atlas shrugged, are we living through it ?

Treadmillionaire wrote:

In the time you have spent defending yourself here you could have read the first 545 chapters of the book. You would almost be through Part 1.

Sorry, for the length. I don't think the book isspecifically the subject here, but more so the state of society. Despite this I will read it; I just need to find a copy.

Blowing Rock Master wrote:

3rd Street wrote:

I don't need to reread your post.

You're right, why run the risk of being less ignorant. Good luck getting through life without using a trader or broker.

...or without someone to handle the paperwork required to live in our type of society. No person (man) is an island---you can't do everything by yourself.

Society is complex, and paperwork, fortunately or unfortunately, is a necessary part. If you stop to think about it, even buying toilet paper is not something you could do without intermediaries (paperworkers).

Blowing Rock Master wrote:

Good luck getting through life without using a trader or broker.

OMG, you think what you do is important beyond funding your various bad habits?!?!

I had forgotten how unattractive unsubstantiated self-importance is. Guess I've been living with modest brilliance for too long.

Paperworker was right. Brokers and traders are nothing but dirty a$$wipes.

Given I've never met an honest broker or trader, I think I will continue to be able to get through life just fine without them.

If you ever get past the mental age of 19, and can stop worshipping that trade paperback novelist, Rand, you may want to pick up Daniel Pink's latest book, A Whole New Mind. It might give you a little peek at your paperpushing future. Or at least at the future of the guy in India who will replace you. Apparently moving numbers around doesn't take much of a skill set. Or just keep re-reading The Fountainhead. Ignorance is indeed bliss.

3rd Street wrote:

Blowing Rock Master wrote:

Personal riches have nothing to do with being a producer or leech. If you create wealth, no matter how small the creation might be, you're a producer. If you try to enrich yourself by taking from others while creating nothing, you're a leech.

So traders and brokers are leeches because they enrich themselves by taking from others while creating nothing?

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman agrees with you, and he knows more about economics than you, I, or Ayn Rand.

"The revelation that Bernard Madoff — brilliant investor (or so almost everyone thought), philanthropist, pillar of the community — was a phony has shocked the world, and understandably so. The scale of his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is hard to comprehend.

Yet surely I’m not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?"

What I find lacking in Rand's worldview is much in the way of complexity. We all produce, we all take from others without just compensation, and the relative amounts change from moment to moment. Besides that, there's the issue of what we value. One man's art is another man's wastefulness. Think about how we react to Gebrselassie's races and how others might find them pointless.

3rd Street wrote:

Brokers and traders are nothing but dirty a$$wipes.

You deal with brokers and traders everyday. They're the ones who create the marketplace. Here's a bunch of examples:

The grocery store, do you think they grew the food and manufactured the toilet paper? No, they either bought it and then resold it to you, or allowed someone to use their shelf space to market their goods. The profit they make is what you pay them for the privilege of one stop shopping. Unless you grow your own food and wipe your butt with a corn husk you can't do without these traders.

The same applies for other retailers whether it's Walmart or your local running shoe store. They don't make any of the stuff you buy there. They provide a service where they gather the goods in one place and (gasp) push the paper required to get it there.

What do you do with the money you earn (assuming you earn any)? Bury it in your backyard? If you put it in a bank, CD, mutual fund, or stock, guess what - you're dealing with a broker. All the paper pushing they do makes you money. Good luck selling a stock without all the traders out there to provide a market. Without them you'd be reduced to putting an ad in the paper or Craig's List hoping you can connect with someone who wants to buy 100 shares of Bonehead Inc. BTW, in this instance the paper or Craig's List would be acting as a broker. Damn, you just can't get away from them.

But I realize what you're really trying to do is attack me because I'm a realtor. I described in great detail on another thread what a realtor does for you. There are plenty of books out there that will tell you even more. If you want to buy or sell a home on your own, go to it and I wish you luck. Unlike some professions (for example doctors, lawyers, pharmacists) there's no law that says you have to use a realtor and I hope there never is.

So if your goal in life is to be free of brokers and traders I suggest you find a desert island, because we're everywhere. Now get back to your homework.

Dammit! That was my post, not my wife's.

jsquire wrote:

"The revelation that Bernard Madoff — brilliant investor (or so almost everyone thought), philanthropist, pillar of the community — was a phony has shocked the world, and understandably so. The scale of his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is hard to comprehend.

