Posted on 01/13/2012 6:14:08 PM PST by VinL
Furthermore, making a profit is only one component of owning a business. Whatever happened to the idea that you are responsible for your workers and to the larger community? Too often, people feel like just pawns in a ‘game’ of ever increasing largesse for the top dogs. The big shots are always the winners – often getting payouts in the millions when their companies fail — and the “losers” are left to figure out how to eat or buy clothes for their children. (A new study found that $100 million “golden parachutes” have become commonplace for failed CEOs).
Romney’s “class envy” claim is predicated on a lie we often here from the uber-rich and their defenders: the highest goal and achievement for Americans is to be wealthy, when all most people want is to be able to provide a decent lives for their families…
The unlikely hero in this tale has been Newt Gingrich, who has been making the most coherent argument for ethical capitalism. Says Gingrich, what we want is, “a free enterprise system that is honest. . . fair to everyone and gives everyone an equal opportunity to pursue happiness.” Criticizing Romney’s brand of free enterprise, (Newt)said, “It’s not fine if the person who is rich manipulates the system, gets away with all the cash and leaves behind the human beings.”
Be still my heart.
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
“Is there something unethical about capitalism such that it needs to be qualified by the word ethical?”
Remember “compassionate” conservative. Same concept. If you are a conservative it is assumed you have no compassion. But it really meant “liberal” conservative.
I am waiting for people around here to spend more of their time talking about the unethics and lack of compassion involved with socialism and communism.
It should be easy since were are currently engaged in it.
Yup phoney “free trade agreements”....Wall Street types cooked these up and profited mightily. My sister’s family was friendly for a while with an uber wealthy family (250 million or so). Both families boys played tennis that’s how they met. He was a Goldman Sachs biggie and his thing was promoting trade with China and teaching them the ways of American capitalism
Free trade is for idiots. The high IQ oriental minds (Koreans, Japanese, Chinese) don’t buy into that for a second. We are the stupid magnanimous ones. We had a 23-0 lead and decided to fritter it away
As far as Newt vs Romney..... This in Main Street capitalism vs Wall Street capitalism. Sometimes they overlap but when Wall Street gets predatory it wants to eat Main Street
dittos
Do you realize that Dade Behring was a huge success story? The bankruptcy filing was only temporary. The company boomed after that. When they were finally sold to Siemens in 2007, they employed over 6,000 people. They boasted worldwide sales of $1.7 billion and had a net worth of 0ver $6 billion. It is hard to find that caliber of success in the business world. Going from $440 million to $6 billion in only 13 years? Who else do you know that can deliver a 14-fold ROI? Voters are going to see this and think that Mitt is some kind of business genius. It’s better to stick with things like Romneycare instead of bringing up what amounts to business miracles.
If we took ethics out of surgery, you would get sliced and diced, and end up dead.
The means to the end are just as important to the end goals.
What has made America an exceptional nation is ethical behavior. What is destroying it is unethical, but legal behavior.
I am certainly no Romney fan. By the same token, as a former consituent, I am certainly no Gingrich fan, either.
To lambast ‘capitalism ala Romney’ is a mistake; he should be beaten down as the model for ObamaCare, not as a bad example of capitalism. The masses won’t understand the distinction between ‘good’ capitalism and ‘bad’ capitalism. They’ll only side with Obama and go for collectism.
There are at least a half dozen things (outside of the personal life stuff) that one could hash and rehash about Gingrich. I’ve listed them here at times. I won’t now because I’ve decided to let these candidates fight it out for themselves and then go with the winner, distasteful as that might be in some potential results. but I won’t contribute to blasting away a fundamental bedrock, even if it does have some cracks here and there.
Xzins, this is an extremely weak line of argument. Not only will you lose, conservatism will lose. Newt and Perry are wrong on this.
Did you read those books I recommended?
http://www.fee.org/nff/the-myth-of-the-robber-barons/
Please do so asap. You’re embarrassing yourself and our great cause. You sound like an FDR Democrat, which leads to an LBJ Democrat. You’re being waved off, take another pass and land safely.
Great! Democratic activist and former Hitlery aide praising Gingrich! Just what we need!
Failure and success are at the heart of capitalism. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Trying to attack Romney as an unethical capitalist is steering a course toward dialectic Marxism. Stay away.
The way to win is:
1. Get focused (our vote is being intentionally split)
2. Get organized (we’re killing any candidate who isn’t pure blooded & it’s costing us)
For my part I want Obama out at any cost. That said, I am not willing to lose the House nor not gain the Senate. We waste a lot of effort here at each others throats over a situation we have little control over.
We’re smart, dedicated and talented. That needs to be applied to either local House races, Senatorial elections, or local causes. Think on the headline if we stop the WI recall effort in its tracks.
Sign up here: http://verifytherecall.com/Home_Page.html
We’re in a war folks. It’s as dirty as it gets and as deadly as any. We have to win our country back and we don’t get there by attacking capitalism. No matter how you slice or dress it, that’s what Newt & Perry did.
...and not-free trade is for slaves.
“Do you realize that Dade Behring was a huge success story? The bankruptcy filing was only temporary. The company boomed after that. When they were finally sold to Siemens in 2007, they employed over 6,000 people. They boasted worldwide sales of $1.7 billion and had a net worth of 0ver $6 billion.”
