Occupy Wall Street - Page 138

On November 02 2011 19:09 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Isn't it the position of libertarianism itself? You read two pages of Ayn Rand and you realize that the world is divided between the good market and the bad government.

What strikes me is both the blind faith in capitalism and the complete disbelief in democracy and politics in general. I can't help to consider it as just another completely extremist position. I'm not that interested by extremism in general.

I never got this thing with the FED, but in France we used to have a central bank (BF) that was completely public, that didn't make profit and that was working very well. If I understand, the problem with the FED is precisely that it is owned / ruled by and in favor of certain private banks, right?

On November 03 2011 00:34 BestZergOnEast wrote:
Wealth redistribution is incompatible with justice. The purpose of law is to protect property rights, and as bastiat pointed out it it has been perverted away from that function and turned into an instrument of plunder. Theft is not just. Nor do I hold that egalitarianism is an aesthetic ideal which should be aimed for. Personally I favour societies with a good measure of inequality. If someone is not massively rich, who then will construct sky scrapers, shopping malls, or other such necessary things? And of course we have seen what societies that valued equality over freedom have degenerated into. It wasn't pretty.

If I understand, the problem with the FED is precisely that it is owned / ruled by and in favor of certain private banks, right?

On November 03 2011 00:50 two.watup wrote:

No. The fed is an independent government agency, it doesn't have profit (or revenue for that matter), it merely controls the supply of money.

These are just facts, not conspiracy.

The Federal Reserve is a private institution. It is owned by the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks, which are each in turn owned by a combination of regional banks, commercial banks, foreign banks, and miscellaneous individuals who have inherited pieces passed down through generations. (Rockefellers, Rothschilds, etc.)
The Federal Reserve holds a monopoly on the issuance of currency in the USA. In essence, this is the power to borrow an infinite amount of money at 0%. The dollar bill in your pocket is a 0% loan to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve then uses these 0% loans to purchase income-producing assets. Before 2008, the assets purchased were primarily Treasury debt, which is backed by the taxation power of the US Government. In other words, we are exchanging the property rights to our valuable assets (land, labor, entrepreneurship) for little slips of green paper to buy trinkets with. The government can then tax these valuable assets to pay for our excess. The more we spend, the more the Fed owns.
If all money created is debt and counts as principal, where does the money come from to pay interest on this debt? It comes from the money that gets printed in the future. This is why inflation is a natural result of our current monetary system.
Prior the the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act/TARP Act of September 2008, commercial banks were required to hold 10% of deposits as reserves. This placed a limit on the potential amount of money creation at around 9x the original deposit. An obscure clause in the TARP Act changed the reserve requirement to 0%, immediately making the potential money supply infinite.
The reason for the credit spread blowups of October/November 2008 was because in the same TARP Act the Fed was allowed to pay interest on deposits without publicly stating the interest rate. Before the TARP Act, there was around $20 billion deposited by commercial banks at the Fed. After the TARP Act, deposits immediately jumped 50x to $1 TRILLION. This resulted in a disappearance of demand for risky assets, which led to blowouts in credit spreads.
As a result of various acts of Congress in 2008, the Federal Reserve now has the authority to buy all sorts of assets (commercial paper, corporate bonds, mortgage loans, etc.). A cynical person would say this essentially allows the Fed to seize all valuable assets in this country directly by exchanging fancy bits of green paper for them without having to go through the intermediate step of coercing the US Government into spending more money and taking on more debt.
Much of the Fed's activity is not made public because of the use of off-balance sheet vehicles.
There is debate over the constitutionality of the Fed's various awesome powers.
What does this all mean? This economic crisis will not become a depression. By employing the new tools of monetary policy that the Fed has created for itself (interest on reserves and direct asset purchases), the money supply can be jerked around as if on a string. Initially, this means we will soon experience another period of easy credit and unsustainable economic growth.

However, the end result of current policies is that the Fed will be powerless to stop the next economic crisis. Assuming no outside shocks (another big war, nuclear attack, etc.), the dollar will over time lose its status as the reserve currency, and we will experience a currency crisis followed by rampant inflation at some point down the road.