Yet surely I’m not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?"

The main difference between Madoff and the rest of the industry (well most of it) is that Madoff is a crook. He wasn't investing any money. He was taking in money from the unsuspecting and paying part of it out as "dividends" while pocketing the rest. The financial meltdown we're now experiencing is the result of many firms getting involved in securities they didn't understand. They also didn't comprehend what could happen if these investments went south. Government meddling in corporate accounting, forcing banks and brokers to report assets at far less than their true value, also caused enormous problems. There was a problem with some mortgage brokers filing fraudulent paperwork, but if that was the only issue you wouldn't even notice it. Basically there was a lot of stupidity fueled by ignorance.

Regarding your comments about the inequality of compensations and what people value, I think that all falls under the "life's not fair" heading. You can have a philosophy about how things should be, but that doesn't mean reality will cooperate.

3rd street just got dominated.

Blowing Rock Master wrote:

Dammit! That was my post, not my wife's.

Too much wine again?

Yes, I realize that brokers and traders are everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of them have infiltrated every aspect of our lives, but it does not mean that we NEED them. Nor does it mean that what they do could not be easily replaced by only small advances in current technology.

You obviously have a tremendous need to feel important. Perhaps you have been in too many relationships where you didn't feel validated. Perhaps you felt your father was not proud of you. I can only guess. I do think it is bizarre that you get your need for validation met by pretending to be someone or something you are not on a public forum, with more than 50% of your responders calling you out on your idiocy. I'm not attacking you because you are a realtor (that would be a little silly). I just can't fathom why you go on and on like you do??? For God's sake get some help before you hurt someone.

I don't know why it took me so long to figure this out. Hi Lia.

Hi Sweety.

3rd Street wrote:

Hi Sweety.

That was sarcasm by the way. I don't know who this other chick is.

A weird kind of love going on here. How does the tune go?

BRM and Third Street sitting in a tree...K.i.*.*.i.n.g.

I think the *.* is supposed to be l.l. Or, maybe it's c.k.

Yeah, k.i.l.l.i.n.g or k.i.c.k.i.n.g, it's something like that.

Greed didn't get us here- corruption did.

iflyboats wrote:

Greed didn't get us here- corruption did.

Is there a difference?

GREED is not equivalent to CORRUPTION....you can be extremely greedy and perfectly moral at the same time....GREED means self-interest, meaning you work for your own benefit rather than the benefit of others, which is not morally wrong unless you actually injure others or violate the rights of others in the process. If you create a great product and you sell it for profit to people who voluntarily pay for it, that's greed, and that's good. If you create a shit product like fiat money and force people to accept it involuntarily, that's corruption. See the difference?

People like to claim that Rand is the banner bearer for the conservatives, but she is much more in line with the ideal of classic libertarianism. Conservatives are seen as hypocritical because they want government out of the workplace but in the home. Liberals are seen as hypocritical because they want government out of the home, but omnipresent in the workplace. Libertarians and fascists are the least hypocritical of the political groups.

there is a huge difference between greed as defined in Rand's book and outright fraud / crime. It took a lot of government intervention to create the housing bubble since all of the left wing liberal groups put forth the idea that for some reason everyone has a right to own a home for some reason, and to "deny" someone's right of home ownership was some kind of discrimination. Those programs were fed into the Wall Street greed machine that, by its own design, pays based on transaction (size and frequency) as well as margin. It seems like the confluence of too much government intervention and too much opportunity for fraud. Now the magnitude of the problem is destroying the stability of many people around the world, from the retirees who have under-funded pensions, to the students about to graduate into a crappy job market. Now we have a cascade of government-driven solutions creating a financial death spiral. Owning a home was never a panacea and never should have been marketed as one.

Yes, you are close here. Objectivism (which is Rand's philosophy) is related to Libertarianism, although they've had their disagreements, for sure. But Rand is certainly not a conservative, given that conservatives nowadays are so religiously motivated and Rand spat all over religion (good for her) in a quite profound manner.

As I've said before, I could never bring myself to be totally aligned within Randian morality/philosophy, but the people who just outright shun it or say its ridiculous simply don't have the understanding of it that they think they do. 3rd Street, while calling everyone else stupid and narrowminded, is the biggest of the lot.