[mscarborough]

Making the subprime loans in the first place doesn't necessitate packing them into opaque financial instruments and going bananas with the wildly over-leveraged profit-seeking.

Financial firms has been making tons of money during decades of increasing wealth inequality. Sure, let's talk about these congressional acts, but not going to put a lot of blame on relatively small programs that required these firms to throw back some scraps.

[PathOfEclipse]

I'd rather have wealth inequality, which is natural, especially in a world where even the poorest have only gotten richer over time, than have enforced wealth equity, which has resulted in near universal poverty nearly everywhere it's been implemented. People calling for enforced wealth equity don't have the moral high ground. They're in the moral caves and pits!

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/financial...

"The seeds of the financial crisis were planted during years of rock-bottom interest rates and loose lending standards that fueled a housing price bubble in the U.S. and elsewhere.

It began, as usual, with good intentions. Faced with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, a series of corporate accounting scandals, and the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate from 6.5% in May 2000 to 1% in June 2003. 4 5 The aim was to boost the economy by making money available to businesses and consumers at bargain rates. e result was an upward spiral in home prices as borrowers took advantage of the low mortgage rates. 6

Even subprime borrowers, those with poor or no credit history, were able to realize the dream of buying a home. "

The repeated story of our government's behavior in the financial sector is:

1) act with supposedly good intentions

2) Mess everything up

3) Blame the mess on someone else and call for more government action to clean things up.

[mstipetic]

People like you are so annoying. Super natural to have 70 people control 50 percent of the world wealth. Ace.

[PathOfEclipse]

At what point in the world's history has wealth not been concentrated? What, therefore, is your argument or evidence that wealth inequity isn't natural? Even in video games with an online economy and trade that resets periodically, within a week of a reset you'll see massive disparity in wealth between the top and everyone else that only grows over time. And I mean massive.

You should read "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics." It really is illuminating to learn at an academic level how wealth has been produced throughout history and some reasons why it is distributed unevenly.

https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Thomas-Sowell...

[mstipetic]

What is this magical wealth you speak of? Who is ensuring it, who is guarding it? It’s a game that people play until they feel it gives them a reasonable chance to live. Once that’s gone all bets are off and your magical numbers on a computer don’t mean much.

[PathOfEclipse]

From Merriam-Webster, wealth is:

a: all property that has a money value or an exchangeable value

b: all material objects that have economic utility

I'm not sure what' you're talking about with regards to "ensuring" or "guarding" it. But in general, wealth is produced in various forms by people. That's generally the goal of work! Just as important, wealth decays over time. And, like with everything else in this universe, everything related to the production and maintenance of wealth is unevenly distributed, including:

1) Physical resources

2) knowledge and skills

3) cultural and moral values

4) geopolitical landscape

5) personality and personal productive capacity

6) social circumstances

7) dumb luck

Given that none of this is evenly distributed between individuals, groups, nations, etc., it's absurd to expect wealth to be evenly distributed, even in a hypothetically just world. In fact, based on what we know, we should expect differential wealth to be a simple and indisputable fact of life.

In a functioning economy, people earn money by creating value for others. This generally means that even as the rich get richer, so do the poor. It is hardly disputable that capitalism has done more to lift more people out of poverty than any other economic system. Also, because wealth decays, to maintain wealth one must invest it to produce more of it. It is through this investment that society can benefit as a whole.

The problems with wealth redistribution include:

1) By taking wealth from people who know generally able to best produce it, you reduce their ability to invest wealth to produce more of it. All of society suffers for this as overall wealth decreases for everyone.

2) When giving wealth to people who aren't producing anything, they take the wealth and spend it without creating any more wealth. Overall wealth decreases for everyone. It is hardly disputable that welfare programs in Western countries have led to far more dependence and far more able-bodied people not working than before these programs existed.

It is not an accident that wealth redistribution makes countries poorer, ultimately harming the poor that the redistribution is meant to help. We should be focusing less on wealth equity and more on wealth production and maintenance.

https://www.northwood.edu/afeu/when-free-to-choose/how-to-en...

[mstipetic]

Yeah go tell Jack Ma or any Russian “billionaire” how great their wealth is. There are people (police, army) that ensure ownership is respected. What happens when they refuse to do it? You have such a naive understanding of things I don’t know why I’m even having this discussion.