Just who are these 'little people?' :o)


>Be patient Grady. Uncle Milton's magical market science will soon perform an invisible hand job and trickle down it's food to the hungry mouths of all the little people. Just look what it did for Chile. Maybe someday we'll have such a miracle too.
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>>>>I'm on a pension and have run out of cash. Bail me out please?
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>>>But that would be socialism!
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>>I don't care for socialism, but I'll accept their(your) cash gift.
>>The older we get the more we lean left.
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>>>>>>It's a failure of the system in general. The same model, that capitalist owner will see to the welfare of the enterprise and reinvest and think long term, was the theory behind the privatization of all the state and society and employee owned businesses in the countries transitioning back. But it didn't work that way - they mostly wanted to take the money and run.
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>>>>>>Business is about building value for shareholders. So, if a business is strategic and you want it to build value for society, then society should own it. If society doesn't want to own it (and there are good reasons for this too) then society can legislate to protect it. In this case it looks as if society has decided to do both. As a result, things will stabilize before long. If you are dissatisfied with this performance, to what real-life system are you comparing?
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>>>>>Start with the railroad you mentioned. Then Enron-style power systems (and I'm not taking Enron as an exception; it was the exception by being caught, not by being the only one). Then most of the economy of the countries in retro transition - where large swaths of them were destroyed so they could be bought cheaper (mostly with the same money which was stolen from it), and then the mumbo-jumbo shell gamers couldn't become entrepreneurs overnight, nor over a few years, and simply couldn't, or wouldn't, put up the promised investment and bring about all that progress and wealth. In many cases, the only thing they invested in were armored jeeps and bodyguards.
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>>>>>And let's not forget the gov't here - so much of the work it once did is outsourced or simply privatized, and now it costs much more but gives less effect. The county water billing being outsourced to a company three states away (and the mess and profit they created) is one small example.
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>>>>>>Or they were just the front for the who knows which interests, who aren't the steward capitalists in Adam Smith's sense; they generally don't know where are their assets and don't really care, they want profit and they want it now, before the end of quarter.
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>>>>>>You mean people who buy into funds rather than buying and selling stocks directly? You object to that- IOW people should have to research and make their own share purchases rather than providing liquidity for competent purchasers? I suppose people could perform appendectomies on themselves as well,but why?
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>>>>>Not objecting directly, just not expecting it to have the same effect as direct ownership or direct investment. When you own a bit of this and a bit of that and you actually don't know what you own, and you didn't really give any money to the people where you're "investing", you bought their papers of value on open market - you don't know them, they don't know you, and you have about as much electrostatic as financial influence on each other - nearly zero. There are at least two or three layers of middlemen between you (managers, brokers, bankers), each of them having their own interest - and the long term wellbeing of the enterprise is not their primary. They rather want to build their own names, to be known as wizards, to boost the value of their warez, which may as well mean cutting the branch on which they sit (firing the enterprise's knowledge base to cut cost, closing down refin... plants to reduce supply and cost while keeping the demand etc) but effects of which may come years later. IOW, their goal today may coincide with yours - let's make the most out of this investment - but may at any time do something to profit on the demise of the enterprise. You may profit with them, too - but that's not stewardship. The whole point of capitalism being efficient is that the owner is not crazy to cause damage to his property, or allow damage by others. Now with the remote owner, paid managers and ownership mediators, this is no longer true. It's a different capitalism, where the pursue of profit doesn't necessarily mean an automatic increase of overall wealth as a result.