The Occupation of Wall Street Spreads

[K. A. Pital]

But in Britain? How far back do you have to go before such things become common?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdLdGkAiJjY
Done.

[Simon_Jester]

While I hear what you're saying, the problem I have with that way of formulating the problem is that "greed" is such an ephemerally defined concept and often bandied about knee-jerk style as a blanket pejorative against self-interest.

The problem I have with not formulating the problem this way is that we've reached the point where corporatism stands foursquare against the public interest. It is hurting people. It is not promoting a healthy market, or a healthy economy, or anything else but the enrichment of the people running and owning those corporations, and the relatively small managerial and financial class that does their money-shuffling for them.

It's not a rigorous definition, "greed" is not something you can legislate against, but at some point you have to be able to point to an institution that's damaging your society and say "this is vicious." Where things are vicious, you must be able to put a name to the vice, to make it clear that no this is not okay, not just a natural part of the system doing its thing, this is in fact a broken part that needs to be fixed. Until you're willing to do that- to call a bridge in danger of collapse rickety, to call a bureaucracy that takes bribes corrupt, and so on- you can't really tackle the problem the way it needs to be tackled.

What we've seen in the past twenty to thirty years is an escalation of the gospel according to Gordon Gekko:

"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A."

We have found that the U.S.A. cannot and should not be run like a corporation, malfunctioning or otherwise- that the duties of a nation to its citizens are entirely different from the duties of a corporation to its shareholders (let alone its employees). We have found that while greed does indeed capture the essence of the evolutionary process, evolution is a blind idiot god, one which is every bit as capable of creating ichneumon wasps as it is of creating boons for our existence.

Greed has not saved, is not saving, the U.S.A.

And yet all corporatist arguments ultimately boil down to the same proposition that the fictional Mr. Gekko makes- that if every person pursues their desire for success and the accumulation of wealth, without having to worry about the consequences to others, all will be well. That goes double for people who, by pursuing a desire for wealth, organize other people into accomplishing things.

And yet our experience is that this isn't reliably true anymore. Some people who become rich have done good things that we can say are beneficial. Others have not, and in the quest to further enrich themselves have done things that damage the country- corrupt the political process, inflate and then pop the housing bubble, create a protected niche for an increasingly inefficient privatized health care system, and accumulate money via microtrading at the expense of large, slow-moving investors like pension funds. The connection is there, but it's not reliable.

I do not seek to abolish greed- it's part of the human condition, and we could no more survive without it than we could survive without appetite for food. But we don't encourage people to satiate the desire for food endlessly- if we do they become obese and slow. Likewise, while we can and should accept that yes, people will be greedy and that a certain amount of this is healthy, we should never fall into the Gekko trap of venerating greed, of assuming that powerful men are doing something good for the country purely because they are pursuing what their desire for wealth makes them want to do.

Once we accept this, once we are willing to call the motive that drives people to hurt the country by lobbying and by predatory financial strategies "greed," it becomes far simpler to do something about the problem.

IMHO, it's better to drop the buzz-phrase and focus instead at the extent to which favoritism is made possible by the government (a problem faced by all economic systems), and the general tolerance of such.

In many cases, the favoritism can only be fixed by changed government actions- it requires someone to stop turning a blind eye, not someone to stop interfering with the system by actively changing it.

Thus, blaming government can easily make it harder to address the problem rationally. When the fox raids the henhouse, the guard dog may be to blame for sleeping through it, but we cannot forget that it is the fox which killed the chicken, not the dog. Beating the dog will not necessarily save future chickens.

[Lord Zentei]

The problem I have with not formulating the problem this way is that we've reached the point where corporatism stands foursquare against the public interest. It is hurting people. It is not promoting a healthy market, or a healthy economy, or anything else but the enrichment of the people running and owning those corporations, and the relatively small managerial and financial class that does their money-shuffling for them.

And how precisely does my formulation fail to capture that?

It's not a rigorous definition, "greed" is not something you can legislate against, but at some point you have to be able to point to an institution that's damaging your society and say "this is vicious." Where things are vicious, you must be able to put a name to the vice, to make it clear that no this is not okay, not just a natural part of the system doing its thing, this is in fact a broken part that needs to be fixed. Until you're willing to do that- to call a bridge in danger of collapse rickety, to call a bureaucracy that takes bribes corrupt, and so on- you can't really tackle the problem the way it needs to be tackled.

