Super rich pay no taxes

Originally posted by crankySamurai

Originally posted by thepresident

The problem that you seem to missing is that in this CURRENT environment
the term "free market" is used as a tool to engineer policies for players in the
market.

All those politicians hollering "free market" regularly demolish just enough
regulation to legalize fraudulent policies that negatively impact the consumer
the public and the tax payers.

In 98 there was an environmental bill that impacted oil production, namely spills
and bi products.

In that case the "free market" side was voting to let the company dump their waste
into and aquifer that sources wells in the locale.

Same forces did the same routine with medical waste.

The point WE are making is that the ideology and the practice are NOT the same.

The practice is to call it "free market" so people like you support the action being
proposed.

I in NO way miss understand this.

This is the same way that our government supposedly represents freedom and a democratic republic when in fact it has become the very antithesis of that. Just because Bush passed the patriot act in the name of protecting freedom doesn't mean that freedom is a bad thing.

No politician represents the free market just as none represent liberty. That does not mean that the idea of freedom or liberty has changed!

The politicians do everything in the name of freedom. Does that mean we should oppose freedom? That is what you are suggesting with your opposition to the free market.

I am in no way fooled by their rhetoric... you seem to be though.

edit on 4-9-2012 by crankySamurai because: (no reason given)

Friend,

You don't seem to be paying attention to what they DO.

The same cast of characters use it repeatedly to raise the playing field
for big business.

The Banks and Insurance companies were deregulated in 99 in the name
of free market principles, by the most vocal free market advocates in America.

The nuance you miss is that knocking out two or three lines from a thousand

pages of regulation to create a loophole or fraud is NOT free market. The nuance is

that is how the "free market" principle is applied.

Just because you call it free market or because it is pro business does not make it intelligent

or practical.

Originally posted by crankySamurai
reply to post by thepresident

 

Again if people started going around injecting people with aids in the name of good health does that mean that we should oppose good health?

No, we should question the people who keep bringing up good health while carrying a syringe.

Those are the majority of politicians who use the words "free market" to inform their

corporatist policies.

reply to post by thepresident


What are you saying what are you arguing against? That is the very thing which I am talking about.

Why do you think that I support what they DO? I am completely against the policies that have been put in place pretty much for the last century.

reply to post by crankySamurai


The patriot act was a sham.

I knew that from the start and so is the free market concept.

Few are the ideas worth believing.

Originally posted by poet1b
reply to post by crankySamurai

 

The patriot act was a sham.

I knew that from the start and so is the free market concept.

Few are the ideas worth believing.

No $hit the patriot act was a shame. Did you even read my post? Jesus....

reply to post by poet1b


The free market is not a shame. It is the only true form of economics there is. Just because the politicians espouse free market rhetoric while putting forth policies that are not remotely free market oriented does not mean that it is the free market that is the problem.

Politicians put forth polices that restrict freedom constantly while saying that they are acting in the NAME of freedom.

Yet this does not mean that freedom is a shame.

The same holds true with the free market.

reply to post by crankySamurai


Sorry, I don't share your faith.

Freedom is true.

The market system is true.

But there is no such thing as a free market.

If you believe in a free market, stop support pols who preach the free market while supporting something that is completely the opposite of what you believe.

Originally posted by poet1b
reply to post by hawkiye

 

Your sources are well known for putting out propaganda nonsense. Provide a link that backs your claims and you could get some credibility. You quote numbers from the wrong decades.

That's always your response with no evidence whatsoever. Some unsubstantiated blanket statement... Sigh!

My sources are renowned for their pin point accuracy on the economy. The Austrian economics school of thought with Ron Paul Peter Schiff and others has predicted every crisis with uncanny accuracy unlike your sources... oh wait you haven't posted any sources... Ok unlike the Keynesian economists who have told us right up until every crash everything was hunky dori and unlike any other source period.

So yeah I lean toward the guys words that have been amazingly accurate over several decades about the economy despite being ridiculed by the so called experts instead of twisted nonsensical BS such as you spout.

Oh and you only mentioned 1890 I gave a larger picture of the late 19th century and early 20th century for better clarity something you are obviously not familiar with. I also did not quote some arbitrary website BS I quoted well known accurately researched and cited history books. Of course you are welcome to try and rebut those highly esteemed books and their historical references if you like but I won't hold my breath...

You know I used to think you were just an uniformed kid who had the brains to figure things out if just given enough accurate information. However I am beginning to think you just have an agenda because you are showing all the classical signs of a troll. You do not post evidence and just willfully ignore hard evidence time and again that destroys your claims while you continue to repeat your unsubstantiated non-sense over and over hoping that by repetition some one will buy it...

Too bad you had such potential and it is all wasted on BS!

Originally posted by poet1b
reply to post by crankySamurai

 

Sorry, I don't share your faith.

Freedom is true.

The market system is true.

