Here is a short quiz to find out your political leanings:
http://www.theadvocates.org/quizp/index.html.
Apparently I am all libertarian. I’m not active politically, but I do have
opinions (http://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/11/normal-0-false-false-false-en-ca-x-none.html).
Some people lament the gap between rich and poor that
seems to be perpetuated multi-generationally within a free market
economy. This does happen, but in an economy that has the illusion
of being a free market. It is, in fact, government intervention that
facilitates this phenomenon, and it is in the form of laws allowing the set-up
and protection of trusts and limited liability companies. The limited
liability company is a fiction, a holdover from the Babylonian system of Rome,
that allows someone to shelter his assets from his actions. Trust law
arose in England I think and provides a mechanism which, together with the
corporation, allow someone to receive the rewards of doing business without the
normal and natural risks.
The natural life cycle of family wealth seems to be that one generation makes it, the next generation maintains it and the third generation loses it. Not so with effective corporation and trust planning. This is only possible because governments have intervened to prevent natural consequences.
No, the market is not as free as our illusions of it portray. We still suffer from feudalism. Briefly (I hope): civilization developed feudally, and this involved powerful men (in Nimrod style) exercising their whims upon their "inferiors", but the trend (politically at least) is for feudalism to disappear. As a young man, while the western world shivered at what they thought was the spread of communism, I was not concerned because I saw (courtesy of Howard Katz) that communism was feudalism by another name and that when a country went communist, thus creating the impression of a spread, it was not an advance at all but simply feudalism putting on a new garment, and I knew that since feudalism was on the wane, communism would have to disappear (unless the centuries old trend somehow reversed, which was unlikely because a trend in motion continues until it stops). We have many families who have held their wealth because of feudalistic holdovers. For example, the Windsors of England. Could their matriarch really own all the swans in that nation in a truly free market?
The natural life cycle of family wealth seems to be that one generation makes it, the next generation maintains it and the third generation loses it. Not so with effective corporation and trust planning. This is only possible because governments have intervened to prevent natural consequences.
No, the market is not as free as our illusions of it portray. We still suffer from feudalism. Briefly (I hope): civilization developed feudally, and this involved powerful men (in Nimrod style) exercising their whims upon their "inferiors", but the trend (politically at least) is for feudalism to disappear. As a young man, while the western world shivered at what they thought was the spread of communism, I was not concerned because I saw (courtesy of Howard Katz) that communism was feudalism by another name and that when a country went communist, thus creating the impression of a spread, it was not an advance at all but simply feudalism putting on a new garment, and I knew that since feudalism was on the wane, communism would have to disappear (unless the centuries old trend somehow reversed, which was unlikely because a trend in motion continues until it stops). We have many families who have held their wealth because of feudalistic holdovers. For example, the Windsors of England. Could their matriarch really own all the swans in that nation in a truly free market?
Corporations should not be allowed limited liability. People
should be responsible for their mistakes and to their creditors. We rightly
have bankruptcy laws to wipe the slate clean when needed. Eliminating limited
liability would close the wealth gap by a long way.
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