<snip rant>

If you don't have any way of defining "greed" as opposed to self-interest in general, how do you expect society to act against it, or the system to be inoculated against it? Where do you intend to draw the line?

But if you define "greed" as "desire for X, regardless of consequences for others", then that's not a problem with self-interest, but the lack of definition of and support for people's property rights. * That's a precise formulation of the problem that is encompassed in the point I made earlier.

In many cases, the favoritism can only be fixed by changed government actions- it requires someone to stop turning a blind eye, not someone to stop interfering with the system by actively changing it.

Thus, blaming government can easily make it harder to address the problem rationally. When the fox raids the henhouse, the guard dog may be to blame for sleeping through it, but we cannot forget that it is the fox which killed the chicken, not the dog. Beating the dog will not necessarily save future chickens.

If it is government which is helping to cause the problem, it is eminently rational to point the finger of blame to government. Neither can you expect a corrupt government to simply fix itself. If you want things to improve, then you need to eliminate corruption in government before you seek to give it additional powers, or you'll accomplish nothing of value.

_____
* After all, it's a mischaracterisation to assert that capitalism is simply about people doing what they want regardless of how it affects others; it's people interacting in mutually voluntary exchanges for their own reasons.

[K. A. Pital]

Other people's property rights do not influence my desire for self-enrichment. In fact, most capitalists who pursue self-enrichment at the expense of others are well aware that they are trampling on their "rights", be it property rights or some other rights, but they consciously ignore it because the self-enrichment goal is prioritized over others.

"Greed" is when self-interest occupies such a high position on a person's goal priority list that it is a goal which can force him to completely disregard damage that may be done to others. That is greed - when a person wants to enrich himself knowing of the damage it would cause and nonetheless he cannot stop but pursue such a course of action.

Of course, I do not subscribe to the idea that "greed" itself is an instinct; no, merely the instinctive desire group dominance manifests itself in rather ugly forms when taken to such a high level. Greed is not an instinct; dominance is, greed is merely means to an end.

[Lord Zentei]

Other people's property rights do not influence my desire for self-enrichment.

They don't?

In fact, most capitalists who pursue self-enrichment at the expense of others are well aware that they are trampling on their "rights", be it property rights or some other rights, but they consciously ignore it because the self-enrichment goal is prioritized over others.

I don't know whether it's "most" capitalists who do that, but to the extent that people in general do that (capitalists and others), we have the importance of rule of law.

[K. A. Pital]

I'm simply using capitalists because only they wield property on a large scale and thus are capable of large-scale intentional damage. A worker by his mere position does not command that much property and thus cannot use it to destructive ends. A worker's collective may damage stuff via vandalism and/or directed sabotage, but that still falls a long way from what intentional direction of large corporations can bring about. This position and additional responsibility is arising due to the fact that capitalists own much more property and especially means of production than all other members of society. They bear a greater, nay smaller, responsibility for their actions.

It is just as unfair as if one would judge a person driving a car and a pedestrian the same. The latter isn't encased in two tons of steel, and the latter's collision with another pedestrian isn't lethal; a car's is. Therefore by the same logic the rules that we apply to capitalists must me more strict, not less strict or the same, as we apply to all other members of society.

As for "they don't" - well, duh. When one desires self-enrichment, he does not think of others. That desire arises independently of all other members of society. It is his, and his alone, regardless of what others do or say. This desire is thus independent from others, and as such, since it arises independently, a person often simply does not ponder over "justified or not" related to conflicting interests when he is thinking about his own and that alone. It is quite simple.

[Lord Zentei]

Yeah, though a collective of relatively small actors can manifest destructive power politically as well as economically.

As for "they don't" - well, duh. When one desires self-enrichment, he does not think of others. That desire arises independently of all other members of society. It is his, and his alone, regardless of what others do or say. This desire is thus independent from others, and as such, since it arises independently, a person often simply does not ponder over "justified or not" related to conflicting interests when he is thinking about his own and that alone. It is quite simple.

