<You like Alan Greenspan?>
Yes.
< You like the bubble he fostered?>
He didn't foster a bubble. It takes no increase in money supply for prices to be bid up. The stockmarket can go as high as you like on the same number of dollars. Two people could just buy and sell the same stock to each other, using the same money [let's say $1 million] and trading fewer shares for more money each time. At the end, the share price could be $1 million per share and one or other of them would still have exactly the same $1 million they started with. That's what happened with the dot.coms and the tech stocks but it happened with more people in the game.
Here is complaint [of which there are many]http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=16288850 that Uncle Al despised the Nasdaq increase and had done since 1996 when thinking about irrational exuberance. Which of course is not true. He understood that bubbles of madness are not the way to economic nirvana. So he popped it by making debt expensive. Before that, he printed heaps to avoid the liquidity crunch of 1998 during the Asian Contagion.
<You enjoy the illusory capital gains on your house and really think this contributes to your standard of living?>
Capital gains on houses aren't illusory if the owners are living in high demand areas or if the money is being diluted and the capital gain represents inflation. Well, they are illusory in that case but the protection of capital isn't illusory. Remember than inflation is concealed these days because of the productivity improvements of the technological and demographic booms, but it pops out in sneaky little places which aren't so linked to those improvements [perhaps such as houses and land].
That's just a protection of standard of living and capital base rather than an improvement to standard of living. I know some people think they are richer because their house went up in price over the past 5 years [along with everyone else's]. They aren't.
<Do you believe in any of the ideals on which our country was founded?>
I guess you mean the USA [which isn't my country although I own it and hire the people who live there to work for me via my investments]. You mean the ideals of slavery, treason, civil war, killin' redskins, racial preferences, gender preference? I guess you mean 'read the constitution'. Of course I believe in many of the themes of the USA which is why I invest in USA companies. The USA has achieved amazing things and continues to do so and long may it do so. It has got the world's most powerful military, judicial and political system where anyone can be dragged before the public and the courts. It is the world's most powerful economic juggernaut with robust financial, communication, transport, educational, medical and everything else systems. It is the greatest achievement of humanity [in many respects] and is dominant in creating the world of the 21st century within which everyone on earth will live, from DNA engineering, to CDMA and the telecosm.
<Is stealing wrong in your opinion?>
Yes, unless it's from sheep [their wool and their lives], trees [their timber], the earth, [all the minerals and oil]. Stealing from other people breaks the most basic human social contract [other than murder and injury]. But when you get to taxation, we enter a realm full of dispute. Is the individual rightfully subsumed to the purpose of the mob? I don't think so. Most people do.
< Is it any less wrong when government officials do it or transfer large portions of economic wealth from one group to another?>
Maybe. See previous comment. That's what democracy is about in the current manifestation. Most people [about 95% judging from Libertarian support] think so. But I don't think so.
Alan Green$pan is great!
Mq |
