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I came across the following video after searching a bit after reading this interview in Mother Jones.
“Deadbeat Nation” sounds like a great name for book. And as it turns out, it is a book. In A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters, William & Mary professor Scott Reynolds Nelson argues that American history consists of a never-ending string of defaults at the individual, municipal, and state levels. Credit bubbles alternately finance transformative policies like westward expansion and infrastructure improvements, and then remake the nation’s political landscape when they invariably pop. Economist Tyler Cowen, in a New York Times Magazinereview last July, needed just one sentence to summarize the book: “We have hardly ever had a well-functioning banking system.”
What this means is that from the very beginning the finances of this country were based on fraud. Watch the video here.
In this he shows how nearly all the financial disasters and crisis can be traced back to bank and financier investments that were dodgy at best and fraudulent at worst. What Nelson I think does not realize is that in this he also shows how capitalism itself is at it’s very core is based on fraud, swindling and corruption. And at the head are the bankers.
I have watched a number of these types of videos and read a number of articles and online books of this sort by various economic and financial historians etc. all with the stated or unstated premiss that there is nothing wrong with capitalism providing it is done honestly.
Then each one without exception goes on to show unequivocally that there is no such thing as honest capitalism. There never has been and probably never will be.
7 Comments
I should have also mentioned that Nelson points out that the banks heavily figured into our political system from the very beginning. With the debates on just how to create money out of thin air.
Mass man must have myths. Ours is the best of all possible frauds.
The early history of the American Republic is replete with land fraud, bank fraud, slave-trading fraud, crop fraud, and every other kind of fraud imaginable at the time.
And people kept falling for it and trying to get rich hoping others would fall for their own versions.
And the beat goes on. What a country!
Thanks for the book reference, cmauk.
@3 OB, I guess there’s a history out there titled something like A Nation of Fools Hoping for Bigger Fools. You could do land fraud each time you got a new wave of immigrants. And bank fraud is almost America’s favorite pasttime. Another biggie is insurance fraud; the money goes in and it never comes out.
… X 2 … like SS?
Well, to this point my experience of Social Security is that the money is coming back out. Now how long the privileged boys and girls in the bubble allow that to continue is something we don’t know yet. But they have the public opinion on record that says “Hell NO!” and they saw some third rail action in the last election. Hope they know how big a crack their ass is in. 401(k)’s are a much better example. And I hear the 401(k) sales folks at “annual enrollment” still start their spiels by telling the lucky workers who qualify for 401(k)s that it’s their best investment because Social Security is uncertain. Marketing in the right hand; lobbying in the left. What a country!
@ ThD @ #6
Seems the real test with SSI has to do with to what lengths WH, Capitol Hill and assorted Saturday Matinee cast of K Street bad guy cut outs will go to not have to redeem U.S.Treasury bonds held by Social Security Insurance.
Is this what Obama WH is trying to do to SSI with Chained CPI proposal — avoid having to pay back UST bonds? Seems likely so.
I was in an employer’s 401K Plan for a few years but when you end up on jobs / employment roller coaster ride like I did the 401K Plan gets lost in the loop-the-loops due to income(s) that barely made / make(s) it possible to keep a key to a door, a roof overhead and an old car on the road.
Like many USians I do not have what my brother who does estate planning work calls ” The Rich Mans Table “. Some days I count(ed) myself lucky to even have a table … ;->
I’m all in favor of increasing the political perils of touching SSI Third Rail by raising the voltage. ;->