There's a difference between the following:

• Not caring about other people's property rights in one's quest for self-enrichment.
• Not specifically seeking to improve the lot of others beyond their acceptance of a voluntary interaction.

That difference is the difference between the thief and the buyer/seller.

[Darth Raptor]

How is a market society supposed to prevent corruption, the formation of trusts and the slide into corporatism and imperialism? Why should individual property rights be given greater consideration than the real needs of human beings? It seems that an economy that is constantly growing is impossible on its face (due to physics), and that any economic system is, ultimately, all just a scheme for rationing the three resources that actually exist (energy, labor and raw materials). If that's the case, then shouldn't the objective be to maintain the greatest standard of living for the greatest number of people?

[Lord Zentei]

How is a market society supposed to prevent corruption, the formation of trusts and the slide into corporatism and imperialism?

By maintaining rule of law through independent courts, a political process with clearly defined parameters and a regulatory framework that is not designed by a select group whose disputes they are supposed to arbitrate.

Why should individual property rights be given greater consideration than the real needs of human beings?

Your question does not make any sense.

It seems that an economy that is constantly growing is impossible on its face (due to physics), and that any economic system is, ultimately, all just a scheme for rationing the three resources that actually exist (energy, labor and raw materials). If that's the case, then shouldn't the objective be to maintain the greatest standard of living for the greatest number of people?

Permanent growth is not the goal, but the optimization of production (which is necessary, regardless of physics). If that permits growth, then growth is the result.

[Bakustra]

Your proposal for dealing with regulatory capture and monopolization is to infringe upon the property rights of others. That's not very capitalist.

[Lord Zentei]

Your proposal for dealing with regulatory capture and monopolization is to infringe upon the property rights of others. That's not very capitalist.

If that was directed at me, then I have to ask: WTF are you talking about?

[Bakustra]

Your proposal for dealing with regulatory capture and monopolization is to infringe upon the property rights of others. That's not very capitalist.

If that was directed at me, then I have to ask: WTF are you talking about?

By acting to restrict capitalists from using their property to influence the political system in their benefit, you are curtailing their property rights. This is something that is necessary to prevent regulatory capture in a meaningful sense. But the majority of capitalist thought is predicated on the idea that property rights are an unmitigated good. Even if not to the extent of Hayek, the idea of infringing upon the rights of others to use their property as they see fit to express themselves is not a capitalist one. It is largely a socially-democratic one, but social democracy is not really a capitalist system. It is an attempt to steer capitalism into more humane ends, but the current burst of austerity seems to suggest that it is itself highly unstable in the end.

EDIT: Monopolization works much the same way. In order to prevent horizontal or vertical integration, you must infringe upon property rights at some point.

[Darth Raptor]

By maintaining rule of law through independent courts, a political process with clearly defined parameters and a regulatory framework that is not designed by a select group whose disputes they are supposed to arbitrate.

Okay, so, I presume we can both agree that some non-profit, regulatory agency (let's call it a state, for simplicity's sake) with the power (both legal and physical) to enforce its regulations is needed. If so, then I assume we're on the same page here in that we want complete transparency in its operations and accountability in its functionaries. IOW, democracy, but I don't expect you to have an issue with that.

Here is where I argue that you can only achieve that through the active participation of a healthy and educated public, and in order to get THAT, the state needs to be ensuring that its citizens are healthy and educated--either directly or through a third party.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't want this to turn into a dogpile, but I was here early on, and so I think I can reasonably claim a right to respond. I'll bow out if it turns into a dogpile too bad to manage, and with Bakustra here it just might.

...

The problem I have with not formulating the problem this way is that we've reached the point where corporatism stands foursquare against the public interest. It is hurting people. It is not promoting a healthy market, or a healthy economy, or anything else but the enrichment of the people running and owning those corporations, and the relatively small managerial and financial class that does their money-shuffling for them.

And how precisely does my formulation fail to capture that?

Because by refusing to use language which might condemn them, it offers them something rather durable to hide behind- which is exactly what American corporatism has done. It's seized the language of libertarianism and the philosophy of the free market, and used that language and philosophy to justify empowering corporations to do as they please with the economy at other people's expense.

