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posted by dennisn on October 2nd, 2008 at 9:38AM
No--it is most definitely NOT a greater evil to leave the market (*the people!*) alone. It has absolutely nothing to do with me. I have absolutely no obligation to "fix" it. Nobody has any right to force me to fix it. I don't know why you preface ideas of right and wrong with the term "philosophical". If it's wrong, DON'T DO IT!
Your eagerness to violate real-life individuals' freedoms, to *help* the perpetrators of this mess, for some *ethereal* notion of "the economy", is absurd. And most definitely *wrong*.
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posted by rick on October 2nd, 2008 at 10:00AM
First of all, market != people. Market is the relationship between supply and demand. I don't even know where your notion came from.
Also, you can keep believing in your black and white world while businesses shut down and everyone loses their jobs. You go tell the unemployed man who has to support his family that fixing the economy is wrong, and that the economy doesn't affect him. Because when the economy collapses, everyone is affected.
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posted by dennisn on October 2nd, 2008 at 10:11AM
Well, the conventional pedestrian idea of "the market" is simply the mutual transactions among people. That's all. It is usually referred to in opposition to government-forced transactions (ie. nationalized institutions). Ie. governments mandating the national supply and demand isn't, at least in this conventional definition, a valid market phenomenon.
Also, I actually strongly feel that this bailout will destroy the US economy further. It takes away more and more freedom from individuals. It makes government bigger.
BUT. Most importantly. You conveniently ignore my loudest complaints--that I had absolutely nothing to do with this mess, and that NOBODY has the right to force me to "fix" it. (Fix is in quotations for the aforementioned reason.)
It is basically just this last point that I should brought up--everything else is just personal opinion.
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posted by rick on October 2nd, 2008 at 5:36PM
I think the bailout takes away more freedoms from financial institutions than individuals. It does make government bigger, in the form of regulations for these institutions. I think it's worth the effort to investigate and discuss what the bailout actually is, because there are misconceptions about it and it hasn't been sold very well by politicians. (Admittedly, I don't know enough about it to start this conversation, so I'll need to do some investigation myself.)
Yes, you did nothing to cause this mess, but you will definitely feel the effects of it. Something needs to be done, and no one wants to pay for it. This was evident in the vote in the House; everyone secretly wanted the bill to pass, but no one wanted to commit to it themselves.
But this is where one of the misconceptions come in. From what I understand, the bailout is more of a loan than a hand-out. Someone coined the term "bailout" at the beginning of the process and it kind of stuck. Again, I don't know enough about it to discuss in detail at the moment.
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by rick on October 3rd, 2008 at 5:12PM.
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