rrrrr

[rm]

Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it is:

- a conspiracy
- a fraud
- evil
- out to destroy your way of life

This includes everything from mutual funds to homosexuals.

Thank you.

In fact, I am particularly sick of people ranting about the evils of capitalism not because it's not evil (it's pretty easy to argue that it is) but because they don't understand it. Informed ranting on why capitalism doesn't work (I basically think that all economic systems fail to execute ideally (and and increasingly unideally) as scale increases) is fine. But the paperwork for your 401K being unclear, while an evidence of many things including poor business writing for business people and poor economic education for everyone in general, is not a secret strategy to break the law, defraud you, or enable the overthrow of the U.S. by barbarian hordes.

No wonder I've had a headache for a week.

Comments

[hangedwoman.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, yet another example of, "Gee, it must be so nice to be relieved of the responsibility of actually thinking for yourself."

[warhol.livejournal.com]

I'm an economist, and I'm not exactly sure what "capitalism" is, myself. (It's not a word that we use often.)

I once asked one of my mentors. He said something like, "I think it's when corporations are owned by shareholders." I couldn't see what's so objectionable about that.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Right, exactly. The idea that making money/acruing resources is an activity which one can assign a moral value to drives me nuts. The moral value goes with the "how" or "to what purpose" but has nothing to do with the actual act itself.

[warhol.livejournal.com]

And it's not just the pursuit of money -- capitalism is really about the pursuit of money by anonymous investors unaffiliated with the corporation. Would we really live in a less evil society if Microsoft were owned entirely by Bill Gates and Ford Motors were owned entirely by Henry Ford XVIII? (Or if they were owned by the government, or by the church, or by whatever other entity?)

Dunno. You're exactly right, though, that it's not just the institution itself that's the problem -- it must be some *consequence* of the institution. Is it that corporations neglect the welfare of their workers, because shareholders care only about bottom-line profits? (But why would a sole owner be any more altruistic?)

[rm.livejournal.com]

All of this is 800times more complex than what pissed me off of course. Just the assumption that a Roth IRA is inately a scam by the government to defraud Americans because some paperwork made no clear sense.

[warhol.livejournal.com]

Oh, then again, Roth IRAs *might* in fact be a scam -- but fortunately, things are so complicated that most of us can't figure that out.