At this point, the illnesses of American corporatist capitalism will not be fixed by libertarians, because libertarians are dangerously enmeshed with faux-libertarian corporatists. Even if libertarians can diagnose the problems (as you have, with regulatory capture), the voter base which supports libertarian rhetoric keeps voting corporatist, because the corporatists have hijacked the movement in the eyes of the public.

That's why I consider it so important to be able to turn around and reject the corporatist narrative- to say that no, these large institutions aren't doing what's good for America, or anyone else except themselves, and that their desire to accumulate wealth is endangering the average person's ability to have a future.

If you don't have any way of defining "greed" as opposed to self-interest in general, how do you expect society to act against it, or the system to be inoculated against it? Where do you intend to draw the line?

Public interest. Any case of private citizens trying to suborn politicians to change the law in their favor, outside the electoral process, is pretty much guaranteed to be a Bad Thing. Call it rent-seeking or corruption or whatever you want, it's still bad. We can start there.

If people act in their self-interest, and the public interest is served or at least not demonstrably harmed in a meaningful way, then that's fine: public goods and 'victimless crimes' are OK by default. But when people act in their self-interest to gain large fortunes, at the expense of the present and future prosperity of the whole nation... that is not OK, because ultimately it destroys the economic game for evreyone else.

But if you define "greed" as "desire for X, regardless of consequences for others", then that's not a problem with self-interest, but the lack of definition of and support for people's property rights. * That's a precise formulation of the problem that is encompassed in the point I made earlier.
_____
* After all, it's a mischaracterisation to assert that capitalism is simply about people doing what they want regardless of how it affects others; it's people interacting in mutually voluntary exchanges for their own reasons.

The problem is that the exchanges can have huge effects on third parties who don't get a voice in the decision, and that context can cause people to make decisions that leave them miserable, because they can't find anyone to agree to an outcome that would make them non-miserable.

Capitalism deliberately ignores the question of how my decision to trade with you affects some other person across the street. To some extent this promotes progress, because it keeps the argument "but someone is harmed by X!" from overriding the argument "but six people are helped by X!" and preventing all social change. But it can also retard progress and make people miserable, because it lets "but you and I benefit by X!" trump "but fifty people lose their jobs because of X!"

I mean, there has to come a point at which a decision which makes perfect sense for two specimens of the tribe homo economicus between themselves can have adverse consequences for the rest. What happens then?

You would surely agree that we need a concept of "legitimate" and "illegitimate" transactions and types of transactions, where it's okay to succeed by legitimate means but not by illegitimate means. What I'm arguing for is that the concept of greed as a potential vice when taken to extremes supports this: there are things you just don't do because of your desire for personal success, because of their external effects on the public. People ruthless enough to hurt the public that badly for their personal success should be stopped, not encouraged, and their behavior should be called for what it is: greedy.

Otherwise, people who operate this way will come to dominate the market, and all arguments about how healthy markets are good become irrelevant, because these powerful people have destroyed the health of the market. But I don't believe in trying to shield the people responsible for this from being called things like "greedy" or "exploitative," because it gives them too strong a piece of cover to hide behind. They can argue "We're not exploiting you by consistently making money pushing down stock prices in the milliseconds after a pension fund places orders, we're just trying to succeed, as consistent with the spirit of capitalism!"

If that argument is true, then it's arguably a judgment against the spirit of capitalism; if it's not true and there is something unhealthy about the high-frequency trader's ability to reliably skim cents off of other people's transactions, then they should be called what they are, and there's nothing wrong with using derogatory language to do it.

In many cases, the favoritism can only be fixed by changed government actions- it requires someone to stop turning a blind eye, not someone to stop interfering with the system by actively changing it.

Thus, blaming government can easily make it harder to address the problem rationally. When the fox raids the henhouse, the guard dog may be to blame for sleeping through it, but we cannot forget that it is the fox which killed the chicken, not the dog. Beating the dog will not necessarily save future chickens.

