bamatone.net

Original URL: http://bamatone.livejournal.com/291224.html

Caught this on Marketplace on my way home yesterday evening. New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson makes two crucial points that I wish would be stressed to the American public more often.

Capitalism is a system that can benefit the greatest array of people, but it is a system that requires an ethical backdrop, a moral compass.

I think we had a two-pronged failure. First was the failure of people in positions of power to remember that they have a social contract. As you rise in an organization, you have a greater responsibility to do the right thing, to rein in practices, identify practices that are imperiling others. That almost got lost. But the other prong of this failure was the failure of the regulators. These entities, institutions from the highest level down to the very lowest really failed dismally at their jobs. And so you had a combination of failures here that really contributed to this disaster.

Capitalism is supposed to be a system in which there is little government intervention. We are now in a type of system where the state, i.e., the United States of America, has investments in much of the automotive industry, has deployed taxpayer money to enormous financial institutions, a great array of them, so we have a, right now in a position where capitalism is not in its sort of true form operating at all. It's really more the government stepping in. And the unfortunate aspect of that is that what has happened is that the gains that were made by reckless lenders, and people who were not overseen by regulators very closely, those gains have now been turned to losses that the taxpayers have to cover. And that is just anathema to a capitalist.

My point here is that all the anti-capitalists out there... don't hate on capitalism because of what you see going on in the U.S. This is not capitalism. And it's only going to get worse if things keep going the way they are.