Budget talks: This is getting nasty

1) Before 2008, the Fed's balance sheet was around $900 billion. Today, it is around $2.85 trillion.
2) Without any transparency, in the wake of 2008, the Fed gave secret loans to financial insitutions that we can only guess totaled more than $16 trillion (and we only know this because Bernie Sanders ordered a GAO audit) to hand-picked financial institutions, some of them foreign. There was A LOT of cronyism at work, considering some of those financial institutions were near worthless, and other financial institutions (smaller regional banks, many of which have folded), couldn't even get their phone calls returned. By the way, $16 trillion is more than our entire country's GDP. And this was all done without any oversight, not that any oversight should make that Kosher.
3) Where was my $2.5 trillion loan? I don't contribute to political campaigns the way Citigroup does, and I don't have any former workmates all the way through the revolving door, a la Goldman Sachs. And why the hell is a secret institution that isn't answerable to anyone, getting away with interfering with our markets -- and engaging in cronyism -- with taxpayer money, in order to create winners and losers of their liking? And lastly, you know how the Fed manages that bloated balance sheet? It's the stealth tax that no one on here argues about: inflation. They control our money. They control us.

No, the Fed should never have been throwing around bags of money in what amounted to corporate welfare.

 

Please don't try to paraphrase me, if that is what you are going to come up with. And I promise not to attribute cartoonish strawmen, italicized quotes to you either.

What I will say in response is that I really don't need you, or anyone else deciding who is greedy or selfish. We live in a free country. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Ring a bell?

In so much as greed and self interest often leads people to invent and create and innovate, they aren't even necessarily bad things -- if one is trying to subjectively decide what is good or bad.

But that's the point. Your idea of what is subjectively greedy or selfish has no place in my life. As my prescriptions for who is good or bad shouldn't dictate your economic freedom.

And even if I am wrong about that for some moral reason you will now throw back at me, you, or anyone else, has no ability to steer our economy with any amount of precision, as has been proven over and over again, and certainly not without creating heaps of awful consequences we eventually pay for, as our Federal government and central bank has continually done for decades -- and largely for corrupt reasons; special-interest politics.

I say let the economy work itself out on its own because our fiscal and monetarist tinkering has created most of our problems and has exacerbated them. And people like you enable it.

"To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm." - Hayek

People seem to be seeing some of the truism in that, with their distrust of our politicians and the harm they have caused us. Guess you are not on board. It's too bad.

 

I have no idea what you read in that. The word "greed" -- as subjective a term as one can come up with -- triggered a Gordon Gekko post. OK.

I posted something in which I made a case against coercing people to give up economic freedom to governmental centralized planning. It's not only ineffective and inefficient, what we have today is thoroughly corrupt.

I advocated a free economy, in which all decisions are made voluntarily. What a novel idea. I am tired of this acceptance of our government coercing us based on some arbitrary rich versus poor, or "you're greedy," "or their need supercedes your need" or "I am smarter than you, so I am going to steer our economy for the greater good," BS. It is the root of our problems.

Economies grow when goods and services create economic activity. That is best accomplished by mutual consent to mutual advantage. People are perfectly capable of figuring out what is to their advantage on their own. We've gotten to the point where all you have to do to demonize someone is ascribe "greed" -- as nebulous a term as there is -- to their motive. And it's bullshit. We are a nation of laws. So a "greedy" person can only legally grow rich by offering a quality product or a service at a lower price than others. How terrible.

The question was "How do we 'fix' our economy"? That's the answer. Leave people in control of their economic freedom and the economy will fix itself. Put an end to the three to four trillion dollar budget of special interest favors that hamper the productive areas of our economy in favor of the special interests that buy favor. And get rid of our central bank, which exists only to hand out favors in secret and then monetize its own and our government' debt. It is killing us.