Dear Mom - Letters to Heaven

Friday, September 30, 2011

Regulations the Human Element to Capitalism


There are realities in the world:

It is Congress that makes the laws. We need to get a better Congress and filibuster proof Senate.

The fox is watching the hen house. You need a cop on the beat.

The elimination of glass stegal caused the financial collapse. Regulators at the Bureau of Land Management were literally partying with the mining/oil industry reps they were supposed to be policing.

Corporations push off downstream waste and expense of polluted rivers, streams, and Bays onto the tax payer and no one calculates the cost of reclamation into the offending parties’ bottom line.

Self regulation does not work in capitalism. Unregulated capitalism consumes itself and its resources as fast as it can.

Capitalism unregulated is just a math model. The faster it achieves a sale, and the more sales it makes -faster- is its mathematical goal. Clear cutting forests, blasting off mountain tops, overfishing all in an attempt to get the most for the least and the quickest to get to market and cash out.

Unregulated capitalism is a short term profit nightmare. Regulations are more than needed. Regulations are the human element to the purely math model of capitalism's supply and demand.

Do you feel me? Think long term and globally on a macro scale that requires sustainability in order to ensure a healthy survival for the entirety of mankind.

Anything less is eventually self destructive....disease unchecked by borders, famine, resource wars, poverty, crime, power struggles the haves versus the have nots..

History will repeat itself until we shake off the single minded "me" thinking of rugged individualism and start thinking we - you know as in We The People...


The worst corporate and civil rights abuses throughout history were enabled by government's/kingdom's failure to enforce law and maintain a level playing field. Which is why we need an uncorrupted cop on the beat?

So how do we un-corrupt government? By taking the money out - its simple remove the middleman and have citizens vote directly on policy by being able to self direct their tax dollars to the programs and departments they wish to support.

Government is just a huge redistribution system of our tax dollars. The powers that be are in the trenches trying to grab/steal whatever they can by coercing the representatives with the promise of or the withholding of campaign contributions. Eliminate campaign contributions - why not? In other words the system has to be cured.

How is government small enough to drown in a bathtub going to sue GE when it puts out a product that gives us cancer? I don't have the means to sue GE- do you? Class action suits - who's paying for them some law firm - even international firms don't have the bucks to go up against GE?

Who was going to reimburse all of our savings, 401k's, IRA's when Wall Street collapsed under the weight of AIG? Should all of those trillions of dollars from Mom and Pop investors, and worker bees just disappear in the collapse?

A multi generational effort of honest savings wiped out by the criminal activity of a few that's why Wall Street got bailed out. Would I have liked to see them all go down those crooks, and arrogant SOB's and stupid greedy single minded people? You bet. Would it have harmed more people and been counter productive - yep.

So its not so simple. What I absolutely abhor is ideology (religion and fanaticism). We have to cull the best ideas from all comers. Wholesale buy-ins to factions, parties, clubs, religions, theorists, schools of thought is another "big" problem. We need practical solutions to apply in a real world....on a problem by problem basis....not theories, and world views.

There is no panacea cure all party, politician, religion, cult, economic theory, school of thought about how things ought to be. There is how things are and what can be done to make them better. Public and private policy combined as well as science, labor, capital and sweat equity are the tools we have. And we need every one of them all in a country that boasts 300+ million people and a world now bulging at 7 Billion residents.

The only savior is practical reality and practical solutions to our everyday problems on a case by case basis that no school of thought, economic theory, party, faction, or religion is ever going to solve all on its own – anything less is a pipe dream.

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