Excellent point.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2008/12/sacasa.htm

What we’ve got here is a crisis level failure to exercise due diligence, an excess of trust.

Stop trusting people. Look behind the numbers. Look to the moral end of things, too.

For instance, the company i work for has massive loans from important banks whose names you instantly recognize. They aren’t being bailed out right now. Why? Well, you take the loan my company has: it has what i call an “economic morals clause” in it. It says that if you have any dealings with anyone that is underhanded, they can withdraw the loan and demand immediate repayment. And “underhanded” is as broad as it sounds. You could win a legal case by some trick of law, for instance, and that counts. Why? Because they don’t want to deal with someone who escapes their obligations by trickery.

You cite this as darwinism, but what you forget is that death is as much a part of darwinism as anything else. you do not get giraffes with long necks just because the food is up high, but also because the ones who can’t reach the higher food die more often. You don’t get cheetahs that can run 100 mph just by having fast cheetah genes, but also by weeding out those who are slow.

So a few humans being ruined financially, the economic darwinist version of death, is part of the system. Sucks for them, but it is necessary to preserve the freedom that you sneer on as “darwinism.” There is simply no way to prevent every single economic scandal without eliminating all human freedom. that’s not to say these bad actors shouldn’t go to jail, but we should not squelch freedom so much that it is impossible to committ bad acts, because in the process you will squelch freedom that you and i would care about.

And even then, you probably wouldn’t eliminate corruption. a govt. takeover of the private sector merely means that there will be more —-ing valuable things in the hands of people like Blaggy. Blaggy shows that the government is not the cure of the corruption problem.

Has anyone looked at the final result of the asset stripping of very robust companies with junk bonds? Were there any benefits except to the pirates? What were the costs to the country of losing such great names, now all too often merely rented out to disguise cheap junk from Asia?

It’s all well and good to preach – but a significant portion of the population is not going to care. What then?