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Economics Without Greed

Lukey

Senator
Because [Unwelcome language removed], possibly like you, didn't care what the GAAP and the GAAS said about accounting standards, or auditing standards. Passing a law put teeth into the requirements for generally accepted principles.

No secrets with ENRON??? They hid the truth from investors, which is what a number of companies have done in the past.

What the fucks the use.
Like I said, there was no secret in the demise of Enron, as the chart of its steadily declining stock price illustrates. Nor was there no indication that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, as the numerous tips to the SEC, which didn't act on them. So don't give me your Marxist bullshit that we need to keep passing more and more laws to put "teeth" in accounting standards. How exactly did Sarbanes Oxley prevent Jon Corzine from stealing his depositors' money and squandering it? Oh, right, it didn't. So then it must have put "teeth" in the accounting standards so he could be sent to jail where he belongs. Oh wait, it didn't do that either. The fact is that your f*cking "teeth" are toothless and just hapmer the formation and growth of good, productive businesses, which is why the economy never has recovered from the last recession. It's as plain as the nose on your face that everything you support is either worthless or detrimental or both to economic growth, which is your aim in all this, though isn't it? So what's being "hidden" is the left's anti-capitalist agenda that is destroying the middle class. I'm looking forward to the opening of the curtain on the socialism behind everything you guys do that we're getting from Sanders' campaign. This is really gonna be great to finally have the debate you subversive Marxists have been avoiding for 70 years...
 
What Marxists know about the "dead hand of debt."
http://store.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Killing-The-Host_PDF_V7.pdf(p.306)


"29. The Fight for the 21st Century

"In 1933, as the wake of World War I’s financial wreckage gave way to the Great Depression, the philosopher H. G. Wells wrote a novel about the conflict he expected to emerge by the last quarter of his century.

"Reminding his readers of the 'perennial struggle of life against the creditor and the dead hand,” he described society’s 'forward effort' seeking to break free of past debts and financial claims.

"Viewing debt as a retarding force, Wells forecast that matters would come to a head in the year 1979 when his fictional character Austin Livewright would publish Bankruptcy Through the Ages. 'We need only refer the student to the recorded struggles in the histories of Republican Rome and Judaea between debtor and creditor; to the plebeian Secessions of the former and the year of Jubilee of the latter.'

"The year 1979 indeed turned out to be precisely when interest rates peaked at a modern-era high of 20 percent."

Regardless of why finance currently trumps production in US GDP, the economic parasites on Wall Street are bleeding the economy in the same way hereditary nobility bled Europe centuries ago; what's to be done?
 

Wahbooz

Governor
Like I said, there was no secret in the demise of Enron, as the chart of its steadily declining stock price illustrates. Nor was there no indication that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme, as the numerous tips to the SEC, which didn't act on them. So don't give me your Marxist bullshit that we need to keep passing more and more laws to put "teeth" in accounting standards. How exactly did Sarbanes Oxley prevent Jon Corzine from stealing his depositors' money and squandering it? Oh, right, it didn't. So then it must have put "teeth" in the accounting standards so he could be sent to jail where he belongs. Oh wait, it didn't do that either. The fact is that your f*cking "teeth" are toothless and just hapmer the formation and growth of good, productive businesses, which is why the economy never has recovered from the last recession. It's as plain as the nose on your face that everything you support is either worthless or detrimental or both to economic growth, which is your aim in all this, though isn't it? So what's being "hidden" is the left's anti-capitalist agenda that is destroying the middle class. I'm looking forward to the opening of the curtain on the socialism behind everything you guys do that we're getting from Sanders' campaign. This is really gonna be great to finally have the debate you subversive Marxists have been avoiding for 70 years...
And how did SOX give Jon Corzine the ammunition to steal customer's monies? With proper accounting of all accounts the courts have determined how much MF Global must return to their customers. And it's up to the SEC to act, the accounting profession can only account and audit. As I said, SOX put teeth into what can be done, if investors continue to trust a certified audit of a companies financials, that was done within a conflict of interest, that's their mistake. Accounting rules are accounting rules. So you think the requirements for record keeping is because Marxists are running the government, and it has nothing to do with paper trails to recover stolen funds?

and you failed to respond as to your knowledge of GAAP, GAAS, and FASB statements. SOX is nothing new, it is nothing more than a legal restatement of accounting requirements that are ages old.

