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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ballsschweaty who wrote (68667)	9/6/2007 12:24:42 PM
From: benwood	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

My point is that greed is inescapable, at least in western culture the past thousand or two years. The pendulum will always swing too far. It would be grand to have a balance where the free market worked efficiently, but the reality is that there are enough of the distorted individuals around who crave power or crave vast wealth or usually both that the equation simply will never be in balance. When workers finally got it good, their union process pushed it too far (always wanting more). Their companies became uncompetitive and help galvanize the export of their jobs. The exact same theme exists now amongst the thug and bully class. They have their men in power to return the favor via favorable laws, corporate welfare, personal tax breaks, incredible denial (e.g. the subprime "miracle"), and as a result, the bully class not only has it better than ever, but it is so far better that it seems incredible to me, from the outside, that this group continues to claw and scratch for more at all costs. The $500 million pulled down by fund managers each year? The terrible CEOs who can make more money more quickly by failure than success? Mergers that allow one or four executives to make millions while the rest of the company, that is, 99.9%, get fired? Yet the grasping for money by the bully class has become more not less urgent in the past five years. And to hear of your contempt for "who will get what they deserve" really amazes me, yet fits in perfectly. These lower middle class and lower class workers have been playing poker a card short for an entire generation. And the deck is stacked. Denigrating and vilifying them, many of whom were simply bullied or bamboozled, is a way to justify this egregious and historically unprecedented transfer of wealth and make those who profited seem all the more deserving. "Owners collude via lobbyists and trade groups while employees collude through unions." True, in part at least. But what you left out is that 99.9% of the collusion today is via "owners." Based on history, this is unsustainable. I'm not sure how it will give, but I suspect it will not be pretty for workers or owners. This time, the owners will simply walk away, with the bulk of their workers already trained in other countries. What will be left behind will resemble a third world nation, perhaps.