Posted on 09/24/2002 5:53:02 AM PDT by TomServo
Edited on 04/13/2004 1:39:58 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
In these post-Enron days of corporate scandal, some of the millions of copies of Atlas Shrugged that have been sold over 45 years are being dusted off by executives under siege by prosecutors, regulators, Congress, employees, investors, a Republican president, even terrorists.
(Excerpt) Read more at usatoday.com ...
One of the things that made America great was that her capitalism was tempered by a moral people. Once morality is gone, and a CEO would willingly take hundreds of millions for himself without giving anything to charity, or the workers who support him, the system fails.
Unmitigated greed from CEO's could be blamed for the onset of socialism just as much as the statists who seek to implement it.
Unless you are retired and living in a stock-piled bunker, your choices in purchasing does have an effect, and subsequent effects, on the nature of your local economy. Declining property values, in depressed neighborhoods which once thrived, is a visible and prime example of the "second effects" principle.
People buying Japanese cars does not, alone, devastate the economy. Some things that really screw up productivity and the economic health:
It will be interesting to watch how well this "me first, I got mine, screw you" generation reacts in a depression which should rival that of the '30s. And what might that do to the economic value of your Japanese car (minus the wheels, glass, radio, etc.).
I'm wondering, in your view, what would "mitigated greed" define? Are you saying that greed, "unmitigated," is evil and should be banished from human action? How would that be accomplished? Greed is a term that only came into usage after the term envy came along. They go together.
I'm saying that they should do it willingly out of a sense of morality, and that it should never be forced by government.
I'm saying that if the very well off do NOT give to others as the Bible asks them to do, they create a situation where others seek to redistribute their wealth, aka socialism.
Yep. Might be a good time to liquidate, or move all holdings to heavy metals (lead, brass, copper, steel, and such).
Sorry, I forgot that we were back in economics. I remember something about a "multiplier effect" being discussed with respect to money flow and value. This might be a huge factor in the differences, in stability, between a barter economy and one which uses a medium of exchange such as money.
Anyhow, when an economy is a net importer of goods, more money is going out of the economy than is coming in. The disparity in the net exchange of money causes a loss in benefit from the multiplier effect for the economy suffering the deficit.
Add to the equation that nefarious serpents of the left are strangling the industries which extract, process, and distribute natural resources, and for no good reason. This item here is proof alone that leftists are not just ignorant or incompetent; they are the pure, unadulterated personification of evil, but I digress.
There has to be someone with a better recollection of economics around here who could help sort out the missing pieces. It was not really my field, and my memory is gone.
Or he could what most people do and invest it. In new companies that provide new jobs (and consequently increase wages). In risky research and development of new technologies that everyone benefits from and takes for granted a decade later.
The accumulation of inordinate quantities of capital is a good thing. Nobody "deserves" anything, they earn it. Money goes where it is used most efficiently, which means those same people are likely to use it to gain even more capital for themselves and the people who work for them.
Virtually every great technology that has ever been developed over the last century was done so by individuals with obscene amounts of time and money on their hands. In the long run, the workers benefit less from charity-case wage increases than from the aggressive investment of that same money in new economic ventures. Improvements in standards of living will follow.
Agreed.
Just trying to point out that faith, hope, and charity are just as important as qualities of a moral society as greed and envy are traits of an immoral one.
Judging by persons who are willing to enrich themselves at THE EXPENSE of their own workers, I'd say we're riding the fence about now.
Didn't you hear? The government does that job for the rich, with the scads of tax money the government takes from them for "the welfare of the people". Their personal involvement in the charity and morality of society has been deemed bad for the masses.
Only half kidding.
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