A tweet can be worth 1,000 words:
The Bern was being felt 140 years ago.
5 thoughts on “Fact”
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Shot in the Dark
Cranking Open The Big Brass Nozzle Of Truth Since 2002
A tweet can be worth 1,000 words:
The Bern was being felt 140 years ago.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I think that this a little flippant of Burge. Any commie would tell you that the foundation of capitalism isn’t voluntary transactions between individuals. Private property comes first, and it takes a political state to make anything more than you can personally protect private property.
Two sides to every transaction my friend. And don’t forget everything you buy has the sellers built in need to pay similar tax burdens.
Traditional economics simplifies things by talking about tangible objects. If I make a donut for $0.45 and you buy it for $0.50 voluntarily, we’ve both won. I exchanged something I created for $0.45 for $0.50, and you felt it was worth at least $0.50, or you wouldn’t have bought it. It’s win-win! A great example of an exchange of private property increasing total value!
But suppose instead of a donut, it’s a stock future or something like a derivative or a debt tranche. Then it is not win-win, it’s win-lose, like Vegas. The value added to the economy supposedly comes from rewarding merit: whichever party was better at determining the real value of the stock or derivative at some time in the future is the winner, the other guy is the loser. But is that merit demonstrable? The free market has no mechanism for differentiating between an agent who is better at determining future value, who is lucky, and who is manipulating the market to manage stock value.
There can be idiots on both sides of a transaction — (even the one appearing to “win” can be an idiot).
Or the winner can be wicked. In Vegas, the consistent winner is the casino. And cheaters. The casinos hate cheaters.
One of the things tipped off regulators to Bernie Madoff was that he always claimed a higher than market return. The regulators seem to assume that if you are continually beating the market, it can’t be luck, and it can’t be skill, either, since whatever ‘secret sauce’ you’ve got would soon be copied by others.