I do not want to be dishonest when I comment. A large portion of the motivation for me replying was the emotional distaste I got from reading your argument, and I didn't want to deny it as a bias by pretending to some kind of intellectual distance and objectivity.
Fair enough, but both sides can play the "armed thugs" card, and then we wind up in a "screw the man!!!! the government is just thugs with guns!" "no dude screw the corporations!!! the banks is just thugs with guns!!!" discussion... which is bad.
You can characterize any political position you don't like with emotional language, but it makes it harder to get to truth. You did write some really good points, that's why I thought it was a shame that the emotional language comes in... it's possible to do without it.
Most people feel emotionally about their politics, but emotional language rallies your side at the expense of alienating the other side, and then discussion breaks down.
This subthread is unfortunately meta; I guess all I want to add is that I felt that your comment relied for much of its force on a rhetorical and psychological trick of associating the banking relationship with the relationship one might have with a doctor or one's spouse. I really do think banks gain a kind of veneer of respectability from their proximity to money, rather than an intrinsic worth in what they do. But scratch the surface, and atavistic greed oozes out.
I'm actually enjoying the meta discussion, learning from it. It feels like the ol' days a little bit, when people had nuanced civil disagreements on here commonly.
As for rhetoric, I didn't come up with the idea that your relationship with your banker should be private - that's actually how it worked in classical banking. Switzerland inherited it because they've had the longest continuous government in the world - it dates back to the Middle Ages.
The idea today that your banker and you don't have a relationship like your lawyer and you... honestly, I think classical banking is far more of an honest profession than modern law, but I'm not a huge fan of modern banking either.
I do understand resentment towards some of the financial engineering that occurred in the past fifteen years, especially in areas of exotic securitization in which systemic risks were made opaque.
But that has very little to do with classical banking. To say they have little intrinsic worth is essentially to claim that the industry that governs the allocation of credit in our economy -- that is, the credit line that finances my business's inventory and receivables, the loan that finances my new production equipment, the reasonable mortgage extended so a homeowner can buy a house, along with a substantial downpayment -- is of little use. That's an absurd position, and I don't know how one can reasonably claim that such an important function in our economy is not a respectable profession. My own company, which employs over 100 people, would immediately shut down without bank financing.
Are you confusing the practices of exotic finance, which arguably have a lesser or questionable value to society, with traditional banking?
> But that has very little to do with classical banking
I don't think anybody here is against that. I do recall that not too recently some not so classical banking organizations received billions upon billions of public funds to rescue them from their mistakes.
"What can government do? The sad answer is -- under the current monetary system -- nothing. It's not going to get better until the root of the problem is understood and addressed. There isn't enough stimulus money in the entire world to get us out of this hole.
"Why? Debt. The national debt is just like our consumer debt -- it's the interest that's killing us.
"Though most people don't realize it the government can't just issue it's own money anymore. It used to be that way. The King could just issue stuff called money. Abraham Lincoln did it to win the Civil War.
"No, today, in our crazy money system, the government has to borrow our money into existence and then pay interest on it. That's why they call it the National Debt. All our money is created out of debt. Politicians who focus on reducing the National Debt as an answer probably don't know what the National Debt really is. To reduce the National Debt would be to reduce our money -- and there's already too little of that.
"No, you have to go deeper. You have to get at the root of this problem or we're never going to fix this. The solution isn't new or radical. America used to do it. Politicians used to fight with big bankers over it. It's all in our history -- now sadly -- in the distant past.
"But why can't we just do it again? Why can't we just issue our own money, debt free? That, my friends, is the answer. Talk about reform! That's the only reform that will make a huge difference to everyone's life -- even worldwide.
"The solution is the secret that's been hidden from us for just over 100 years -- ever since the time when author L. Frank Baum wrote "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."
