How do you get both equity and prosperity?

Because privately owned central banking systems, such as the US Federal Reserve banking system, are parasitic frauds sucking the life blood out of the economy, bank reform — specifically, restoring the authority to issue the nation’s currency must be restored to its rightful owners, the American people — is absolutely necessary before we can get both equity and prosperity with economic justice as an additional benefit.

I just read your Bloomberg link & calling the tone of this article silliness is a correct observation. We have a FREE enterprise economic system which states that economic conditions are the result of uncounted & freely taken decisions of its participants. Government, presidents, or congress cannot just dictate results. It’s been tried & doesn’t seem to work (history hint, hint). Economists have stated this obsevation often. Jobs will come only when business has a reason to hire. That implies someone or something is willing to buy whatever it is they are selling. No money is available to do that because everybody is f***ing broke & up to our necks in debt because we don’t actually make anything anymore & we spend like we all won the lottery yesterday. Very little is going to change until we stop letting our jobs & wages slip out of the country, start saving & stop letting corporate America riding roughshod over us. All this will take time & pain. Don’t like it? We should have thought of that ten years ago. I mean, subprime makes NO sense & niether does pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into obvious scams like AIG. I learned this shit in high school. What’s wrong with these people?? Anyway, the unhelpful noise in this article shows what whiney pinheads the chattering classes & politicos are.

Money is human kind’s greatest invention. Money doesn’t discriminate. Money doesn’t care whether a person is poor, whether a person comes from a good family, or what his skin color is. Anybody can make money.
– Takafumi Horie –

http://japan-russia.jimdo.com/syndicate-ii/

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself.. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.
– Barack Obama –

Some “economists” think that economy will always grow no matter what government policies (specifically taxes) are.

Then why it is so surprising to find that other “economists” are sure that people will continue to work even without any incentive to do so?

Neither of these is the worst examples of non-sense to be heard on hourly basis.

Well educated people with equal access to information are the key. And by well educated, I mean people who can use the Internet to access information. Television news has become virtually worthless, giving us sound bytes from celebrity economists instead of thoughtful analysis.

Look at the 25 plus links to other econ websites listed on this website. We can access all that insight, all that information, and expose the wall street powers who want to control our financial system for their own agenda. And there are 25 more after that, 25 more after that.

Keep reform simple.

Wall off the investment banks from banks that take deposits.

Require bond rating agencies to work for the buyers of the bonds, not the sellers. Seriously, trusting a rating agency that works for the bond seller is like trusting the advertising agency of a car company to give you an honest appraisal.

Make CDS subject to gaming laws. Make arbitrage subject to gaming laws. Make commodity speculation subject to gaming laws.

Create a consumer finance protection agency, but focus its work on making financial documents easy to understand. Documents like mortgages, credit card agreeements and cell phone bills.

Make higher education affordable. Much as I dislike union bashing, the NEA is going to keep k-12 education handicapped, because the NEA is more interested in protecting weak teachers than improving education. I have some hope for post secondary education.

Give the American people good quality information, and access to that information, and the majority will make good decisions.

Let the super rich have their multi million dollar mansions. Their belief that wealth will make them happy is flawed. And there is that something about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle…..

As for the rest of us, the advantage of this recession is that we are learning that we will be OK as long as we can pay the utility bill, our house payment, put food on the table, enjoy good health, get in our cars and go where we want. And have the ability to entertain ourselves.

And we have figured out that the Wall Street Masters of the Universe…….are maybe just arrogant instead of being truly smart.

When the truly progressive members of the Democratic and Republican party band together to simplify the rules, America will start moving forward again. Let’s work on that.

There’s only one answer: binary economics and broad-based ownership. When the USSR collapsed they pretty much followed Kelso’s model, that is until the oligarchs stepped and the implementation of the “shock therapy” didn’t help either. It was of course a well though out plan, and the Masters of the Universe def don’t want full-on Kelsoian economics in the US. Time did and article on Louis Kelso a long time ago I believe?

