Thomas Sowell appreciation thread

High Revolutionary · July 2012

Born: June 30, 1930, Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author. A National Humanities Medal winner, he advocates laissez-faire economics and writes from a conservative and libertarian perspective.

I've already ordered his book 'Basic Economics'. There aren't too many out there like him left.

bambu · July 2012

Good drop.....

But I disagree with the notion that whites care less about race than money.....

Partially true. However, I think that some will undoubtedly go against their own interests in order to advance that agenda.....

Found Economic Facts and Fallacies on Scribd....

http://www.scribd.com/doc/45894140/Economic-Facts-and-Fallacies

HOTEP.....

God-I_Am_Ether · July 2012

Good shot. I like his views on welfare.

White people that are in power careless about race. We must separate that. All white people aren't the same just as all black people aren't the same.

jono · August 2012

Anyone who promotes "laissez faire capitalism" shouldn't have an appreciation thread...jussayin.

High Revolutionary · August 2012

jono wrote: »

Anyone who promotes "laissez faire capitalism" shouldn't have an appreciation thread...jussayin.

What's so bad about laissez faire capitalism?

jono · August 2012

There's very little good about it, in fact I can't think of anything good about it at the moment.

High Revolutionary · August 2012

So being able to make business decisions without government interference is a bad thing?

I can tell you right now what's going on in America right now is very very far from laissez faire capitalism, and many people are projecting a total collapse of the dollar within the next couple of decades if not much sooner. You have keynesian economics to thank for that.

jono · August 2012

You have deregulation of markets to thank for that. It would be worse if there weren't any oversight whatsoever.

High Revolutionary · August 2012

And the government then bailed out the banks thus exacerbating the situation.

In a [truly]free market those banks would have failed like they should have.

jono · August 2012

True, they shouldn't have bailed them out but it was the banks they put themselves in that position with their rapacious habits, said habits existed because the rules were lifted.

High Revolutionary · August 2012

The deregulation wasn't the problem. The problem was the bailout. It set a very bad precedent. I wouldn't even be surprised if the banks deliberately did what they did knowing the government would bail them out.

Also all the people who took out those loans weren't completely innocent either.

jono · August 2012

Deregulation let it happen, when regulation was in place there was no tanking. Not 10 years after deregulation they fall apart. And of course they knew they could get bailouts, they have operatives in the government (all levels) and an army of lobbyists.

waterproof · August 2012

GREAT DROP and i am getting to his books as we speak in which is down the line..... he is one of the few conservative intellect brothers that i study and read.

I take the best from Conservative and so-called Liberal brothers and use the best. Cornell West said it best in RACE MATTERS that we should as a people not be with a one party but take the best from the both personally as a Moderate Independent i think it's the best.

Imagine if BOOKER T WASHINGTON AND WEB DUBOIS came together with their views as i think Booker T Washington was right that we need to start owing our own schools, jobs, and get in with trade and commerce of our own first before going to those who hold us down.

this will be discuss later in my BOOKER T and WEB DUBOIS thread but THOMAS SOWELL is from the school of Booker T and i think he needs to be studied more

High Revolutionary · August 2012

jono wrote: »

Deregulation let it happen, when regulation was in place there was no tanking. Not 10 years after deregulation they fall apart. And of course they knew they could get bailouts, they have operatives in the government (all levels) and an army of lobbyists.

And none of this would have happened under laissez faire capitalism.

jono · August 2012

Lol if you say so...

High Revolutionary · August 2012

I understand I may have made a leap in logic, but if we are too agree that government intervention is partly responsible for the biggest US financial crisis since the Great Depression (which the government is also responsible for) than how is scaling back government meddling a bad thing?

jono · August 2012

The lack of government intervention is what caused this meltdown. Like I said there wasn't a meltdown before regulation was taken away.

And Step · August 2012

Economist attempt to tell what will or has happened. The people they work for make things happen.

I would rather be in the latter group.

And Step · August 2012

Why try to act like this man is anything but an ideological hack committed to promoting the agenda of conservative corporate interest and think tanks?

