Hah. This should cause quite a stir this week. Evidently it was decided to close out Bear Stearns before the markets open on Monday. Whether this will "help" or not remains to be seen. In any event, it buys just a wee bit more time, on the order of a day or two, for certain entities to get out of certain markets before the other shoe drops.

If only the honest were permitted in government, then it would effectively amount to a dictatorship over the criminally-inclined members of society, by the honest. As everyone knows, dictatorships aren't fair or nice, and honest people like to be thought of as being fair or nice or both.

However, dictatorship by the criminals over the honest is permissible, because, well... they're criminals and aren't fair or nice. So, they're allowed to do it. Typically, there are two types of people in the world: 1) producers; and 2) non-producers. Government, according to some theories,produces essentially nothing, which makes its members non-producers. When non-producers rule the producers, deriving wealth form them, it's essentially theft of services / labor, which is slavery.

In a dictatorship such as the Soviet style, there are fewer thieves and they're less concerned with putting up phony appearances, such as liberty, freedom etc. as marketing points. The Soviet is more honest - it tells the truth openly that society is a dictatorship instead of making up appearances. In a representative repblic or democracy, there are more thives than in the Soviet, and they therefore represent society more closely. The form of thievery you get, depends on the strenght and coyness of the predominant group of thieves.

Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with thievery, excepting it being illegal in legal theory, and often enforced, depending on the station / social status of the individual(s) charged. But thievery was a way of life for many, including the Scottish Border Reivers (gaggle it), until the thief James VI came along after Elizabeth died and was made James I of the united crown, and drove out the Border Reivers into a diaspora, stealing their lands, which event was largely instrumental in colonizing the new world under a fairly honest system, until the thieves were again able to catch up.

If anything's to blame for America, it's the thievery of James I.

Regardless of appearances, the world's economies eventually all reach a point where they are run on thievery, till there is nothing left to steal, then the system in place implodes, and the thieves begin stealing from one another.


http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_f...