First, you bring up religion and I have no idea why.

I do not have an anti-capitalist bias. I have an anti-laissez-faire bias. I also think that there are certain things that the government should provide if at all possible. These things, to me, provide liberty. I understand your argument that taxation is a removal of liberty, and I agree. But I think it's less egregious than the ones caused by poverty. I also think that the benefits from reducing poverty are far greater than the benefits of letting the rich get richer.

First, the idea that government-run business cannot make wealth is absurd. The TVA is a great example. Not only did its direct employment keep people off of welfare, its public works created a huge amount of wealth and laid the groundwork for even more.

Second, you use the loaded term "evil" where I said "amoral". Businesses as entities are amoral. Their sole goal is to profit. They may create wealth as a means or as a side effect, but this is not required by the nature of business. See Enron.

You're going to have to define "crony capitalism" for me.


HAHAhahaHahaha! Haha! HA! Ha.

Oh, wait. You're serious.

Um, you're going to have to provide some evidence that this is the case.


Uh, allow? Now you want the government interfering? What happened to the free market?

The banks aren't stealing your money. It said right in the contract that the depositors signed with the bank that they would leverage your money and that there were risks involved.

Are you saying that the government should actively disallow people from entering into contracts with their bank?


I think your facts about the First Bank are somewhat questionable. The Bank acquired its money by selling $10 million of stock in itself. 20% of that was purchased by the Federal Government using money loaned from the Bank itself. The rest of it was sold to the public, requiring only 25% hard currency, the rest of it fiat, bonds, or whatever. Interestingly, 25% of 80% is 20% of the whole. So what really happened is that the Bank took $2 million in hard currency from the public and immediately loaned it to the Federal Government, while claiming that they still had $8 million, which was all in fiat currency, and then still lent money up to the $10 million total, less the amount loaned to the Federal Government.

How, exactly, does this jibe with your idea of how a bank should work?