High Revolutionary · August 2012

And Step wrote: »

Economist attempt to tell what will or has happened. The people they work for make things happen.

I would rather be in the latter group.

So you'd rather work for the federal reserve?

And Step wrote: »

Why try to act like this man is anything but an ideological hack committed to promoting the agenda of conservative corporate interest and think tanks?

What exactly makes him a hack? Cite something specific.

High Revolutionary · August 2012

jono wrote: »

The lack of government intervention is what caused this meltdown. Like I said there wasn't a meltdown before regulation was taken away.

Some food for thought:

The simple fact is that the Great Recession was caused solely by irresponsible welfare policies of Washington. These welfare policies specifically targeted homeowners and banks. Undeterred by the dot.com bubble and ultimate crash he caused in the 1990s, Alan Greenspan kept interest rates too low for too long again in the early 2000s after 911. At the same time, President Bush stated that he was about to "use the mighty muscle of the federal government" to make homeownership more available for more Americans. He got Congress to spend up to $200 million a year to assist first-time homebuyers with down payments. He pressured mortgage lenders to make sub-prime loans because "Corporate America has a responsibility to work to make America a compassionate place." Lastly, he caused immense moral hazard by getting Fannie and Freddie to guarantee all the junk loans being made, again to the tune of potentially $1trillion.

The banksters that closed the deals all along the financial food chain knew that if their get-rich quick scheme ever failed, Alan Greenspan and his Fed and the full financial resources of Uncle Sam would be there to catch their fall. This precedent was set in the 1930s with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the savings and loan bailout of the 1980s, and as recently as 1998 when Greenspan's Fed bailed out hedge fund Long-Term Capital management. Sure enough, the banksters were correct as Greenspan's protégé Ben Bernanke and treasury secretary Hank Paulson frightened Congress into appropriating over $800 billion toward the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Deregulation did not Cause Financial Crisis, Welfare Did

jono · August 2012

I don't find it difficult to understand why you (and those of your ilk now throw him under the bus.
I love how people speak of "the government" as a single monolith as if it isn't a collection of individuals, and there are plenty of individuals that agree with your ideology (such as Greenspan and others).

However:

"The populist theory for the crash is that it was
caused by greedy, reckless, stupid bankers and
homebuyers," Posner began. "But I don't think we
can understand the crisis without understanding
the monetary policy created by Alan Greenspan."
"Excessive deregulation and a lack of enforcement
of the existing regulations are a cause," he
continued. "But so are mistakes by Congress."
The judge began by explaining how Greenspan's
lowering and holding interest rates overstimulated
the economy, which led to excessive credit and a
resulting rise in housing prices. All these together
led to a housing and credit bubble that ultimately
burst. Credit froze, which means the economy froze,
and the government was forced to step in.
"The regulation for banking has to be stricter than it
is for other industries," Posner explained. "And this
is where I have changed my opinion."
The judge went on to explain that for years he
supported deregulating the banking industry,
without adequately realizing that the consequences
of its failure are enormously more far-reaching than
for any other industry. While the airline industry, for
example, can become deregulated, risky, and
eventually broke, its bankruptcy, unlike that of the
banking industry, cannot bring down the entire
economy. "The riskiness of banking has
microeconomic significance," Posner went on.
"Everything in business is geared to the availability of
credit, and if the banking industry falls apart, credit
goes away, and the economy can grind to a halt.
Deregulation went too far in the financial sector,"
Posner emphasized, "because financial
bankruptcies created externalities that other
industries do not."

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/node/3671

Let's not stop there:

But Obama and the left are
wrong; repeal of Glass/Steagall did not cause the
current financial crisis. � In the first place, as Conn
Carroll of the Heritage Foundation has pointed out,
Glass/Steagall was "steadily weakened" from the
1970s on by the "complex new financial reality" of
the times and by waivers from regulators that made
mergers routine - the 1998 merger between
Travelers and Citigroup essentially repealed the law
once and for all. � Thus, the erosion of the law
over 30 some years without any major financial
crisis is an indication that the ultimate repeal of
what was left of the law in 1999 did not cause the
troubles of today.