I can only fill out a tax return, I don't sit at someone's mailbox and make sure they file it. That is up to the IRS. But I sure as hell keep records of returns I've prepared, to protect myself from someone changing any figures on a return I've made out.

'Subversive Marxist'..... Hey, Mr. CEO, you don't need to adhere to accounting principles, just do whatever you want. We're going to do away with rules and laws. What a fvcking joke you are.
 
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Lukey

Senator
And how did SOX give Jon Corzine the ammunition to steal customer's monies? With proper accounting of all accounts the courts have determined how much MF Global must return to their customers. And it's up to the SEC to act, the accounting profession can only account and audit. As I said, SOX put teeth into what can be done, if investors continue to trust a certified audit of a companies financials, that was done within a conflict of interest, that's their mistake. Accounting rules are accounting rules. So you think the requirements for record keeping is because Marxists are running the government, and it has nothing to do with paper trails to recover stolen funds?

and you failed to respond as to your knowledge of GAAP, GAAS, and FASB statements. SOX is nothing new, it is nothing more than a legal restatement of accounting requirements that are ages old.

I can only fill out a tax return, I don't sit at someone's mailbox and make sure they file it. That is up to the IRS. But I sure as hell keep records of returns I've prepared, to protect myself from someone changing any figures on a return I've made out.

'Subversive Marxist'..... Hey, Mr. CEO, you don't need to adhere to accounting principles, just do whatever you want. We're going to do away with rules and laws. What a fvcking joke you are.
That's not the question, but rather what in Sarbanes Oxley PREVENTED it? Nothing. I think government regulations requiring a bunch of accounting mechanisms that ultimately do nothing to make investors safer but simply drive up the cost of doing business for everyone (including the 99% of businesses that are run by honest people) is a Marxist concept. According to the neo-Marxist left all businessmen are crooks and there is no limits to the level government interference in markets that is justified by that premise. So now we know you are an accounting rentier who profits from those never ending government efforts to make businesses file more paperwork. No wonder you think Sarbanes Oxley was so great - your "profits" are driven by the corporations' higher costs of doing business. No surprise there...
 
2. The Long Fight to Free Economies from Feudalism’s Rentier Legacy

"If you do not own them, they will in time own you. They will destroy your politics [and] corrupt your institutions. — Cleveland mayor Tom Johnson (1901-09) speaking of power utilities

"Classical economics was part of a reform process to bring Europe out of the feudal era into the industrial age.

"This required overcoming the power of the landed aristocracy, bankers and monopolies to levy charges that were unfair because they did not reflect actual labor or enterprise.

"Such revenue was deemed 'unearned.'

"The original fight for free markets meant freeing them from exploitation by rent extractors: owners of land, natural resources, monopoly rights and money fortunes that provided income without corresponding work – and usually without tax liability.

http://store.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Killing-The-Host_PDF_V7.pdf
"Where hereditary rental and financial revenue supported the richest aristocracies, the tax burden was shifted most heavily onto labor and industry, in addition to their rent and debt burden. The classical reform program of Adam Smith and his followers..."
 

Wahbooz

Governor
That's not the question, but rather what in Sarbanes Oxley PREVENTED it? Nothing. I think government regulations requiring a bunch of accounting mechanisms that ultimately do nothing to make investors safer but simply drive up the cost of doing business for everyone (including the 99% of businesses that are run by honest people) is a Marxist concept. According to the neo-Marxist left all businessmen are crooks and there is no limits to the level government interference in markets that is justified by that premise. So now we know you are an accounting rentier who profits from those never ending government efforts to make businesses file more paperwork. No wonder you think Sarbanes Oxley was so great - your "profits" are driven by the corporations' higher costs of doing business. No surprise there...
So to your way of thinking, since passing a law which states robbing a bank is against the law, or that murder is illegal, and those laws do not stop anyone from committing those crimes, we shouldn't have those laws; that the gubmint is overstepping it's legal power? We should just let anyone kill someone if they choose, or walk into a business, or jump someone on the street, if they feel like it. Let's just open America up to crime. That is what I get from your stance.

Creating a law, which puts teeth into accounting and auditing principles, makes it possible to punish those who do break those principles, and therefore protecting the American public more than they are had no law been passed. SOX didn't go into effect until July, 2002, 'Madeoff' and MF Global are not concrete evidence that the law will not curtail other companies from playing fast and loose with their financial reporting.
 

Max R.