On November 03 2011 00:34 BestZergOnEast wrote:
Wealth redistribution is incompatible with justice. The purpose of law is to protect property rights, and as bastiat pointed out it it has been perverted away from that function and turned into an instrument of plunder. Theft is not just. Nor do I hold that egalitarianism is an aesthetic ideal which should be aimed for. Personally I favour societies with a good measure of inequality. If someone is not massively rich, who then will construct sky scrapers, shopping malls, or other such necessary things? And of course we have seen what societies that valued equality over freedom have degenerated into. It wasn't pretty.

On November 01 2011 07:33 ZestyPickle wrote:
Can't wait for the recession to end in a year or two and all this political theorizing dies. The economy goes in cycles and this recession wasn't a product of banks or wall street or 1% blah blah blah, it was a knee jerk reaction to the credit down rating of the US. The whole movement isn't going to fix anything and for the most part it is just mindless class warfare. Not to mention they picked the worst fucking time of the year when policy makers are in election campaign and wont do anything controversial right now. The majority of this thread reflects the same poor attitude congress has, pointless fact throwing and bush beating but no real compromise or action. Redistribution of wealth, at least the kind that these protesters want will and can never happen in the US. Even if taxes do get raised on the wealthy, that money isn't going back into the 99%, it will go into slowly dying government programs like SS, medicare, medicaid. Does unemployment suck? Yes, but camping on the financial center of the East Coast isn't gonna do shit. This is a capitalist country and its gonna stay that way. If you want change vote people in. I'm tired of living in a country where the voter turnout is roughly 30-50% and people bitch about no change. Run for office or get off your ass and vote. Unemployment is at what 9.1%? yeah that's a whole % drop from a year ago and it was going down until SP made one of the most irresponsible decisions in down rating US credit in a recovery period.

On November 03 2011 00:34 BestZergOnEast wrote:
Wealth redistribution is incompatible with justice. The purpose of law is to protect property rights, and as bastiat pointed out it it has been perverted away from that function and turned into an instrument of plunder. Theft is not just. Nor do I hold that egalitarianism is an aesthetic ideal which should be aimed for. Personally I favour societies with a good measure of inequality. If someone is not massively rich, who then will construct sky scrapers, shopping malls, or other such necessary things? And of course we have seen what societies that valued equality over freedom have degenerated into. It wasn't pretty.

On November 03 2011 03:53 H0i wrote:


The purpose of the law is to protect property rights? That's funny. Let's defend property rights and take back what we own then, because the "1%" enriched themselves by exploiting the "99%". Redistributing the wealth isn't theft, it's reversing the theft the 1% committed. And assuming this wasn't so, how would it be immoral to redistribute when 1% of the people own everything? Is nearly all of the people on the world being a slave and being exploited on a day to day basis justice? I don't think it is.

On November 03 2011 04:00 Myles wrote:

It's no wonder you guys can't have a decent discussion. You load nearly every word you say.

One yells "Taxation is stealing' 'Government ruins the economy' then the other shouts 'No, the 1% steal from the rest of us' 'The system is slavery'. Well, I think you're both full of shit. Comparing taxation or abusing the system to theft, along with all the other crap you both spout, is intellectually dishonest and doesn't get you anywhere.

On November 03 2011 04:07 Sgonzo wrote:


how come there isnt a cap on markup costs of goods so as to ensure that we have a running economy that doesnt see the poorest get poorer? this is intellectually the sound choice to make.
how come planned obselescence is the way things are run nowadays? this isnt intellectually sound at all in fact it ruins our enviroment
why do upper middle class get the worst tax bracket possible? i believe its because are system has created laws which perpetuate itself so the idea that Laws themself hold any justice is wrong

On November 03 2011 04:18 Sgonzo wrote:
heres a more concise qoute
is intellectually dishonest and doesn't get you anywhere

On November 03 2011 04:00 Myles wrote:

It's no wonder you guys can't have a decent discussion. You load nearly every word you say.

One yells "Taxation is stealing' 'Government ruins the economy' then the other shouts 'No, the 1% steal from the rest of us' 'The system is slavery'. Well, I think you're both full of shit. Comparing taxation or abusing the system to theft, along with all the other crap you both spout, is intellectually dishonest and doesn't get you anywhere.

On November 03 2011 04:32 H0i wrote:


Except that I can come up with arguments.

Debt is slavery. Simple as that. It is virtually impossible to have a normal life and not get into debt. No college without debt,, no house without debt... except if you're rich. Debt is a money moving scheme from the people to the banks and the owners of the banks. Corporations owning things like the water supply and electricity and making profit out of basic human needs is unacceptable. Why should someone charge more than needed for what you need to survive every day, and why should it cost more and more too?