^ From your source

This also doesn't prove deregulation wasn't the cause, its more of an argument of why deregulation took place.

That's like saying because people run red lights that we shouldn't have red lights. All they proved is that the industry has the ability to bully and or influence the government.

Continuing with that analogy, you can run read lights without accident, hell there may be 200-2,000 people running red lights without accident but that still doesn't mean that running red lights doesn't cause accidents.

"You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others," said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the committee. "Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?"

Mr. Greenspan conceded: "Yes, I've found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I've been very distressed by that fact."

On a day that brought more bad news about rising home foreclosures and slumping employment, Mr. [U[Greenspan refused to accept blame for the crisis but acknowledged that his belief in deregulation had been shaken.[/U]

He noted that the immense and largely unregulated business of spreading financial risk widely, through the use of exotic financial instruments called derivatives, had gotten out of control and had added to the havoc of today's crisis. As far back as 1994, Mr. Greenspan staunchly and successfully opposed tougher regulation on derivatives.

But on Thursday, he agreed that the multitrillion-dollar market for credit default swaps, instruments originally created to insure bond investors against the risk of default, needed to be restrained.

"This modern risk-management paradigm held sway for decades," he said. "The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year."

Mr. Waxman noted that the Fed chairman had been one of the nation's leading voices for deregulation, displaying past statements in which Mr. Greenspan had argued that government regulators were no better than markets at imposing discipline.

"Were you wrong?" Mr. Waxman asked.

"Partially," the former Fed chairman reluctantly answered, before trying to parse his concession as thinly as possible.

Mr. Greenspan, celebrated as the "Maestro" in a book about him by Bob Woodward, presided over the Fed for 18 years before he stepped down in January 2006. He steered the economy through one of the longest booms in history, while also presiding over a period of declining inflation.

But as the Fed slashed interest rates to nearly record lows from 2001 until mid-2004, housing prices climbed far faster than inflation or household income year after year. By 2004, a growing number of economists were warning that a speculative bubble in home prices and home construction was under way, which posed the risk of a housing bust.

Mr. Greenspan brushed aside worries about a potential bubble, arguing that housing prices had never endured a nationwide decline and that a bust was highly unlikely.

Mr. Greenspan, along with most other banking regulators in Washington, also resisted calls for tighter regulation of subprime mortgages and other high-risk exotic mortgages that allowed people to borrow far more than they could afford.

The Federal Reserve had broad authority to prohibit deceptive lending practices under a 1994 law called the Home Owner Equity Protection Act . But it took little action during the long housing boom, and fewer than 1 percent of all mortgages were subjected to restrictions under that law.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.xml

Not enforcing the law is the same as it not existing.

Greenspan is one of YOUR guys. He believes the same shit you believe, but because he was forced to accept his failures he is now becoming a part of this evil "government" monolith... he's being disavowed, what is this Mission Impossible?

He refused to do his job because he believes what you believe. He believes the industry can regulate itself, but as we've seen, they cannot.

jono · August 2012

Just for kicks I looked into that merger the author of your source mention and not to my surprise it turned into a horrific deal

Let's take a look at the reaction and the interesting things said in 1998:

But there are some major hurdles to be cleared.
Travelers said it would apply to the Federal Reserve
Board to become a bank holding company. Current
law would require it to get rid of some of its
nonbanking holdings. In recent years, however,
there has been much erosion of legislation
designed to separate the banking and securities
industries.
A key goal of the combination, John Reed, the
Citicorp chairman, said at a news conference, would
be to make investment products such as stocks and
bonds available to middle-class customers around
the world. Citicorp has built a global retail franchise
alongside its worldwide corporate banking
business, while Travelers is an investment and
insurance conglomerate that last year bought
Salomon Brothers Inc. to add to its Smith Barney
brokerage operations.
"We like the deal," said Tim Ghriskey, portfolio
manager of the Dreyfus Fund, which has stakes in
Citicorp and Travelers. "They are combining a
largely wholesale and a largely retail operation with
numerous cross-selling opportunities."
Sanford Weill, the Travelers chairman, said he
expected the Fed to quickly approve his company's
application to become a bank holding company
and added: "I don't think we have to spin anything
off to make this happen."

www.nytimes.com/1998/04/07/news/07iht-citi.t.html

Of course not you-know-who was in charge...

