[Red Slinger]

We can blame the banks, bankers, lobbyists, politicians and lawyers all we want but they are not the root cause of this collapse or what, I'd agree, is becoming more and more a plutocracy.

There are generally two types of large corporations. There are publically held companies with shareholders that are able to buy a little piece of the company and get their share of the profits as the company profits. There are also privately owned companies held by one or more individuals that do not offer share equities. Koch Industries is a prominent example of the latter. For a company like Koch, their direct interests lie in the company making money so of course they want to tilt the playing field in their favour whenever possible to maximize their profits. For a publically traded company the shareholders would give birth to kittens if the company didn't regularly turn more and more profit each year and thereby secure them a small personal profit.

The common denominator to both of these scenarios is that of unlimited greed. I don't think greed is necessarily a bad thing, in and of itself. Healthy greed I compare to a trait like ambition. When there is no ceiling on the greed is when you have issues like the financial collapse. Most of us (certainly I am) are guilty of unlimited greed. I want more and more and more and there really is no end in sight. I want a bigger house, better car, vacation whenever I want, eat what I want, dress in the finest clothes, etc. It's a gluttony of monumental proportions. Before the invent of currency there was a natural limit on greed. If you wanted to have food you could only have enough before it spoiled. Anything beyond that was wasted. Now, there are no natural limits on our greed because everything we could ever dream of fits nicely in a thin plastic card easily carried in your back pocket and difficult to steal or lose.

The foundation for how we live our lives is based on the same unlimited greed as that which drove Goldmann Sachs to become the financial arm of the US government. It is the government's job to put controls in place so that one person's (or company's) greed doesn't negatively impact too many other people but there is really no definition as to how much is too much. If Goldmann Sachs had screwed over 1000 people would anyone really care much? What about 10000? 100000? In this case it was millions (possibly billions) of people that were directly affected by the financial meltdown. The point is that even if the government legislates to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, a similar scenario will play out again because the market is still based on winning and losing and winners are celebrated and losers generally ignored and forgotten. Those that want to win will find a way. The market is not now nor ever has been about doing what is right or fair. It has never been about ceilings. It has never been about limits. The market is the serpent swallowing it's tail.

Our way of life is unsustainable.