If it is government which is helping to cause the problem, it is eminently rational to point the finger of blame to government. Neither can you expect a corrupt government to simply fix itself. If you want things to improve, then you need to eliminate corruption in government before you seek to give it additional powers, or you'll accomplish nothing of value.

In this case, the corruption is mostly being used to preserve the status quo: the government refuses to take on powers because it adopting those powers would be bad for the people who are paying it. Congress and White House alike refuse the power to provide health insurance in a public-option system, because that would hurt insurance companies. They refuse to tax the rich more heavily because that would hurt the prosperous and comfortable.

Changing government policy on issues like this is one and the same with changing the corruption in Congress. We will never see anyone taking bribes from the insurance industry to bring about public-option health insurance in America.

Yeah, though a collective of relatively small actors can manifest destructive power politically as well as economically.

As for "they don't" - well, duh. When one desires self-enrichment, he does not think of others. That desire arises independently of all other members of society. It is his, and his alone, regardless of what others do or say. This desire is thus independent from others, and as such, since it arises independently, a person often simply does not ponder over "justified or not" related to conflicting interests when he is thinking about his own and that alone. It is quite simple.

There's a difference between the following:

• Not caring about other people's property rights in one's quest for self-enrichment.
• Not specifically seeking to improve the lot of others beyond their acceptance of a voluntary interaction.

That difference is the difference between the thief and the buyer/seller.

What do you call a man who, by voluntary interaction with a third party, knowingly makes your property worthless? What if the property he makes worthless is something you need to live?

How much harm can be done in this way before we say that your rights are being infringed by this other person's consensual dealings with people who aren't you?

[Lord Zentei]

By acting to restrict capitalists from using their property to influence the political system in their benefit, you are curtailing their property rights. This is something that is necessary to prevent regulatory capture in a meaningful sense. But the majority of capitalist thought is predicated on the idea that property rights are an unmitigated good. Even if not to the extent of Hayek, the idea of infringing upon the rights of others to use their property as they see fit to express themselves is not a capitalist one. It is largely a socially-democratic one, but social democracy is not really a capitalist system. It is an attempt to steer capitalism into more humane ends, but the current burst of austerity seems to suggest that it is itself highly unstable in the end.

EDIT: Monopolization works much the same way. In order to prevent horizontal or vertical integration, you must infringe upon property rights at some point.

Um... no. Not to be able to use your property to indiscriminately manipulate the political process is not a violation of your property rights. It's a recognition of the property rights of others than the one who desires to do that, since the government has the power to monopolize the use of force for the purpose of non-voluntary transactions.

Okay, so, I presume we can both agree that some non-profit, regulatory agency (let's call it a state, for simplicity's sake) with the power (both legal and physical) to enforce its regulations is needed. If so, then I assume we're on the same page here in that we want complete transparency in its operations and accountability in its functionaries. IOW, democracy, but I don't expect you to have an issue with that.

Indeed. Although I'm skeptical of simply equating "democracy" with "complete transparency in [the government's] operations and accountability in its functionaries".

Here is where I argue that you can only achieve that through the active participation of a healthy and educated public, and in order to get THAT, the state needs to be ensuring that its citizens are healthy and educated--either directly or through a third party.

I'm not sure where we're disagreeing here, as this seems to be a departure from your previous point.

[Bakustra]

By acting to restrict capitalists from using their property to influence the political system in their benefit, you are curtailing their property rights. This is something that is necessary to prevent regulatory capture in a meaningful sense. But the majority of capitalist thought is predicated on the idea that property rights are an unmitigated good. Even if not to the extent of Hayek, the idea of infringing upon the rights of others to use their property as they see fit to express themselves is not a capitalist one. It is largely a socially-democratic one, but social democracy is not really a capitalist system. It is an attempt to steer capitalism into more humane ends, but the current burst of austerity seems to suggest that it is itself highly unstable in the end.

EDIT: Monopolization works much the same way. In order to prevent horizontal or vertical integration, you must infringe upon property rights at some point.

Um... no. Not to be able to use your property to indiscriminately manipulate the political process is not a violation of your property rights. It's a recognition of the property rights of others than the one who desires to do that, since the government has the power to monopolize the use of force for the purpose of non-voluntary transactions.

