The complicit politicians would probably go to prison also as you suggest if they did not have the police, Army, Navy and Air Force behind them. Power corrupts, as the saying goes.

emarine: Please name one wealthy American or send me one statement from a wealthy American "blaming the poor for their problems." In 50 years of reading, listening, watching TV, and meetings attended I have never met anyone who said it (other than generally speaking by a self-professed liberal), never seen a quote from a real live person, or heard one on the radio or TV saying such a thing. I'm not asking for hundreds of examples from Americans "right here" but only asking for one example.

To Liberals and Conservatives the same words have different meanings. Liberals and Conservatives think differently, process concepts differently and arrive at different conclusions. (Parenthetically, lawyers and real estate brokers use words that have different meanings in their trade than what the same words mean to people not in the same businesses, probably the same thing in medicine). There is a free chapter on this at Romancing The Voters.com One reason it is difficult to communicate between Liberals and Conservatives.

Floyd, I thought I wrote this earlier in the office but maybe not. Rabbi Gold ( and others) said. "Who you are screams so loudly I can't hear what you are saying." More in depth is a book, I think the title is: It's not what you say, it's what they hear, Working With Words.

Big Mike: First, how do you get a postage stamp size photo in the left hand column?

2nd, Your remark about the “rules of the game,” I use the follow descriptive analogy to make the point in my book. The rules determine the out come of any contest. For instance, nearly everyone agrees that no woman’s basked ball team can beat the Lakers. Just change one rule however, for a different outcome --- make everyone play in high heels.

3rd, The banks serve as an arm of the federal government to inject money, tax money or otherwise, into the economy. We read that this bank or that bank has just been fined several million dollars by the government. What’s not reported as I understand it is Bank of America or other large banks can borrow say $20 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank at 1/4% interest and invest that same money in U.S. Government Treasuries with the U.S. Treasury Department for 2% or 3% and earn practically an infinite return. Much safer than making loans to strangers. This is ostensibly to enhance bank balance sheets in order to payoff the billions of dollars in failed loans the government (politicians) forced the banks to make to unqualified borrowers. For more on this if you are persistent read the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Report threatening banks and fining them for not making bad loans to unqualified borrowers under nearly zero underwriting requirements. Printing money to pay for ill-conceived government programs and thereby making each dollar in our possession worth less is probably the major way we are manipulated. Sort of like diluting Lemonade with ever more water making it weaker and weaker.

4th, About fiat money an early definitive easy read is Fiat Money Inflation In France by Andrew Dickson White (80 pages). You are right about no fiat currency has survived a currency cycle. For a full elaboration on this read about 66 countries over 800 years that have defaulted, including bank panics, and inflationary spikes in the comprehensive and magisterial, This Time Is Different by Reinhart & Rogoff (486 pages). In each generation and every country it seems there are politicians who say we are smarter, wiser, have better information and our printing money will-nilly “will be different this time.” The conclusion: Over 800 years --- “It’s never different.”

5th, By simply doing the math it is impossible for the U.S. to work its way out of the $90 trillion in unfunded entitlements that politicians of both parties have granted. See report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, by Fisher(?), I think.

6th, The biggest “Unknown known” the collapse of the house of cards --- could come tomorrow or not for 15 more years or when a “Black Swan” event may occur. No one I’ve ever met thought it could last this long without collapsing. The only hope, Milton Friedman thought, was education.

"Where that person is coming from," or as Rabbi Gold once said (and others) who you are screams so loud I can't hear what you are saying.

To all below: Well, some 45 years ago and since I have read some very persuasive tracts about how the U.S. was controlled by the Black Hand Secret Society, and subsequently by the Rothschilds, Bilderbergers, the Rockefellers, The Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Seven Sisters Oil Companies, and most recently by the Catholic Church. Premises are established and them built upon, embellished, and read like a best-selling novel. Once the premise is established, it’s relatively easy to add one non-sequitur after another. The idea almost always is that several people, businesses, or banksters have carved up the world and divided it amongst themselves.

Since I’ve been in numerous committees over the years and saw how difficult it is to get people to agree on anything far less ominous than dividing the world among several people or even several hundred and controlling one country after another, I have become exceedingly skeptical. I remember when Nixon was President, resigned, and the secret tapes were released from the most powerful, knowledgeable, and well-funded security and spy apparatus in history. The most salient fact that came out of the public hearings was that people in the White House in rooms across the hall from each other, six feet away, did not know what the others were doing. (Equivalent to being in the center of Echelon or the NSA).

We may very well be controlled by Great Britain, The IMF, The BIS, and the FED including our country and world, however to what end? Who is the “We”? What means “our country”? “Country,” (like The People, The Public Good, The Public Interest, and Common Good) is an imposter term for ease in communication. It is all-inclusive and means every man, woman and children and everything else within its borders. When we take back our country – from whom – for whom – to what purpose? More specifically, how exactly am I controlled? I buy what I want, from whom I want or abstain from buying, or borrow from a lender/bank or abstain from borrowing. If the banks have all the power attributed to them, why have they allowed interest rates to fall from a high of 18% in the 1970s to under 5% today?

This is not to say that big corporations, banks, and wealthy people don’t have enormous influence upon government and are “Rent Seekers” always looking to advantage themselves over their competition and customers. Even Adam Smith acknowledged this in 1776. Politicians do what politicians have been doing for 3,000 years or more – trading government favors, subsidies, patents, grants, exclusive trading rights, etc., to others for campaign contributions and other emoluments. Not much new under the sun.
For more see free chapters at Romancing The Voters.