Agreed. There is a lot more gray in this story than this liberal democrat muckraking journalist presents.Did it not escape anyone that the company was purchased for 75 million, held 9 years and over the years a 16.5 million “profit” was made along with recouping the investment.That is less than a 3% annualized return on their risk exposure of 75 million.Yup they leveraged the purchase as the majority of investors do when buying a business or real estate and the returns were magnified on the investment.Did you pay all cash for your home or did you put 10 ot 20 percent down? Did the house double in value by 2006? Were you a greedy pig for refinancing, taking money out and buying a vacation home with it? When the market crashed in 2008-2009 was it wise as a matter of hindsight that you did not sell in 2006 or that you “looted” the house back then by refinancing it to deploy your gain in other areas to try to achieve growth.
There is a lot more to this story starting from the fact that the union pension fund was already deleted when Bain purchased the company and the Federal Pension Guaranty fund was already on the hoof to the union employees for the shortfall and no one in their right mind is going to assume that liability. So they negotiated that the liabilty for the shortfall would remain with the entity they purchased it from. Altho the gubmint ponied up for the shortfall Bain reaped zero economic benefit from it.There were union problems going forward with a recalcitrant union refusing to budge as the steel industry went into depression,fierce global competition coupled with falling steel prices,and it simply became cheaper to make steel and its products overseas.
Sure Bain made mistakes along the way, But so did real estate investors and many others investing in businesses that went into recession.
There are other ways to get at Romney than take this cartoon path of “fat cats” raping the workers and eating their young populist storyline.
Right! And not just workers -- in the 19th century, what we call the unemployed were referred to as "surplus" or "supernumerary" population, which doesn't seem too far a philosophical remove from "useless eaters"!
Don’t need to.
The concept of capitalism exists wether or not there is a sentinent being there to contemplate that concept or not, it is simply unrealized at the time, just as time exists whether or not there is a sentinent being there to record its passage or contemplate its existence. It simply hasn’t beeen realized at the time.
End of the line, huh VinL? Can’t define your concept of an ethical car, can you? How about an unethical car? No? Didn’t think so. That’s why your argumnent failed, and that’s why Newt’s argument failed, and that’s why Newt will fail.
His thin skin has revealed exactly who he is. He’s the guy who, if you run enough negative adds against him, will turn his guns on the very foundations of his own country in an effort to shoot down the creator of the adds. Do we need a president ad reckless as this? I know I don’t.
Good luck getting him the nod.
That is simple disinformation and a Marxist lie. Think on the origin of your knowledge of 'worker discrimination' during industrialization. Where did you learn that as you most certainly didn't live it?
Isn't that something you 'read' or were 'taught'? Socialism/Progressivism have a history longer than the 20th century. Stop emoting and think.
“He was stripping assets”
That is how a company fails, so if you believe that some companies should be permitted to fail, then you are endorsing this. As far as stripping pension funds is concerned, I doubt that is the case. Gingrich himself told the PAC that is running these ads to correct that inaccuracy. In fact, I don’t think there really is any evidence at all so far that he bought any of these companies in order to strip them, much less to strip their pension funds. He bought them to turn them around, and some of them did not succeed. That’s all there was to it. But even if he had bought them to strip the assets from the beginning, that is a legitimate activity. If the assets are worth more in some other business, then move them there. That’s what capitalism is all about. Moving assets to their most productive use.
Neither livius nor I mentioned "discrimination."
And unless you're a great deal older than we are, you didn't live it either!
OK, so you’re retracting the statement or belief that industrialization hurt workers?
Isn't that true of any system, institution, organization, etc.? You seem to be missing the point over and over again. Using the adjective ethical or unethical before the word capitalism is really meaningless. Capitalism is an economic system that includes elements such as private ownership of the means of production, creation of goods or services for profit or income, the accumulation of capital, competitive markets, voluntary exchange and wage labor.
The right of the individual to keep the fruits of one's labor, i.e., property, is part of our inalienable rights that is enshrined in the Constitution and given by our Creator.
Again, this is not a difficult concept to grasp. In the cases of both the family and the capitalist system, they function best when the participants are good, upstanding, and moral people. And in my opinion, the best ethical system for regulating both the family and capitalism is traditional Christianity.
You seem to have a difficult time grasping that capitalism is not a moral system with a code of ethics. It can and has worked in countries and places that aren't Christian. It is an economic system. Max Weber understood this better than most:
The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. One may say that it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the objective possibility of it is or has been given. It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naïve idea of capitalism must be given up once and for all.
The genius of our Founding Fathers and the Constitution is that they recognized human nature for what it is and created a system to harness those basic human motivations. The problem with the Left and systems like Communism and socialism is that they try to change human nature to achieve some utopian vision that they have created. If capitalism has been corrupted in this country, then the biggest culprit is government, which has interfered in the workings of the marketplace through regulation, taxes, etc. in an attempt to change human behavior and obtain some utopian result.
Huh??? You’re shifting the subject. That’s not what was claimed.
Look at those Koreans with their Samsung and LG. They are smarter than you and know free trade is BS. They don’t practice it because it is BS. It’s an Anglo-libertarian delusion.
I trust the Korean IQ more than the American libertarian IQ
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