Man, point #2 is a like a giant pit of possibilities and problems.

@RandyMiller for example throws out a whole list of probable ideas and I think that’s where we really need to focus our efforts.

Problem is, if you look at his reform ideas, they’re all over the map. (and I like most of the ideas)

I mean, credit rating agencies need to be just outright changed. The fractional reserve banking system needs an overhaul. The market for equities and commodities needs to be made way more transparent. The market for lending needs to be truly opened (P2P lending).

We probably need to draw big lines between bonds and stocks and prevent corporations from issuing both. We need public companies to report investments split between being “regulated” and “non-regulated” and those that are “regulated” should all be subject to levels of transparency well beyond the current SEC requirements.

But hey, all of those changes are pretty massive and require some serious buy-in from both the public and an unwilling financials sector.

To add to Randy Miller’s list:
Corporations cannot be allowed to treat the citizenry as sheep to be sheared.
So the hell forged link between corporations & congress absolutely MUST BE SEVERED.

I’m blown away by the ridiculousness of the reductio of conservative and liberal ideas about the economy. Liberals, for example, don’t denigrate innovation; their policies have been as responsible for innovation as anything conservatives have come up with. To say that conservatives value innovation and growth over equity issues is equally as dumb because the conservative movement has focused on individual freedoms and responsibilities – other than moral issues they wish to impose – and failures in equity are part of the cost of maintaining individual liberty.

Manzi’s often a good thinker, but I think you give him far too much credit on this one. It reads to me like a quite contorted effort that at least implicitly denies a fundamental long-term reality: that there is a whole slew of policies that generates both greater equality and faster growth.

Manzi’s proposals strike me as picking up dimes.

Greater equality also provides more opportunity and incentive for energetic climbers, not less:

http://www.asymptosis.com/republicans-create-opportunity-yeah-right.html

The (sometimes-stated) assumptions behind Manzi’s proposals are in many cases simply wrong, rooted in faith, not facts.

“Greater equality also provides more opportunity and incentive for energetic climbers, not less:”

Indeed, as expounded in Larry Bartels’ paper on income inequality and partisan politics:

http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/income.pdf

Walt,

The article on Kelso, “The Man Who Would Make Everyone Richer,” appeared in TIME on June 29, 1970. Email me at thirdway@cesj.org and I’ll send you a copy of the article. You might enjoy visiting the website of the Center for Economic and Social Justice at http://www.cesj.org for free downloads of Kelso’s two books with Mortimer Adler, plus much on the Just Third Way, binary economics and the proposed Capital Homestead Act for removing tax and monetary system barriers to universal access to capital ownership . . . from the bottom-up.

Own or Be Owned,

Norm Kurland

Justin, this is the commenter formerly known as TomT. You were always good about answering my questions.

.

So here goes: do you really like this Manzi piece or do you like the way you like Robert Samuelson, i.e. think it’s garbage but can’t say so because journalists aren’t allowed to criticize conservatives?

.

What he writes sounds like garbage to me, mostly a way to pimp vouchers. Is that about right, honestly?

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Thanks

I really do agree with much of what Manzi says. He leaves out a bunch of other things that could increase equity without significantly damaging competitiveness. But compared with the kneejerk claptrap offered up on a daily basis by, say, the GOP Congressional leadership, this is thoughtful and possibly helpful stuff. On schools, I have some experience with the Dutch secondary school system (that is, I went to high school there for a year). It has operated quite successfully for decades along the lines described by Manzi: government-funded but partially autonomous schools compete with each other for students across city and other political boundaries. It’s a system that only really works in a densely populated area with good public transit, so it certainly isn’t any kind of panacea for the U.S. But it’s not a BAD idea.

Thanks.

[...] • Related Topics: economic development, education, inequality, regulation, competitiveness Like me, Jonathan Chait also liked parts of Jim Manzi's epic right-leaning prescription for combining [...]

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