An email from the head of a controversial unit at AIG suggests employees who gave up their bonuses did not do so voluntarily, but feared their names would be released if they did not.

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Anti-capitalist group boasts of attack on Sir Fred Goodwin’s home

My point is, AIG shouldn’t even be in business, owned by the government or not. And when companies fail, even good people who work there get laid off. These executives should have been laid off, not rewarded on the taxpayers’ dime. If they truly were good workers, they’d have landed on their feet somewhere else.

I’m not saying the government should be putting any punitive taxes on anyone. I am saying the bailout never should have happened in the first place.

You want my solution? Liquidate AIG. Liquidate Fannie and Freddie.

Any other company that took money and can’t pay it back, you ask them how long it’ll take them. Then you tell them if the money is not returned in full by that date, we’ll liquidate them the next day.

As for companies that are “too big to fail”? Break them down. Make sure they’re small enough to fail.

Capitalism does not reward failure. Our government has no business doing that either.

Moreover, the ones who made the “bad decisions” were forced to do that by bad laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act. Now the government is using the “populist rage” that they are whipping up as an excuse to take over control of executive pay in whatever industry their whims desire. The door is open to economic dictatorship.

As for Obama as a “persecutor”, I’ll agree, but you’re looking at the wrong victim. The one being persecuted is the American taxpayer.

AIG was complicitly in bed with the government. There was a story out yesterday about Chris Dodd’s wife was on the board of an AIG subsidiary. I wonder how many other government links we can find if we look hard enough?

Right.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio_episode.aspx?sched=1242

An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.

This is no answer. You’ve merely restated your arbitrary assertion and thrown in an ad hominem to boot. You don’t answer Lee because you can’t. You couldn’t answer Grant’s excellent summary of the economic crises if you tried. You are not well read in economics (or philosophy for that matter). You may be a good special effects guy or you may not. But you are no intellectual. That’s for damn sure. You fit right in with the Angry Left.

Amy Nasir / Any Nadir / Am Nastier – it’s easy to make fun of people’s names, isn’t it?

And now I’ll discuss the ecnomy with someone named MadMax – yes, the foriegn investment caused the mortgage crisis. I mean – in the real world, it did. In your world, it was the altruistic gay brown people, I bet.

Your economic ignorance is astounding. Chinese and Indian investment caused the mortgage collapse?!?!

But your arguments are not what surprise me, its that someone who was at one time supposedly an Objectivist could possibly make them that I find so unbelievable. During your “Objectivist phase” didn’t you ever read Von Mises? or Hazlett? or Bastiat? or Reisman? Not even Rothbard or Simon or Hayek? What the hell did you read?

So what happened, you got turned off by some Objectivists you knew and then you started reading Chomsky, Zinn and Diamond? And you believed them? Usually when people turn away from Objectivism they become libertarians, and there they usually become anarchists. In some cases they turn back to god. All that atheism and egoism scares them. But to become an economically ignorant leftist? I have never seen that before. You’re an odd bird.

Ellsworth Toohey: “Don’t bother to examine a folly — ask yourself only what it accomplishes.”

Mr. Strangeham is not here to win an argument or to be advised or to seek knowledge. What do you suppose he is here for? What is he accomplishing? It’s time to throw him to the curb by ending communication.

1) Indian and Chinese foreign investment: This occured because those economies had received massive amounts of American capital as a result of the offshoring of American manufacturing. It is tempting to argue that it occured because of the independent growth of Indian and Chinese manufacturing capacity, but that simply is not the case. If it had been, then the capital those economies received would have been invested in Indian and Chinese assets which would have been regarded as equally as stable as their American counterparts.

Why did the manufacturing capacities (and standards of living) of those countries grow in proportion to the accumulation of foreing capital on those countries? In a word: corruption. Or, more precisely, corrupt, invasive, communist/socialist/fascist governments which determine all of the major growth, investment, and wealth distribution patterns of those nations – all while taking a significant portion for themselves and their political allies.

What makes such governments popularly supported (or at least, once entrenche, not popularly resisted)? Namely: altruism. The wide-spread, deeply-held notion that the individual is not sovereign. Instead, he must sacrifice his interests to, say, the upper castes in India or to, say, the people in China. Or, if that doesn’t work – then he must follow the example of the Yogi or the Buddha and accept pain, passivity, and oppression as man’s natural state on Earth.

