| Ah yes, you're right of course - there is no objective measure of the balance of good and evil. What I do does eliminate jobs. Does the benefit to everyone else outweigh the loss of these jobs? Many people would say yes, some would say no. Some job eliminations open the door for more jobs - for different people. Does this balance the morality of putting people out of work? I don't know. Nobody does. But there is some measure of balance to what we do. What we do has a benefit - a benefit to someone other than just ourselves. Right now I work in travel informatics. What I do empowers tens of millions of customers to make better choices about how they travel, find better prices, put more information at their fingertips, keeping them informed. The price of this is that I'm also putting airline service agents out of work, not to mention travel agents. I've made an end run around them and made it easier to get all of this information than going and talking to a human. Personally, I think this is a worthwhile balance. The loss of these jobs also means a massive improvement to the efficiency of travel, and the happiness of tens of millions of travelers. This isn't a clueless assumption either - the emails I've seen from users demonstrates that people are passionate about what we do. You can disagree - and you wouldn't be wrong. I am, after all, not the arbiter of what is and isn't a worthwhile trade. There's a difference between this and what Goldman does, though. The balance is way on the other end of the scale. The artificial supply squeeze on industries benefits... what exactly, besides Goldman itself? The price is obvious - rising consumer prices, starving people who can no longer afford to eat (re: the food crisis that Goldman is also accused of contributing to), wars and revolutions caused by desperate, hungry people. So what's the upside? What did we gain for this price Goldman has exacted? > "Financiers know double entry accounting and they know that for every credit there is a debit, both sides of the leger are equally true." Please name the "credit" of what Goldman has done here. We're not idiots, we know there's a credit and a debit. The question is, this doesn't seem to be the case in situations like these, where it seems we're all paying the price, and the only "credit" is to the financier. |
If aluminum becomes more scarce in the future (Goldman seems to be betting that it will be), then Goldman has done us all a favor by conserving it in the present.
If it is not more scarce in the future, then Goldman will lose money.