Fractional reserve banking makes this moving from wealth of the people to the banks/owners go a lot faster. The banks can loan out money they don't have, in fact, they create the money at the moment you loan it. You are paying interest for something that does not exist. Inherent to the system of interest is that the money moving speed needs to increase exponentially in order to make it possible to pay off the debt because the ratio [debt]/[existing money] becomes bigger and bigger because of interest. Even if you adjust calculations for inflation, printing and all that.

Obviously this still moves nearly all of the wealth to the banks and owners. It reaches a point where it is mathematically no longer possible for people to keep up (bankruptcy, people get fired, lose their houses), and this amount of people and businesses who can mathematically no longer keep up also increases all the time. The system is then manipulated further by those "big fish" by use of central banks like the FED, constantly printing money which causes a hidden tax on the people, inflation. By manipulation of the government, which is no longer for the people but taken over by the same people who own the banks and corporations, they bail themselves out with our money. And then people who are the victim of this actually defend the very system that by it's nature is designed to do this... they defend this system because they think it's good. Brainwashed by all the propaganda (tv, illusion of democracy, etc), and more things like peer pressure and scare tactics (if you see 1 problem in "capitalism" you're labeled as a communist and this label is somehow connected to murderers, rapists and all bad things you can imagine).

Meanwhile we destroy our earth in the name of profit, we destroy people in the name of profit, we keep our people ill instead of curing them in the name of profit, we take more of their stuff in the name of profit. Everyone who complains and sees the true nature of the system is "lazy". Economics is full of complicated theories and models in order to make it inaccessible for the general public who then trust the ideas of "economists", while current day economics is nothing more than a set of oppressing and old ideologies combined with complicated models to attempt to analyze and manipulate a ponzi scheme. Those old and oppressing ideas are preached and forced on people like extremely religious people who force (their) children to be like them. And if you don't believe or don't necessarily believe in what the book says or what some other guy says they say you're going to hell. Constantly, you are manipulated into certain thought patterns and ideas, and any others that you might get are destroyed because the book says you'll go to hell or that it makes you a communist.

On November 03 2011 04:35 Myles wrote:

I think you're full of shit. You can try to justify it all you want, but calling debt slavery doesn't work. You may not like the life you would have without debt, but that doesn't make it slavery.

On November 03 2011 04:44 H0i wrote:


How is it not? That's the thing about debt slavery, it makes it look like it isn't true slavery. Did I not explain how it is mathematically impossible to pay off the debt? This means a huge group of people will lose their job or house or whatever it is they have. What gives banks the rights to make money from loaning money to you, which they create out of nothing? And is it not slavery if a huge part of your taxes go to paying off the interest on the (ever growing) debt your government has, because it was manipulated into removing the ability to print money and giving that ability to a small amount of people who use it to profit greatly?

According to gini coefficients if there were 10 people and 1000 dollars on the world, 1 person would own $990 and the other 9 would own $1.11. That other group of 9 people needs to do ridiculous things to only survive, varying from walking 100km to get water to working hundreds of thousands of hours just to have the "right" to live somewhere and eat food, while a tiny amount of people literally own nearly everything and try to exploit him as much as they can to satisfy their need for power?

On November 03 2011 04:46 Myles wrote:

Easy. Slavery you are forced into. No one forces you to take on debt. Like I said, you may not like the life you have without debt since you don't get all the fancy toys people like, but it's very possible.

On November 03 2011 04:55 H0i wrote:


You're wrong.

- You pay for debt you didn't create through taxes
- If you don't go into debt and are not born rich it is impossible to get proper education and a house, etc basically forcing you into taking debt or living on the streets.
- Many people do not understand how debt works and are easily manipulated by the various credit card offers, loan offers and other things they get. If you don't know how debt works and if you're tricked then it wasn't a true choice but you still deal with the problems.
- You can get affected by debt related problems such as losing your job even if you don't have any debt.

And besides that, ridiculous prices for water and food and health care are a form of slavery too. A small amount of people owning everything is also a form of exploitation and injustice. There is no reason for these few people to have everything. People die because they have no food. People don't have a place to live in. People die because of things we can cure easily. People die because they have no water. People die because we invade their country and bomb them. Why do we not fix this? We're supposed to work together not fight to death.