What the hell are you talking about? I point out that preventing people from spending their money as they see fit, whether through anti-trust legislation or through barring regulatory capture, means curtailing their right to use their property how they want, and you come out with this. I mean, how exactly is buying out your suppliers a violation of their property rights? How is donating shitloads of money to politicians a violation of people's property rights? I'm not saying that those aren't abusive acts, but I don't see how those are property rights or what the concept of monopoly of force has anything to do with it. I mean, unless you're going to redefine capitalism as you see fit, in which case I guess I'll just have to share my new definition of it.

[Lord Zentei]

What the hell are you talking about? I point out that preventing people from spending their money as they see fit, whether through anti-trust legislation or through barring regulatory capture, means curtailing their right to use their property how they want, and you come out with this. I mean, how exactly is buying out your suppliers a violation of their property rights? How is donating shitloads of money to politicians a violation of people's property rights? I'm not saying that those aren't abusive acts, but I don't see how those are property rights or what the concept of monopoly of force has anything to do with it. I mean, unless you're going to redefine capitalism as you see fit, in which case I guess I'll just have to share my new definition of it.

I'm in the middle of trawling through Simon Jester's gargantuan post, so I'm not going to waste too much time covering this:

If you can't see how subverting the government who has a monopoly on the power to use force for the pursuit of non-voluntary transactions can curtail other people's property rights, then you're an idiot.

[Bakustra]

What the hell are you talking about? I point out that preventing people from spending their money as they see fit, whether through anti-trust legislation or through barring regulatory capture, means curtailing their right to use their property how they want, and you come out with this. I mean, how exactly is buying out your suppliers a violation of their property rights? How is donating shitloads of money to politicians a violation of people's property rights? I'm not saying that those aren't abusive acts, but I don't see how those are property rights or what the concept of monopoly of force has anything to do with it. I mean, unless you're going to redefine capitalism as you see fit, in which case I guess I'll just have to share my new definition of it.

I'm in the middle of trawling through Simon Jester's gargantuan post, so I'm not going to waste too much time covering this:

If you can't see how subverting the government who has a monopoly on the power to use force for the pursuit of non-voluntary transactions can curtail other people's property rights, then you're an idiot.

So basically you're unwilling to admit that your method requires curtailing the property rights of people, you presume that "can" means "will" in order to justify your argument, and you frame literally everything on the grounds of property rights. So explain how banning monopolies does not involve infringing upon property rights, then. That does not involve interference with the government, but rather with other private individuals. All it involves is buying and selling, which are completely voluntary transactions.

PS: I am not advocating monopolies or the buying of elections. Maybe if you actually read my first couple posts, you would see that.

[Lord Zentei]

No: what I'm doing is calling you an idiot who isn't paying attention to what is being said, and who isn't contributing to the fucking discussion.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm in the middle of trawling through Simon Jester's gargantuan post, so I'm not going to waste too much time covering this...

Sigh.

I'm sorry, I didn't think in terms of compactness.

My point is basically rhetorical, and therefore unimportant, anyway. It's restricted to the assertion that we shouldn't be afraid to say bad things about people who hurt the public interest, and that doing so can be productive.

[Lord Zentei]

I don't want this to turn into a dogpile, but I was here early on, and so I think I can reasonably claim a right to respond. I'll bow out if it turns into a dogpile too bad to manage, and with Bakustra here it just might.

Responding to multiple people isn't quite as annoying as having to trawl through gargantuan posts. Nonetheless...

Because by refusing to use language which might condemn them, it offers them something rather durable to hide behind- which is exactly what American corporatism has done. It's seized the language of libertarianism and the philosophy of the free market, and used that language and philosophy to justify empowering corporations to do as they please with the economy at other people's expense.

This is nonsense. And you're not addressing my point: bandying about buzz-phrases does nothing to provide an adequate framework for deciding what is acceptable and what isn't. It's just an appeal to emotion, and one that is detrimental to rationally analyzing the situation. Neither am I refusing to use language which condemns wrongdoers, but I'm adverse to using vague and non-specific language which can just as easily be leveled against anyone who simply desires something for himself.