On the road
Supporting Member
FWIW:

"What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions and therefore it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfillment, from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. What actions are these? Obviously such actions as promote the physical and social conditions requisite for the expression and development of free—or moral—personality.... Law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. Happily it is impossible. No code of law can envisage the myriad changing situations that determine moral obligations. Moreover, there must be one legal code for all, but moral codes vary as much as the individual characters of which they are the expression. To legislate against the moral codes of one’s fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters."
R.M. MacIver, Scottish sociologist, educator,
The Modern State, ch. 5, Oxford University Press (1926).
 

Lukey

Senator
So to your way of thinking, since passing a law which states robbing a bank is against the law, or that murder is illegal, and those laws do not stop anyone from committing those crimes, we shouldn't have those laws; that the gubmint is overstepping it's legal power? We should just let anyone kill someone if they choose, or walk into a business, or jump someone on the street, if they feel like it. Let's just open America up to crime. That is what I get from your stance.

Creating a law, which puts teeth into accounting and auditing principles, makes it possible to punish those who do break those principles, and therefore protecting the American public more than they are had no law been passed. SOX didn't go into effect until July, 2002, 'Madeoff' and MF Global are not concrete evidence that the law will not curtail other companies from playing fast and loose with their financial reporting.
Where ever would you get that idea? I support prosecuting the crimes that are already illegal, rather than allowing the politicians to sidestep their responsibility to uphold those laws by serially adding legislation that provides the appearance that they are addressing the problems without actually doing anything to piss off their criminal benefactors in the corporate "C suites." And in the process make life miserable (and more expensive) for the law abiding. If you can't see that this process is leading to fewer and larger businesses, and the wealth concentration that goes along with that, then you are either not really interested in solving our problems or worse, invested in keeping the system going down the tubes.

And actually, yes they actually are proof that SOX did nothing to prevent fraudulent accounting and even outright theft and/or Ponzi schemes. And the fact that you ignore that, and equate my stance to "lets just open up America to crime" simply renders you unserious in this entire matter.
 
The only way to take greed out of economics is to take humans out of the equation.

Obviously, if that's done, then what's the point?
If greed is part of human nature, why would we construct an economic system that concentrates more and more of the economic surplus in fewer and fewer hands with each passing generation?

"The original fight for free markets meant freeing (markets) from exploitation by rent extractors: owners of land, natural resources, monopoly rights and money fortunes that provide income without...work - and usually without tax liability."
http://store.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Killing-The-Host_PDF_V7.pdf(p.9)

Capitalism comes directly from feudalism, where hereditary wealth manipulated the political process to shift the tax burden off unearned incomes and onto labor and industry.

Today's hereditary economic parasites (Kennedy & Bush) use finance the same way their ancestors used military conquest, as a means to create markets free of government regulation or taxation of unearned rentier incomes.

"rentier
play
noun ren·tier \räⁿ-ˈtyā\
Definition of rentier
Popularity: Bottom 40% of words
  1. : a person who lives on income from property or securities"
 

Lukey

Senator
If greed is part of human nature, why would we construct an economic system that concentrates more and more of the economic surplus in fewer and fewer hands with each passing generation?

"The original fight for free markets meant freeing (markets) from exploitation by rent extractors: owners of land, natural resources, monopoly rights and money fortunes that provide income without...work - and usually without tax liability."
http://store.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Killing-The-Host_PDF_V7.pdf

Capitalism comes directly from feudalism, where hereditary wealth manipulated the political process to shift the tax burden off unearned incomes and onto labor and industry.

Today's hereditary economic parasites (Kennedy & Bush) use finance the same way their ancestors used military conquest, as a means to create markets free of government regulation or taxation of unearned rentier incomes.

"rentier
play
noun ren·tier \räⁿ-ˈtyā\
Definition of rentier
Popularity: Bottom 40% of words
  1. : a person who lives on income from property or securities"
It doesn't! Free markets insure that there is a check on greed. There's another kind of rentier that is actually worse for the economy than your definition, and that the political class and their benefactors in the lobbying, legal, accounting, consulting and social welfare rackets - a person who lives on (redistributed) income from the regulatory morass and/or government contracts, rather than producing a good or service that creates wealth. They bother me way more than the ones who live on income from property or securities.
 
It doesn't! Free markets insure that there is a check on greed. There's another kind of rentier that is actually worse for the economy than your definition, and that the political class and their benefactors in the lobbying, legal, accounting, consulting and social welfare rackets - a person who lives on (redistributed) income from the regulatory morass and/or government contracts, rather than producing a good or service that creates wealth. They bother me way more than the ones who live on income from property or securities.
I wonder if we agree the markets you call "free" are constructed to distribute scarce goods and resources to the benefit of the richest market participants: One dollar, one vote?
 