But there is no such thing as a free market.

If you believe in a free market, stop support pols who preach the free market while supporting something that is completely the opposite of what you believe.

What makes you think that I support any of these politicians?

I don't know where your getting this crap from but you keep making ridiculous claims that aren't even remotely close to true.

reply to post by hawkiye


Your sources are known for their propaganda. It's like asking a catholic bishop about religion.

I posted on the 1890s, you posted on the 1870s. That not giving an broader look, thats pretending one decade is the same as any other.

As I proved with the legit ate link I provided, free market policies were a failure before the fed res act.

reply to post by poet1b

If a business or individual becomes wealthy it is because they supplied something for which other people voluntarily gave them their dollars.

- From crankySamurai

Not at all. The most successful borrowed large amounts of money to buy something, which they managed to sell for a whole lot more money. This isn't business, its fraud. They sold a bill of goods, a lot of promises with no real value.

- From poet1b

Frankly, poet1b, I don't understand why you're disagreeing with him. This late in the thread, could it be just a reflex action? After all, you're saying that people obtained something which they sold for more money.
CrankySamurai said that people sold something that others wanted and were willing to pay for.

How are you disagreeing? Is the difference that you are specifying they had to borrow start up capital? So?

And what can you possibly mean that it has no real value? What is the value of a really old, slightly torn, shirt? Nothing? What if it was worn by Babe Ruth, or JFK? The value of something is what some one is freely willing to pay for it.

There are cases where something fraudulent is sold to a willingly buyer (a sucker).

The banks would post collateral, in the form of bundled "securitized" bonds, and use the short-term loans to maintain operations. When the banks collateral became suspect — because no one knew which bundles held the subprime mortgages — then intermediaries (primary dealers) demanded more collateral for the loans. Suddenly the banks were losing money hand-over-fist as the value of their assets tumbled.

Lehman’s Liar’s Loans and Other Cons

When a bundle of "liars loans" is passed off as good rating, either by using as collateral or sold to investors, that is like selling an old shirt as one worn by a historical figure. It's fraud.

When someone pays a lot of money for a fashion knockoff, purported to be the "real deal" but is not, that is fraud.

Selling snake oil might make someone rich, but they're a rich crook.

reply to post by charles1952


There is a big difference between selling something of value, and pulling a con.

Under the whole free market scam, fraud is allowed to parade as legitimate business.

How do you not see this?

reply to post by poet1b

There is a big difference between selling something of value, and pulling a con.

Yes, I agree completely.

Under the whole free market scam, fraud is allowed to parade as legitimate business.

No, I disagree. The transaction may not be investigated, the perpetrators tried, or proper punishment handed out (See Corzine for a recent example), but that is an attack on the free market or a perversion of the justice system, it is not a condemnation or failure of an economic system.

reply to post by desert

In making his case against Lehman, Black exposes the omissions, failures and negligence of the primary regulators, particularly the Fed. Had the Fed not been derelict in its duties, the cyclical downturn would not have turned into a near-Depression. "Lehman’s failure is a story in large part of fraud," Black said in his testimony before the House. "Lehman was the leading purveyor of liars’ loans in the world. For most of this decade, studies of liars’ loans show incidence of fraud of 90per cent. … If you want to know why we have a global crisis, in large part it is before you."

Yeah my dad was an Ayn Randian corporate "free market" libertarian aligned with the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation and his federal appeals court district judge friend -- and the right wing corporate law society my dad was a member of. When the financial crisis hit my dad said:

I wish Greenspan had not be pushing everyone to refinance their mortgages.

That was quite a confession from my dad, considering Greenspan had the same ideology that my Dad looked up to.

"Lehman’s nominal corporate governance structure was a sham," says Black. "Lehman was deliberately out of control with regard to “risk” in its dominant operation – making “liar’s loans.” Lehman did not “manage” the risk of making liar’s loans. It engaged in massive, fraudulent transactions that were “sure things”. Black notes that sleight-of-hand accounting assures that institutions will "report superb (fictional) income in the short-term and catastrophic losses in the long-term," which is exactly what happened. The head honchos skimmed off billions in fat bonuses and stock options, while their companies were fed to the dogs.

So you watch the Flaw documentary and Greenspan says he "discovered" a "flaw" in his ideology. I mean like the whole financial crisis was for his own personal learning experience! Wow I hope we helped the man learn something -- but at what expense. haha. Talk about selfish.