At this point, the illnesses of American corporatist capitalism will not be fixed by libertarians, because libertarians are dangerously enmeshed with faux-libertarian corporatists. Even if libertarians can diagnose the problems (as you have, with regulatory capture), the voter base which supports libertarian rhetoric keeps voting corporatist, because the corporatists have hijacked the movement in the eyes of the public.
That's why I consider it so important to be able to turn around and reject the corporatist narrative- to say that no, these large institutions aren't doing what's good for America, or anyone else except themselves, and that their desire to accumulate wealth is endangering the average person's ability to have a future.

As I'm pro-welfare, I'm not entirely sure how "libertarian" I am. Classical liberal, perhaps. Nonetheless: by your approach the dialogue which would permit the accurate diagnosis of the problem is undermined. This is not in anyone's interest. Besides which, parties which spout liberal and progressive rhetoric have been captured too.

If you don't have any way of defining "greed" as opposed to self-interest in general, how do you expect society to act against it, or the system to be inoculated against it? Where do you intend to draw the line?

Public interest. Any case of private citizens trying to suborn politicians to change the law in their favor, outside the electoral process, is pretty much guaranteed to be a Bad Thing. Call it rent-seeking or corruption or whatever you want, it's still bad. We can start there.

If people act in their self-interest, and the public interest is served or at least not demonstrably harmed in a meaningful way, then that's fine: public goods and 'victimless crimes' are OK by default. But when people act in their self-interest to gain large fortunes, at the expense of the present and future prosperity of the whole nation... that is not OK, because ultimately it destroys the economic game for evreyone else.

And "public interest" is defined how, exactly? And at what point does it supersede the interest of private individuals who make up the public? Anyway, I don't see how you're refuting my position. If you're destroying the economic game for everyone else, then you're demonstrably transgressing against their fortunes as individuals too.

But if you define "greed" as "desire for X, regardless of consequences for others", then that's not a problem with self-interest, but the lack of definition of and support for people's property rights. * That's a precise formulation of the problem that is encompassed in the point I made earlier.
_____
* After all, it's a mischaracterisation to assert that capitalism is simply about people doing what they want regardless of how it affects others; it's people interacting in mutually voluntary exchanges for their own reasons.

The problem is that the exchanges can have huge effects on third parties who don't get a voice in the decision, and that context can cause people to make decisions that leave them miserable, because they can't find anyone to agree to an outcome that would make them non-miserable.

Capitalism deliberately ignores the question of how my decision to trade with you affects some other person across the street.

This is called an "externality", and is covered by classical economic theory. And yes, if they actively harm you when they make a transaction, then based on the idea of property rights, you can sue them for damages.

To some extent this promotes progress, because it keeps the argument "but someone is harmed by X!" from overriding the argument "but six people are helped by X!" and preventing all social change. But it can also retard progress and make people miserable, because it lets "but you and I benefit by X!" trump "but fifty people lose their jobs because of X!"

In many cases, the favoritism can only be fixed by changed government actions- it requires someone to stop turning a blind eye, not someone to stop interfering with the system by actively changing it.

Thus, blaming government can easily make it harder to address the problem rationally. When the fox raids the henhouse, the guard dog may be to blame for sleeping through it, but we cannot forget that it is the fox which killed the chicken, not the dog. Beating the dog will not necessarily save future chickens.

If it is government which is helping to cause the problem, it is eminently rational to point the finger of blame to government. Neither can you expect a corrupt government to simply fix itself. If you want things to improve, then you need to eliminate corruption in government before you seek to give it additional powers, or you'll accomplish nothing of value.

In this case, the corruption is mostly being used to preserve the status quo: the government refuses to take on powers because it adopting those powers would be bad for the people who are paying it. Congress and White House alike refuse the power to provide health insurance in a public-option system, because that would hurt insurance companies. They refuse to tax the rich more heavily because that would hurt the prosperous and comfortable.

Changing government policy on issues like this is one and the same with changing the corruption in Congress. We will never see anyone taking bribes from the insurance industry to bring about public-option health insurance in America.

Not so, changing government policy is not possible without diminishing corruption (unless things become so bad that the public won't support the corrupt politicians any more regardless of how many campaign donations they receive).