Lukey

Senator
I wonder if we agree the markets you call "free" are constructed to distribute scarce goods and resources to the benefit of the richest market participants: One dollar, one vote?
The profit motive (when government doesn't get in the way) strives to produce the most goods (and services) at the lowest price so the most market participants can afford them.

The more perverted the markets get as a result of government interventions, the less likely they are to achieve the most efficient (and best) allocation of goods and services based on the highest possible volume. I suppose for the anti-capitalist (including, it appears, the majority of Democrats), that is simply not good enough. But if you think about it logically, there really is no better outcome possible other than the one the free market provides (which is why the left's efforts to distort markets always end up making things worse, rather than better).
 

Max R.

On the road
Supporting Member
If greed is part of human nature, why would we construct an economic system that concentrates more and more of the economic surplus in fewer and fewer hands with each passing generation?....
Dude, you just answered your own question.

You tend to see the world in black and white; either full-blown laissez faire capitalism or pure socialism. As we've discussed several times before, there is plenty of middle ground there. Regulated capitalism with a social safety net seems to provide the best of both worlds.
 

Max R.

On the road
Supporting Member
I wonder if we agree the markets you call "free" are constructed to distribute scarce goods and resources to the benefit of the richest market participants: One dollar, one vote?
"Scarce goods". The never-ending competition for resources is a main thread running through human history. What happens when resources are no longer scarce?
 
The profit motive (when government doesn't get in the way) strives to produce the most goods (and services) at the lowest price so the most market participants can afford them.
That statement seems to contradict all available evidence:

Capitalists increase their private wealth by the extraction of surplus value from the working class and the poor (profit). It is for the purpose of capital accumulation, as opposed to economic growth, that production for profit strives.
http://www.hermes-press.com/CDM_PFU.htm
 
"Scarce goods". The never-ending competition for resources is a main thread running through human history. What happens when resources are no longer scarce?
According to Marx:

"Superabundance

"...The aim of the socialist transformation is to put an end to class divisions, to create a society where Marx’s aphorism 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' could become a reality.

"That requires the development of an economy of superabundance, entirely possible on the basis of modern science and technique, once we’ve done away with the anarchy of the market."

http://www.marxist.com/marxism-state-apparatus-army-police1994.htm

fwiw, I suspect the coming of nanotechnology will provide much of the basic infrastructure for "superabundance" if production is done for use and not for profit.
 
Dude, you just answered your own question.

You tend to see the world in black and white; either full-blown laissez faire capitalism or pure socialism. As we've discussed several times before, there is plenty of middle ground there. Regulated capitalism with a social safety net seems to provide the best of both worlds.
Since I was born in 1947, I'm well aware of how "(r)egulated capitalism with a social safety net" produced an authentic "golden age of capitalism" that reduced economic inequality to levels previously unseen while building the greatest middle class within the greatest engine of production in all recorded history. Those features, low economic inequality and a powerful middle class, came as a direct consequence of a generation who spent their childhood in the Great Depression and early adulthood in WWII. Their living memory of those two events is now nearly extinct. Hence, we see a return to the Gilded Age economics and, possibly, the rise of American fascism?
 

Lukey

Senator
That statement seems to contradict all available evidence:

Capitalists increase their private wealth by the extraction of surplus value from the working class and the poor (profit). It is for the purpose of capital accumulation, as opposed to economic growth, that production for profit strives.
http://www.hermes-press.com/CDM_PFU.htm
Yikes! What's going to save that kid from a life of poverty - communism or capitalism?

https://www.globalpolicy.org/images/pdfs/Global_Food_Aid_Deliveries_Largest_Donor.pdf

Funny thing - I don't see one communist country on that list...
 

Max R.

On the road
Supporting Member
...
"That requires the development of an economy of superabundance, entirely possible on the basis of modern science and technique, once we’ve done away with the anarchy of the market."

http://www.marxist.com/marxism-state-apparatus-army-police1994.htm...
Over the last century, it's been proven time and time again that capitalism provides better scientific results than socialism.

In the end, "superabundance" aka unlimited resources will allow humanity to do as they please just as I've described previously on several occasions. Some will sit on their asses smoking pot and playing video games, while others will reach for the stars.
 
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