[quanticle]

Our founders said that the legitimacy of government comes from the consent of the governed. Vox populi est vox dei. So why do we continue to consent to a government that sets up an economic system that ensures that plutocrats can behave badly and get away with it? I'm talking about cases like Dick Fuld, where he drove his firm into bankruptcy, nearly upended the entire American investment banking system, and still walked away with millions upon millions of dollars. I'm talking about cases like Jon Corzine's, where there was outright fraud -- M. F. Global was mixing its own proprietary money with its customers', which is fraudulent -- and nobody went to jail.

I'm not even talking about solutions. I think talking about solutions is entirely premature at this point. We haven't even identified the problem yet. Why do a significant fraction of Americans vote against their own economic best interests, even when they know that their vote is harming them?

[ItendToDisagree]

Identifying the problem is actually pretty easy and you mention it in your first sentence in the parent. It has been going on since at least the Romans.

Money begets power, power protects money.

There really doesn't seem to be much you can do about it... If you 'throw the bums out' you get a whole new set of bums. Its a terrible thing but also a possible fact of life.

One thing I would like to see though... Those who get caught actually getting punished... Even if it is just for 'revenge among kings' purposes. The fact that no one really gets in any serious trouble, for doing the sorts of things you mentioned, shows the system is really broken, rather than the things happening (because they will regardless).

[skyshine]

There is a common misconception that humans are in control of society. We are not. It is an emergent phenomena. Perhaps we can influence it, but to do so we have to understand what its purpose is. Many would say its purpose is to serve humans. I disagree. There is a wealth of evidence that all systems (from atoms to cells to solar systems to society etc) exist for one simple reason : they enable energy to be converted from states of low entropy to states of high entropy more rapidly than if that system did not exist.

The systems come about and develop by many methods, such as the physical forces in the case of atoms or biological evolution in the case of animals. But in every case they succeed at being better generators of entropy.

If we want to make society work for us then we have to understand how society can generate more entropy - and at the same time create roles for us (its component parts) that we want to live. Free market democracy has succeeded precisely because it does this exceptionally well. It creates a framework in which innovation is embraced and people are encouraged to work and consume (creating a very efficient dynamic for entropy production - literally turning resources into shit.)

If you want a socio-economic system that is less corrupt then you have to work out how to create one that has the benefits of the free market, but without the downsides. That is a hard problem to solve. But I think it is solvable, and so I have spent the last few years working on a new economic platform called Babbling Brook. http://babblingbrook.net

It is not a new economic system in itself. It is a protocol for social networking activity, that is based on an understanding of emergently complex non equilibrium thermodynamics. Which is essentially means it is an open ended platform with built in feedback loops that allow for increasingly complex systems of exchange to emerge.

[kelvin0]

If only Ayn Rand could see what her 'job creators' were up to these days ... LOL

[mariodiana]

If you were at all familiar with her works, I think you would realize that the "Bailout King" and his colleagues would be counted among the villains of her novels -- the "looters."

[quanticle]

I'm not sure that anything in Ayn Rand's novels actually corresponds to the realities of corporate capitalism. I'll take one illustrative example: the discovery of Rearden Metal. In Atlas Shrugged, Rearden Metal is depicted as the product of the lone genius of Hank Rearden, who defied his own corporate scientists and a made a metal that everyone else considered impossible. At the time, Hank Rearden was not a lone inventor working in his garage. He was already a plutocrat, with multiple millions to his name, and a large corporation backing him.

Can you actually think of a case in the real world where that's happened? Where the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation has personally made a breakthrough discovery in his or her field? Of course not. Billion+ dollar companies are crazy complex machines, and our hypothetical CEO has far too much to be doing to be merely mucking around in the lab like a lowly research scientist. He (and I use the masculine deliberately) has a corporation to run. He has decisions to make!

No, the closest thing I can think of to Hank Rearden is Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. Genius CEOs of multi-billion dollar corporations who, by virtue of their sheer brilliance come up with discoveries that all their trained underlings miss, despite having far less time to devote to the topic at hand. And, for that reason, I find Ayn Rand's scenarios to be deeply irrelevant. Her characters, plot, and morality are more suited to comic books than novels. There is no ambivalence, no ambiguity in any of her characters or her situations, and her books turn into thousand page morality plays that one reads without gaining any insight into how one should actually behave in the real world.

To say that a living person corresponds to a character in an Ayn Rand novel is akin to saying that a living oak tree corresponds to a page in a notebook. You can argue that there are commonalities. But the commonalities between living wood and dead paper do more to obscure than clarify. It is the same with comparisons to Ayn Rand characters. At this point, I'm ready to just throw out Ayn Rand analogies altogether in my rhetoric, for they seem to add more heat to the discussion than light.

[kelvin0]

I read Atlas Shrugged, completely. Hated every page. The lack of nuance of her characters, all the good/bad/looter/enlightened. It read like a child's fairytale book, in my opinion ...