Big Mike, It is unclear what you are trying to say. The banks in effect are subsidiaries of the this government, true. Nonetheless we still have the richest poor people in the world, in fact, richer than nearly all kings and queens, princes and potentates of just 150 years ago. Furthermore, most "big businessmen" are not capitalists nor defenders of capitalism. See: Romancing The Voters Chapter 15, or "Can Capitalism Survive" by Ben Rogge.

You are correct in much of what you write and undoubtedly you know, except for Hamilton most of the founders were opposed to a national (or central) bank and opposed to paper money. It's is pretty well documented that the Federal Reserve took a typical business cycle downturn and turned it into the Great Depression. A Central Bank is not an integral part of Capitalism (unless it is private as F.A. Hayek advocated). Murray Rothbard has explained how The Federal Reserve causes booms and busts and Milton Friedman describe how the Federal Reserve accentuated the Great Depression by reducing the money supply by about 1/3. After all is said and done the "Haves" have a lot but so do the "Have Nots" have a lot --- under our system. For everyone to be equal in poverty is not something that should be advocated.

Emarine, you write, “Anything that redistributes something from one to another is a form of socialism.... The US Military... The US Government.... State and local Government...police...fire... “The poor did not ruin America no matter how many times the wealthy want to say it.

You seem to confuse the Bureaucratic Management of certain functions of government under Capitalism (Free Enterprise) with Socialism. The reason people form governments is to protect citizens against the law of the jungle, protect them from the biggest and the baddest in any society. Government is indispensable in enabling a capitalistic society to function. Under Capitalism, it is government’s fundamental obligation to protect the people from predators, both foreign and domestic, protect private property, and to invoke a common system of justice to prevent never ending revenge killings, e.g., the Hatfields & McCoys, Sunni & Shia, etc.

Socialism is the full government control of the economic factors of production, land, labor and capital. An offshoot, The Welfare State distributes the proceeds derived from the factors of production.

Please name one wealthy American, that has said the “The poor ruined America.” Since America is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world and has the richest poor people in the world you should be able to name hundreds of people who have said “the poor ruined America” if you want to maintain any semblance of credibility.

emarine via Floyd Brown, please name the good things about Socialism. My wife lived in the USSR for 35 years and yes health care with sterile water was free, however is you wanted medicine you had to pay extra "Na Leva" (under the table). Sweden until the 1950s had one of the world’s fastest growing economies. It tried Socialism and became a basket case. Since eschewing Socialism it is today once again among the strongest economies in Europe.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704698004576104023432243468#printMode

Big Mike, "Capitalism works despite human nature to a point?" The typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. In a little more than 200 years since the Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalism (another word for savings invested), poverty has so diminished that world population this year will reach 7 billion — an impossible feat if the world’s poor weren’t getting richer.

Since 1800, per capita income has skyrocketed 10-fold, freeing billions from dependency on their rulers or their governments. Capitalism inherited poverty, began overcoming it and must still fight it every day (just read this blogs pejorative comments about capitalism) because wealth must be created every day. Marxists at first complained that capitalism kept the poor both hungry and poor. Now they complain capitalism makes poor people fat.

If you need proof that poor people around the world are getting richer through capitalism (even minimally practiced), you need only look at world population. World population is now 7 billion, it took until 1800 for world population to reach 1 billion people, as starvation, slavery and early death prevented advancement. Three cheer for CAPITALISM & FREEDOM.

Chris, you alluded to it but did not emphasize it. "Wealth is not distributed --- it is earned." People are equal under the law but not necessarily under all other circumstances. There millions of people who can run faster than me, jump higher, taller, slimmer, better at math and better at anticipating the future and making more money than am I. Equal under the law yes, with no American required to bow down and kiss the shoes of even the richest among us. Those who think capitalism is unfair merely are advocating a kleptocracy in place of the "free market," where there is, as Leonard Read asseverated, "A wisdom a trillion times greater than any discrete group of men (or women)." Those who advocate more fairness really mean more "theft," with them being the arbiters (usually involving for them a handling charge).

It is clear whoever you are citing has no understanding of Capitalism other than consciously or unconsciously from a Marxist point of view. You write, "The flaw of cap­i­tal­ism is greed & nar­cis­sism (cap­i­tal­ism rewards greed, as long as you are not caught)."

Greed and narcissism has nothing to do with capitalism. Greed and narcissism are indeed human frailties. However, Capitalism is a system of social cooperation based on voluntary exchange. Voluntary exchange does not take place unless all parties feel in their own subjective minds (even if not the optimum) that they are better off after the exchange. This is why Capitalism is the only moral economic system ever devised. Under Capitalism consumers determine what is to be produced in what quantities and qualities, through their buying or abstention from buying. In several books and articles, Ludwig von Mises explains it in greater detail that is easy to understand.

It's important to understand that all hyphenated forms of Capitalism such as Crony-capitalism are merely extensions of Socialism with Capitalism used in a pejorative manner.

Ludwig von Mises expresses it best in Bureaucracy (short and downloadable from Mises Institute). Capitalism or market economy is that system of social cooperation and division of labor that is bases on private ownership of the means of production. The material factors of production are owned by the individual citizens, the capitalists and the landowners, etc. etc. (page 20). For further elaboration see: Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand.