.  They've already been caught posting chat sessions for the world to see.  Do you need to be smacked with a 2x4 to get the message?

FB is selling you and your demographic attributes to the highest bidder.  That's why "Harvard" shows up on my thumbnail despite my efforts to get rid of it.

Zuckerberg likes to wrap himself in the mantle of free information.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  He only wants to liberate your information from you for the benefit of access to your wallet.  Those of us on FB are just marks, succumbing to a con because we like hearing from our friends.  It's exploitation.

Facebook continues to allow virus writers to spread their crap.  Click on a video a friend has posted, and you can never tell whether you'll see a video - or post the same video to all your friends, as if you'd clicked Like.  It's an abuse, and FB won't stop it.

Here's what I want to think about:  How can we build an open source, decentralized social network with the benefits of Facebook and without the soul-selling drawbacks?

Friday, January 21, 2011

Loughner's never getting out, so what's the problem?

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer prepares to empty the asylums.  Oh, too late, done decades ago.  Brewer proposes to stop taking care of the mentally ill except to fling tranqs at them.  Complex problems, simple-minded solutions, the Republican way...

Can't you just purr from the warm feeling of Republican Nocare!  Yes, the free market is going to take care of these people.  It always does.  They can sell their meds on the street and get their transplants.  If that's the rational way to act in the market for medical services.  Though we might need a government program to intervene from time to time - what do we give cops tasers for, anyway?  Portable electroshock!

Then Arizonans can finance it all with yet another zombie movie.  It's already cast, so no need for a casting director.  Win-win-win!

(h/t Digby)

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Still too complex for the Teapublicans

Paul Krugman, as always, gives us the gift of simple proof. High unemployment is due to a lack of demand, not a temporary dislocation that requires no intervention in the so-called free market.
There are no jobs, hence the need to extend unemployment benefits.

The Teapublican alternative: Stop benefits, tell the longterm unemployed that they're on their own, and necessarily reduce aggregate demand in the economy as a whole. This is a perfect way to continue to reduce demand in the labor market, leading to even more unemployment and exhaustion of benefits.

Who wins in a persistently deflating labor market? Not people who work for a living, that's for sure.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Practical economics

Before Jimmy Carter bought into the deregulation mania of the 1970s, you could book a round-trip itinerary without making sure that both legs were on the same airline. Here in 2010, I just heard an Expedia ad that touts that as a great new selling point.

Is 35 years long enough to prove that the free market is often not efficient?

Update (8/4): The free market seldom takes this long to discover opportunities such as these to screw us, purely as a result of their market power.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Head up BP's ass

If you for some odd reason still need to see more of a certain common type of conservative stupidity heavily leavened with hypocrisy, you can seldom go wrong with the flagrantly doctrinaire and unfunny cartoons of Chuck Asay. Here is today's.

In one cartoon, Asay - his head firmly in place in BP's ass - tries all of the following:

  • lets BP off the hook for the worst oil spill in history
  • evades every claim conservatives have ever made to be the party of personal responsibility
  • fails utterly to understand that competitive price pressures of the market should exact a profit penalty from BP - under the conservative theory of the market
  • imputes to liberals his own failing - stupidity

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Masturs of the universe

More proof, if any were needed, that Wall Street doesn't know your ass from a hole in the ground.

[M]addeningly, the cause or causes of the market’s wild swing remained elusive, leaving what amounts to a $1 trillion question mark hanging over the world’s largest, and most celebrated, stock market.
These are the people we've left without adult supervision, despite the fact that they might at any moment hoist our living economy up on the mortuary table and drain its blood out in preparation for embalming.

Why would Skynet need a nuclear launch?

Monday, April 26, 2010

Calling the tune

Krugman identifies another corruption of our vaunted, innovative financial system:

[Debt rating] was a system that looked dignified and respectable on the surface. Yet it produced huge conflicts of interest. Issuers of debt — which increasingly meant Wall Street firms selling securities they created by slicing and dicing claims on things like subprime mortgages — could choose among several rating agencies. So they could direct their business to whichever agency was most likely to give a favorable verdict, and threaten to pull business from an agency that tried too hard to do its job. It’s all too obvious, in retrospect, how this could have corrupted the process. [Emphasis added.]
Since Enron corrupted Arthur Andersen by applying the leverage of money to built-in conflicts of interest, it has been obvious that it would be impossible for any alleged watchdog paid by the watchees for its watching to resist payment from the same parties not to watch. Free market competition guarantees it.

Krugman's hardly ever slow on the uptake. Maybe he just didn't have any public statements to point out, proving that he had noticed long ago.

(h/t Atrios)