Yeah, though a collective of relatively small actors can manifest destructive power politically as well as economically.

As for "they don't" - well, duh. When one desires self-enrichment, he does not think of others. That desire arises independently of all other members of society. It is his, and his alone, regardless of what others do or say. This desire is thus independent from others, and as such, since it arises independently, a person often simply does not ponder over "justified or not" related to conflicting interests when he is thinking about his own and that alone. It is quite simple.

There's a difference between the following:

• Not caring about other people's property rights in one's quest for self-enrichment.
• Not specifically seeking to improve the lot of others beyond their acceptance of a voluntary interaction.

That difference is the difference between the thief and the buyer/seller.

What do you call a man who, by voluntary interaction with a third party, knowingly makes your property worthless? What if the property he makes worthless is something you need to live?

How much harm can be done in this way before we say that your rights are being infringed by this other person's consensual dealings with people who aren't you?

Explain the scenario more clearly. If you're talking about active destruction of property, then I call him a saboteur; if you're talking about creating something that out-competes my production, then I call him a successful competitor. I may hate him for it, of course, but that's another issue.

[Lord Zentei]

I'm in the middle of trawling through Simon Jester's gargantuan post, so I'm not going to waste too much time covering this...

Sigh.

I'm sorry, I didn't think in terms of compactness.

My point is basically rhetorical, and therefore unimportant, anyway. It's restricted to the assertion that we shouldn't be afraid to say bad things about people who hurt the public interest, and that doing so can be productive.

Yes, that's fair enough. But as long as you don't use rhetoric which undermines our ability to diagnose the problem rationally, and which isn't vague enough that it can't be used against non-destructive enterprise too.

[Bakustra]

No: what I'm doing is calling you an idiot who isn't paying attention to what is being said, and who isn't contributing to the fucking discussion.

This is the position you propound:

Acting to prevent regulatory capture is actually protecting people's property rights because if corporations controlled government they could abuse eminent domain. That ignores that the original question being asked included monopolization, to which this does not apply. This conflates "could" and "would" in order to make this a defense of property rights. This presumes that telling somebody how they can and cannot spend their money is somehow protecting property rights. This declares that the central problem with regulatory capture is potential infringement of property rights. In other words, your contention means that society was less capitalist before the successes of socialism and social democracy in the 1890s-1920s.

[Simon_Jester]

Sigh.

I'm sorry, I didn't think in terms of compactness.

My point is basically rhetorical, and therefore unimportant, anyway. It's restricted to the assertion that we shouldn't be afraid to say bad things about people who hurt the public interest, and that doing so can be productive.

Yes, that's fair enough. But as long as you don't use rhetoric which undermines our ability to diagnose the problem rationally, and which isn't vague enough that it can't be used against non-destructive enterprise too.

By the way, I'm willing to put up a 'compactified' version of a post on request if you need me to. I'm not going to go howling to the mods because you don't want to go line by line with someone whose idea of an off the cuff response runs to five paragraphs...

Anyway. Basically, I don't think condemning the behavior of the American health insurance and financial sectors as "greedy" really endangers our ability to diagnose the problem rationally. I don't advocate 'outlawing greed' or any such nonsense, but we have to recognize that at some point the desire to succeed becomes a vice- just as appetite can become a vice, if it leads you to gorge yourself and become fat and useless.

[Lord Zentei]

<snip>

Right, continue to post incoherent bullshit non-sequiturs and unjustified blanket claims all you want.

Does not apply to monopolization... conflating "could" and "would"...

Just wow.

By the way, I'm willing to put up a 'compactified' version of a post on request if you need me to. I'm not going to go howling to the mods because you don't want to go line by line with someone whose idea of an off the cuff response runs to five paragraphs...

Anyway. Basically, I don't think condemning the behavior of the American health insurance and financial sectors as "greedy" really endangers our ability to diagnose the problem rationally. I don't advocate 'outlawing greed' or any such nonsense, but we have to recognize that at some point the desire to succeed becomes a vice- just as appetite can become a vice, if it leads you to gorge yourself and become fat and useless.

Well, in that case, our present disagreement is probably more rhetorical than substance-based. There's most likely not much more to say on the matter.