Who Is To Blame?

Mr. Brook in the first real voice I have heard that makes sense. To claim the free market has failed is absolutely ridiculous. We are so regulated in this country I don???t know how we haven't had a major crash till now.

This country needs to grow up and learn from history. Capitalism is the one true, moral system. This is not an opinion, but a full blown observation. READ A HISTORY BOOK!. Where there is freedom there is prosperity, where there is government controls there is slavery.

It's time we all head to Galt's Gulch.

Didn't the savings and loan crisis occur after the S & L's were de-regulated?

The arguments back and forth for "free markets" vs. socialism almost inevitably miss one vital point - that FRAUD must be the single most punishable offense in any just society.

1. When people invest in agri-business and also in the pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries, and then intentionally taint the food supply via GMOs, poor quality control, etc., drastically reducing the quality of life and cutting the average life span of humans in half, in order to increase profits in both industries, that is fraud.

2. When lobbyists give insane amounts of money to elected officials to sway their votes against the wishes of the people those officials represent, that is fraud.

3. When a "traffic cop" writes you "speeding ticket" without a verified criminal complaint by an injured third party as dictated by the statutes they are supposed to uphold, that is fraud, and then when the "traffic court" sends you a "bill" to "pay off" this "infraction" without due process of law as stated in the Constitution that this D&B listed "court" is supposed to uphold, that is fraud again.

4. When a privately held financial institution such as the Fed draws you into a unilateral contract to use their private credit via various government approved programs such as the use of a Social Security number, and they then charge you interest in the form of "income tax", and collude with the government to tell you that these "taxes" are necessary to feed the poor and protect us from "terrorism" and operate "public schools" and on and on and on, that is fraud.

5. When the government creates entities full of unelected bureaucrats like the FCC to "regulate the public airwaves", and these unelected officials then collude with a few select individuals by giving them "licenses", who then keep honest debate off the airwaves to promote their own agenda, that is fraud.

6. When "privately held" corporations in the meat packing and ranching field lobby congress for laws like NAIS, requiring EVERY farm animal on the planet to be tagged with an RFID chip and thus driving the small rancher out of business, that is fraud.

And so on...

At some point maybe people will come to realize that FRAUD is the number one enemy of a free and just society. Willfully carried out fraud must be judged by a PUBLIC court system and punished to the same degree as MURDER if the intent is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to show no regard for human life, as in my first example above. FRAUD is the lowest common denominator in all of humanity's problems. Until we find a way to severely limit it in our societies, terms like "left/right", "conservative/liberal", "capitalism/socialism", etc. will only continue to divide us. Meanwhile the pond scum at the top continues its reign of fraud over the rest of humanity by blocking out

As I have heard said: "I thought Objectivism was cool, but then I grew up."

Objectivism is just an excuse for the extreme Narcissism in our CEOs and Politicians. Blagojevich ? Dubya? Cheney? Lay? Enron? Halliburton? They followed Objectivism to it's logical conclusion: Get what you can and screw everybody else.

Canada has a much more regulated economy than the U.S., yet our banks are doing just fine. Why? Because they don't give mortgages to morons who can't afford the house they are buying in the first place, and, secondly, with no money down they can afford (and are allowed to) walk away from this non-commitment scot-free. In Canada, that mortgage remains your responsiblity whether you can afford it or not, and you have to have a minimum 5% down on it so you have a vested interest to begin with. As a businessman, I can find our regulations stifling and counter-productive, but in times like these they prove to be the safety-net for our entire economy ... as well as the leveler of the playing field so those that actually produce something can compete fairly with those that just speculate.

Rand???s laboratory theory will never work in the real world. Any psychiatrist, or for that matter anyone who watches the typical driver, can easily show anyone with an open mind that ???rational self-interest??? falls on its face on the very first word; rational. People are emotional. If you expect people to behave live ???Vulcans??? then you are even more irrational than them.

Here is the response given by one of Rands followers:

???But if you want to educate himself and understand that in purely laissez faire capitalist system any business is eventually punished by loosing the market if behaving unethically.???

Ah, all we need do is to get rid of regulations and enjoy the ride. Oh yes, cultists like Skysi will have to admit certain events will happen along the way like this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Onondaga

And eventually things will be wonderful. Well as people who can see reality all around may have noticed events like this lake is are not a temporary problem. What has happened here can never be undone. Does that sink into a Rand brain or is it too full of utopia to acknowledge the mess made here? It was done prior to regulations and in the person???s rational self interest. How many more such errors will be made before ???eventually??? kicks in? And you can???t ask the criminal to pay to correct this, there is no way to undo it. Does a Rand limited brain understand the consequences of such events?

