Pure Indulgence

Mostly I like to whiz along the information superhighway, short concise comments and even short rambles, but move along and rarely just savor a dialogue, like I was reading it in a good magazine or something.

So long comments, in the heat of the conversation, I’ll read ’em real fast and somtimes, I admit, they’re so good I find myself slowing down and really reading, not just gulping the knowledge offered, as I sometimes gluttonously do.

I know we are in weird, grim times.  And we need to be serious in a way we never thought we’d have to be.

So although this is indulgent, I don’t think it’s harmful to dealing with these grim times, and may even give us more of a wider view than we normally get in our sick culture.

Or I’m just goofing around and want to indulge myself.  Heh.

If you’re still interested, the rest of this indulgence is below.

We see a lot of links here to the talkers of the day, both in the lamestream (h/t Lasthorseman) media and on the blogs.  We’ve been blogging long enough that these big blog talkers (Greenwald, Kos, BTD, Arianna, Marcy Wheeler, Josh Marshall, and any number of others, there’s a whole bunch of famous bloggers now) have gained a certain amount of credentials with some of us.

And of course there are the intelligent bloggers who have completely opposing views and are also big talkers in their circles, with credentials and such, and those bloggers would refer to the ones I’ve listed as anything from bogus to facist.

But it’s the same thing, they’re all bloggers that thousands of people read and many people link to and quote to support their political and cultural views.

This isn’t the first time I’ve quoted the bloggers here at Docudharma.  I wrote a whole front page essay one time just riffing off of Robyn’s essay.

And I do so in the spirit that I think these are big blog talkers, if only because I always make a note to read Robyn and these two characters below.

So of course this is completely subjective.  Thus the pure indulgence.

Here’s two long comments — you can check the whole thread if you like, but these two comments are, to me, an example of great dialogue and not just information, but an exchange of real knowledge.

Without further ado, allow me the pure indulgence of reprinting the entirety of these two comments between buhdydharma and jay elias.

buhdydharma remarks to Jay, in Jay Elias’s Quotes for Discussion: Financial Regulation:

oops

Bad communicating on my part. Mixing in too much philosophy, in a practical discussion.

They/we need regulating, but I don’t mean to say that it is right to regulate them…individual human beings, I mean.  When it comes to the individual, I am as libertarian as you, perhaps. Where we seem to part  is that you see (?) corporations  as extensions of the individual, whereas I see them as an invention to escape personal responsibility, which HAS to be as important as personal freedom.

But we DO have laws to regulate individual behavior. As you no doubt agree, to the point of ridiculousness. Why is the individual regulated more than the corporation?

No man has a right to regulate my freedom, until I impinge on the freedom of another. That’s where it starts getting tricky, lol.

Ideally regulation is balancing the good of the general public (as both an entity and as individuals) against the right to profit. You do not have the right to pollute my water supply for your profit, for instance. Or worse.

Nor do a bunch of individuals have the right, imo and contrary to current law, to come together and form a corporation that dissolves their legal responsibility for the actions they commit, such as fleecing homeowners (as gullible as they may have been) with exploding mortgages, causing them to lose their homes. They have the freedom to do that, does that make it right? If not, who is responsible?

And why should our government bail out “persons” like Bear Stearns, after they and their ilk wrote the bankruptcy laws that prevent individuals getting bailed out? Are corporate persons more privileged than individual person? They are here and now, imo, why?

The excuse is that it is better for “the economy,” ……..so where does that leave the individual. We who have no stake in the game but have to try to navigate our lives through and survive in the face of corporate greed that is immune to the laws that regulate us?  In the face of corporations who the government will protect before protecting the rights of the individual. FISA.

The corporations have rigged the game. They have bought and otherwise subverted The Peoples democracy to serve their own end…..avarice.

Government…democracy, was invented to try to balance all of these rights.

The fact that it as corrupt as the human beings that run it is just the way it is, at least for now. I of course want to change that. The fact that corporations are just as corrupt as human beings is different, in that they, unlike the individual, are not held legally responsible for their actions. I want to change that too.

What it comes down to is balancing rights. Right now, again in imo, the rights of the individual and the corporation are out of balance. When the rights of the individual are pitted against the right of a corporate person, the corporation wins.

I believe the individual is more important than the corporation. I believe individual rights are more important than corporate rights. Corporations don’t. So I believe that corporations need to be regulated to bring that into balance. If it was the other way around, I would push for the rights of (legally responsible, not corporately protected) business.

In a perfect world we would all have the perfect balance of freedom and responsibility. Until we get there we need to keep adjusting with the tools we have to do so.

Sigh, my apologies, this is a sorry mish mash of a comment! I’ll do better next time, lol!

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Jay Elias responds:

OK

Well, I don’t see corporations as “people” – indeed, I’ve long maintained that it is important for us to legislate away corporate personhood.  Arthur Andersen was a real eye-opener for me.  My girlfriend at the time worked there, and I clearly saw how the “company” (AA was actually a partnership) was “convicted” of a crime, but no one was responsible.  All the mid and low-level folks lost their jobs and seniority, all the partners were aggressively recruited by the other big-5 Accounting/Consulting Firms.  They got raises because the company was a “criminal”.

At the same time, corporations are a tool for human persons to amalgamate capital, and as such, the rights of the people who own and run them need to be respected.  I don’t think we can do whatever we want to corporations.  But the corporations don’t have individual rights.

But here is where we cross the line into what the rights of the regulator are.  Some businesses, indeed, some industries, rely on the benefits of their regulators.  Fannie and Freddie are particular exemplars, as Government-Sponsored Entities.  But anyone who has access, for example, to the Fed’s discount window should have to voluntarily accept regulation in order to get it.  Any bank whose accounts are FDIC insured have to submit to its regulation, voluntarily again.  These regulators benefit these firms.  That needs to be a two-way street, or else moral hazard is so high as to be unacceptable.  The current situation is one where the profits are private and the risks are public.  That is morally absurd.

As for the purpose of government, lets not forget that the reason why American (and, for that matter French) democracy exists is because rich white male landowners didn’t want to pay their taxes.  The “People’s Democracy” has always been something of a joke, and the fact is that today is the day when this has been the least so (and tomorrow it will be slightly less of a joke than today, and so on).  It was always a government of the richest first.  The game was invented to be as crooked as a Vegas casino; give it enough time and the house always wins.

What has always been the key to good things happening in America is to simply play without involving the house.  Labor unions were a way of asserting workers’ rights when government wasn’t the least bit interested in doing it.  The Civil Rights movement was the same.  

So, I agree that individual rights matter more than the rights of the corporation, but that the rights of individuals also are far, far greater than the rights of the state.  And part of how the rights of the individual trump those of the state is in the ability to enter into private agreements and contracts, and the state has no right or cause to abridge that.  But to the extent that government presently is involved as a regulator in a fashion that does benefit individuals and/or corporations, it does have rights as a regulator which have import and value as well.  Further, as much as people of like mind to me may want to see a massive deleveraging and contraction of the credit markets, the externality costs of that taking place rapidly and without mechanisms to control those costs are too great to be contemplated.  Bear Stearns deserves to fail, but you and I and everyone else doesn’t deserve to live in the sort of world that would take place if they had.  The proper course right now is to limit the damage and prepare for gradual change.

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So anyway, for a subject I’ve never really found interesting, I found this dialogue to be very interesting and better than anything I’d see on my nonexistent teevee.