[ExI] Matt Taibbi takes on Goldman Sachs

[Dan]

--- On Sun, 7/5/09, Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it> wrote:
> Damien Broderick ha scritto:
> > [my financial advisor comments: "I'm glad to see
> someone talking about
> > this publicly."]
> > 
> > <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine>The
> > Great American Bubble Machine: How Goldman Sachs Has
> Engineered Every
> > Major Market Manipulation
> > Jul 02, 2009 8:38 AM - Rolling Stone
> 
> At the end of the day, anyway, Goldman Sachs could had done
> nothing of
> this without a government helping and backing it.
> The system is exploitable and manipulable, so there always
> be someone
> that will try to manipulate it to extract wealth. And, at
> the end, the
> first and the best able to manipulate the system will
> emerge.
> 
> Anyone willing to write in the constitution an amendment
> about "no
> bailout" of private entities with public money?
> Not Community Reinvestment Acts, No Federal Reserve, No
> Fiat Money and
> so on?
> 
> Until these are possible, someone will try to manipulate
> the system to
> make them possible (with good intentions or to profit from
> them).

A constitutional change is a nice idea as far as it goes.  The problem is, though, that it wouldn't have much teeth.  After all, the culture of jurisprudence and the overall political climate here now are such that any sort of limitation like this would be ignored or interpreted to be flexible.  Also, even were this not the case, it's hard to set limits now, while leaving the same statist institutions in place, that will somehow bind a future administration.  One can just imagine someone twenty or fifty years hence saying, "That was from the age when computers were as big as notebooks.  We shouldn't be beholden to the constraints of the iPhone Age."

So what's my solution?  I'm not sure I have one -- save for getting rid of government completely (peacefully overthrowing it wherever it may be) and trying to make sure it never grows back.

Regards,

Dan