2) The offshoring of America’s manufacturing capacity: This occured because this economy, for nearly 150 years, grew at such an astounding rate and produced so much abundance that much of the working population came to regard the problem of production as solved. To the general public, all that mattered now was the issue of how to “fairly” distribute the wealth.

American workers, fed on 100+ years of European philosophy which had been festering inside academia and the intelligencia, came to regard the phrase “all men are created equal” as “all men out to be equal.” This made the laboring class look at the entreprenurial class and think: “Hey, I work an equal amount of house that he does, I should be paid equally as well.”

Why was the average person capable of such a massive evasion? Namely: Altruism. Altruism told him that he did not have to actually understand and quantitatively compare the value created by his labor to the value created by his superiors, all he had to do to know that his demands were noble was to remember that he needed more money. Why did he need more money? Was it his egalitarian pretentions? Those were not questions altruism required him to ask. The fact was that (cue pragmatism) right here, right now he was behind on his bills.

3) The willingness of American financial institutions to accept their own government’s fiat currency and regard it as legitimate foreign investment: This occured because this economy, for well over 80 years, has been experiencing the evenly-tightening grip of a regulatory and taxation burden approaching that of an 18th Century European kingdom. However, American business people, ever the optimists, continued to believe that what was happening wasn’t really happening. That somehow such patently unAmerican policies were not going to last. In response to this, they forced themselves to become comfortable with regularly engaging in all kinds of exotic, and otherwise completely unnecessary, business practices in order to “bridge the gap” and remain profitable until America became America again. Why was this attitude so easily accepted? Namely, pragmatism. What was it in response to: The growing welfare state and the interventionist regulatory bureaucracy. Why did they come into existence: to provide for the needs of the “less fortunate” citizens of this country. Why was the satisfaction of their needs regarded as a legitimate function of government: altrusim.

I could go on, but my point has been made. I look forward to seeing how you will evade it.

Because of your O’ist-tinted glasses, you’re seeing altruism where none exists.

The AIG money is NOT going to ‘keep poor people in their houses’, either. Again, the AIG situation relates to the financial crisis involving the worldwide commerical paper market and CDSs; it’s tangentially related to mortgage crisis. And even them you’re still incorrectly identifying the cause of the mortgage crisis – that was caused by the influx of foriegn investment (largely Indian and Chinese) that had nowhere to go, so the mortgage industry created new mortgage ‘products’ solely for the purpose of selling them as mortgage backed securities.

The problem wasn’t altruism – it was greed. Greedy mortgage companies wanting to sell their mortgages; they ran out, the Chinese and Indians still wanted to invest and so they lowered the standards completely – not to help anyone, but to cash in.

This is an excellent point. Good stuff Grant.

Tell me, what is the reason why giving multiple-billions of taxpayer money to AIG the company is at least debateable but giving $165 million to the same men personally is self-evidently evil?

It’s exactly the same thing. Honestly, what is the difference if AIG spends $165 million to continue insuring the mortgages of a bunch of houses “owned” by people who don’t deserve to be living in them (ie: they only got the loans because of CRA) or if a group of AIG executives spend $165 million to maintain their standard of living? Both options amount to exactly the same thing: other people’s money being used to perpetuate a financial situation that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

If the double-standard is the not the result of altruism, and if the “solutions” proposed is not the same pragmatism that caused the whole mess, what is?

That being said, you’re doing the same thing to me as you are to Democrats – you’re inferring deep dark secret motives without any proof whatsoever. It borders on paranoia and it’s certainly a delusion.

It’s not needed, either. You could choose to make an argument just on the basis of agreed upon facts – such as ‘I opposed any government intervention in the economy but our President is in favor of propping up a company like AIG’ without going down the crazy, unprovable assertation path.

But this is the problem with Rand; she went down this sort of path all the time, especially in her fiction. In her novels, the villians sometimes were evil geniuses who had a whole secret hidden agenda, ala Toohey.

Grant. That’s FICTION. As in not real. You didn’t PROVE anything – you asserted something that you deduced based on your belief system.