10 years later...2008:

That day, at 7:41 in the morning, Mr. Weill unveiled
the megamerger that created Citigroup, the biggest
financial services company the world had ever seen.
The deal — as daring and brazen as the man
himself — tore up a crucial chapter of the legal
canon that had guided American banking since the
Depression.
The rest is history — but not the history that
Citigroup hoped for. A decade later, Mr. Weill’s
watershed deal is regarded by some as one of the
worst mergers of all time.
Today, the behemoth formed by the union of
Citicorp and Travelers seems to lumber from one
crisis to another. Bloated costs, outmoded
technology and political infighting have hobbled the
giant company, which employs 374,000 people in
more than 100 countries.

Whoaaaaa. That's juicy, so your author uses one of the "worse mergers in history" as a reason why regulation wasn't needed? Jeez.

Whatever happens at Citigroup, the aftershocks of
the 1998 Citicorp-Travelers merger are still
reverberating through the financial system. The
deal paved the way for the repeal of the Glass-
Steagall Act of 1933, the law that separated
investment banks, which underwrite securities, and
commercial banks, which accept deposits and make
loans.
The end of Glass-Steagall ushered in an era of
consolidation and integration within the financial
services industry, with mixed results. Mergers
between Wall Street and Main Street banks helped
American institutions compete with foreign rivals.
But the deals also fostered some of the financial
innovations that many say contributed to the
subprime mortgage crisis. The Bush
administration’s plan to remodel the system
regulating the financial industry has rekindled the
debate over the government’s role in the markets.

www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/business/03citi.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Hmmmmm....

redhandedbandit · August 2012

asking the corporations and wall street to regulate themselves is like asking wolves to watch youre sheep

redhandedbandit · August 2012

High Revolutionary wrote: »

I understand I may have made a leap in logic, but if we are too agree that government intervention is partly responsible for the biggest US financial crisis since the Great Depression (which the government is also responsible for) than how is scaling back government meddling a bad thing?

how wasgovt responsible for the first great depression

High Revolutionary · August 2012

@jono

I never really cared for the tit for tat back and forth argumentative style so prevalent on internet forums so I'll just say this:

Alan Greenspan may spout libertarian-esque rhetoric, or quote Ayn Rand from time to time, but the fact that he was chairman of the Federal Reserve, a private institution that has a monopoly on the production of US currency pretty much ousts him as an imposter and proves he doesn't actually believe what he says. He's like the Creflo Dollar of economists. Politicians use this tactic often, they'll claim they hold certain beliefs and blatantly contradict them.

The reality of it all is we haven't lived in a truly free market in decades, if ever, so you using an incident of deregulation as a sleight against free market capitalism is fallacious. It wasn't free-market capitalism, it was a controlled market with some deregulation sprinkled in.

On top of all that earlier you said something even I didn't claim which was that the government was conspiring with the bankers and had allies at all levels within the government, so based off of this wouldn't it be logically sound to curtail some of the governments power? It's like the government is a fighter jet and the bankers, corporations, etc. are the pilots, why would you keep on upgrading the jets hardware?

redhandedbandit wrote: »

High Revolutionary wrote: »

I understand I may have made a leap in logic, but if we are too agree that government intervention is partly responsible for the biggest US financial crisis since the Great Depression (which the government is also responsible for) than how is scaling back government meddling a bad thing?

how wasgovt responsible for the first great depression

Well it wasn't the government directly but they allowed the FED to play hungry, hungry hippos with the US economy.

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