Hello John, Dave T. and all in this thread, [John said] > I think a key element of this protestant ethic was an internalized > moral > code that made bankruptcy unthinkable and honesty and trust in > contractual > dealings and fairness. Those things made capitalism successful more > than > any inherent "god rewards faithfulness with wealth" type of ideological > shift.
I agree! My son and I were having this conversation just today. He said the world runs on money, and I said no, the world runs on trust. The money's no good if we can't trust that it's worth what we think it is. It would be hard to do most transactions if you could not trust the other side to do what they say they will do. We would be reduced to those movie scenes where the buyer and the drug dealer each slide their packages simultaneously across the ground at gunpoint. After watching recent economic events, it seems pretty clear to me that was the first domino. The big banks violated the public trust. Ordinary people did not break the trust, bankers and traders did. Now I think we are seeing the inevitable backlash. Mortgagees are asking themselves why they should continue to honor a contract that was essentially an inflated mortgage based on an inflated house price. If the banks are too big to fail, that seems to have turned out to mean that individuals are too small to succeed. In my mind, this is just one in a whole set of things that are happening because corporate regulation has been relaxed to the point where they are allowed the freedom to operate in any way they see fit to increase their stock price. I do not think the government is the enemy, but corporate greed is, and the government is the only tool we have to limit it. Is it lost on anyone that health insurance providers in the US just reported record-breaking annual profits? We can't reasonably expect them to regulate themselves, but we can reasonably expect government to do so on our behalf. Mary - The most important thing you will ever make is a realization. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