When I was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison I took environmental economics and I wrote a paper called the "Incorrect Supply and Demand Model." My teacher was this pony tail graduate student male pretending to be a liberal while pushing extreme free market philosophy that was all the rage in the early 1990s from the Reagan Revolution. Boy was he pissed that I challenged the very foundation of Free Market ideology. haha. I used a book called "Anti-Samuelson"

When I was an undergraduate learning basic economics from Paul Samuelson's classic textbook, I ran across a book by Marc Linder called Anti-Samuelson. Linder's book was a leftist critique of Samuelson's presentation of the field. Samuelson was the ostensible target of the attack, but as the author of the leading economics textbook, he was really only a proxy. Linder's actual target, it seemed to me, was the mainstream of the economics profession and the way almost all economists teach undergraduates. He thought we economists preached too much reverence for market mechanisms. (Linder is now a law professor: On his webpage, he sports a t-shirt that says "people before profits.")

Wow a Harvard University econ prof even mentions the book -- in a derisive, dismissive fashion of course -- with a wave of his hand from his elitist appointment. Harvard is a big fraud school.

O.K. but my main argument in my The Incorrect Supply and Demand Model paper was using Hazel Henderson's Politics of the Solar Age book that uses nonlinear chaos economics based on entropy energy analysis.

Yep -- it went OVER their heads! haha. It was too mathematically complicated and too sophisticated for them.

O.K. here it is -- Entropy Economics - glad to see that Hazel Henderson's original source is the main reference

Now my dad attended the London School of Economics and so my Dad made me read Thomas Sowell's attack on Marxism. But would my dad read Noam Chomsky? Nope. I wrote lengthy critiques of all the books my dad asked me to read -- so it just honed my skills. But why should those in power intellectually engage with their critiques? Might is Right as it is stated. But indeed I did use Chomsky in graduate school at the U of Minnesota to get some serious reforms passed against sweatshops and slavery investments.

This lecture by Dr. Barlett also uses energy entropy and logarithmic math to debunk the Supply and Demand Free Market model:

reply to post by charles1952

No, I disagree. The transaction may not be investigated, the perpetrators tried, or proper punishment handed out (See Corzine for a recent example), but that is an attack on the free market or a perversion of the justice system, it is not a condemnation or failure of an economic system.

It's not an attack on the free market system, it is proof that the whole free market system does not work. Over and over again, these free market scheme result in massive failure, wide spread fraud, and the redistribution of wealth from the working class to the con artist who benefit off this failed economic model.

reply to post by fulllotusqigong


And persons like you, gigong, are why I remain hopeful.

Alan Greenspan certainly was full of understatements re the financial crisis. In 2008, when he said, "The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War," he was warning that we would be riding on a big, new roller coaster, one built on fraud.

I will watch Dr. Bartlett's lecture. Thanks for sharing.

reply to post by fulllotusqigong


Great stuff. Funny how so many of these college professors are supposed to liberal when they are hard core conservatives, and fully buy into the whole Ann Rand classist belief system.

I would add that all these state rights concepts only play into the hands of petty dictators everywhere. What we need are standards, an evenly enforced fair st of rules that everyone lives by. What the elites want are a convoluted set of rules they can twist anyway they want.

The first place to start is with the banks.

reply to post by poet1b


My dad's federal judge friend rules in a closed door administrative hearing against the Family Farm protection state laws in the Midwest. So one closed door meeting of Federal Judges undermined a whole region of states rules to keep out complete corporate control verticalization cartels of the market. Yet these judges thought they were supporting the "free market" based on their Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society (legal right wing association) followings.

I wrote a paper for my Latin American International Relations course -- my paper was on Cardenas supporting the traditional communal ejidos cooperative farms of Mexico. My professor was a female with the classic Ayn Randian hair cut. No one in this class even asked questions and the whole class material was just promoting NAFTA. I was aghast at the zombie mentality but then I discovered that my new major designation -- International Relations -- was considered a business major. My professor said I was "intellectual dishonest" and I got a D. I had cited all my references so I didn't understand. I went to ask her and she simply responded:

"I think you will fail this class."

It was clearly a threat with no intention of intellectual discussion. I was taking it as a summer class with several other classes that summer. I knew what I was up against -- clearly she was a puppet for the so-called Free Market ideology which was really a pro-big government subsidy policy for big business. So I just didn't respond to her comment and then after that I just regurgitated my class notes without thinking for myself. I just turned my brain off and was a "parrot" to her ideology and presto! I got a B. haha. It was hilariously tragic.

So then years later I was working as a legal secretary for the U of MN law school and one of my professors that I worked for had me type of her lecture notes -- for what? How U.S. businesses get huge tax breaks if they move to Mexico. How quaint. I'm sure she got a nice honorarium for selling out to Big Business Tax Welfare on that one.

reply to post by desert


Did I mention my confrontation of Vice President Al Gore about the CIA and the environmental crisis?

Here's the details -- a half hour with a dozen of his secret service and a dozen of my activist friends all in the basement of a VFW -- Gore on the defensive the whole time.

Sorry if I'm repeating myself -- but I did get pulled over on the way home - the cop asked for my license. I didn't say a word when I handed it to him. He returned from his cop car and said: "Thanks." I think he knew that I knew why I had been pulled over. haha. I was put on some list to be sure.