There???s a far bigger danger than Rand???s followers here and their self convinced infallibility. The problem is when greedy scum go to college and take economics 101 and learn government regulation gets in the way of capitalism. Oh that may not be exactly what is taught, but that is what is heard, that and that only. From that the likes of Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff are created, in the supposed image that capitalism successes get there by disregarding all government imposed obstacles. What???s not taught, or even mandated as a separate class in most colleges, is professional ethics. Most people laugh at the title, as being an oxymoron, and with good reason. Good business practices really are a joke, not because most companies are honest and ethical, but because of the exceptionally high price paid for, by all, when a few companies are not.

You don???t need to be a Rand cultist, or even a college graduate to see all around you; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Governments aren???t about to allow real freedom. The current regulations fail capitalism because the lobbyists of the rich continually stack the deck against Joe Average, not because regulation in and of itself is a destructive thing, it???s been perverted by those that think they are behaving in ???rational self interest???, criminality cloaked with capitalism thanks to economics 101.

Ayn Rand? LOL. What a hoot. Almost as funny as the fact that people STILL swallow that "objectivist" garbage.

Not sure why I'd expect any thoughtful discourse here instead of the same 'ole commentary. Just like a small-scale replica of our pop culture, here we have a handful of rational minds being clobbered and suffocated with ad hominem, baseless claims, the ubiquitously tired "cult" jab, stupendously ignorant economics, and a host of various other jibbering vagaries.

This country has be guided and dismembering itself according to your irrational whims for most of the past century. Can you not see the patterns of destruction and death that result from repeating the same irrational blunders one after another? Have most of you even spent more than a few minutes in critical examination of the tepid slogans that you spew at any opportunity? OK, you don't like Rand for whatever reason... but can you refute, *really* refute any single premise that she contends? I know it's much easier, and way more cool and hip to dismiss her in any way you can, but does that really satisfy your intellectual hunger? I don't know how old (I'm not), or how educated (I'm not highly), or what some of your backgrounds are (mine is pretty average) on here, but what a pathetic collection of drivel!

Look at the trends... we've been heading in virtually the same direction for the past century and look at the results. Look around the world... does it not strike you as noteworthy that America, the country which has come the closest to a Capitalist society, is the nation with the highest standard of living in the world? The further we depart from that ideal, the more we sink into the same mediocre slumber as the rest of the world.

The reasons are simple. It's in man's nature to be free. So long as he respects the rights of other men to life, liberty and property, the sky is the limit. Only when man has force initiated upon him do we see depressions, credit crunches, famines, poverty and misery.

America is in a full march towards its demise and you psychopathic choads are the cheerleaders leading the way.

Regarding Lake Onondaga. Free Market Capitalism would require that the lake be owned privately. Whether a single owner or split up between multiple owners. If that were the case, do you think the lake owners would allow industries along the shore to pollute their property without a lawsuit? It would harm their fishing and recreational industry. The fault there was communal ownership of a resource. The tragedy of the commons pure and simple. In the case of private ownership of the lake it would be in the self-interest of the owners to keep the lake clean and profitable. It would be in the interests of the surrounding industries not to pollute so as to avoid the lawsuits and costs of cleaning up their neighbors property.

This guy is silly. Objectivists will continue to support the free market despite all the evidence that an unabated free market will allow wealth to collect into the saavy hands at the controls while the majority of the population is subjugated and is tied together into lines of economic slavery by those very same saavy hands. Capitalism worked well for us during this period of growth, and competition pushed us to develop all these new technologies over the last 100 years. However, capitalism is fundamentally wasteful. We have 3 companies, each with their own PR groups, website developers, ad execs, lawyers and litigators, CEO's, analysts, and chairmen competing to make the same product (soap, cars, CDS, you name it). Competition is fundamentally wasteful. The earth can not support 6 billion people who are engaged in competing and battling with one another. A centrally planned economy is now needed, now that our species has reached a point of techological maturity. Equality must be demanded for all human beings, an escape from the economic slavery that has replaced the sin of real slavery that we Americans still supported 150 years ago.