Financial topics

[Trevor]

So if those banks are having a difficult time staying alive, how are the countries going to be able to bail them out? That's just going to be an even larger burden on them than what they already have.

[Marc]

You see, perhaps the countries can't do the ultimate bailings-out, but maybe if we eat enough Big Macs or pop enough (legal) pills, we can save the PIIGS, if only temporarily.... —Best regards/Peace, Marc

[Trevor]

Yeah, we'll be able to save them for a short period of time before everything goes down in flames. Hmm, I better start stuffing my money inside a mattress.

[aedens]

Who should be responsible for financial stability at the national level?
" Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil. "
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/ar ... d1978.html

[Higgenbotham]

Who should be responsible for financial stability at the national level?
" Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil. "
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/ar ... d1978.html

Alexander Solzhenistyn's final book: "Currently unavailable"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/5969703729

[OLD1953]

Certainly the law is not above becoming corrupted, but I'd hardly think having no law would be an improvement. If the law and social contract the law implies does not deter greed, then what will? We live in a flawed world with flawed tools, but that hardly means we should throw them down and surrender to fate.

[Higgenbotham]

Certainly the law is not above becoming corrupted, but I'd hardly think having no law would be an improvement. If the law and social contract the law implies does not deter greed, then what will? We live in a flawed world with flawed tools, but that hardly means we should throw them down and surrender to fate.

" Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil. "

I've read a lot of Solzhenitsyn and, if I interpret him correctly, he would be looking at what kinds of social and political arrangements allow the balance to be shifted toward excessive use of law and inappropriate use of the law. In Gulag, Volume I, he has 3 successive chapters - "The Law as a Child", "The Law Becomes a Man", and "The Law Matures".

[Trevor]

sounds like the shysters I know where I live. Granted, not all of them are corrupt, but too damn many of them are.

[Higgenbotham]

There was an official term current then: extrajudicial reprisal
. . . not because there weren't any courts at the time, but because
there was the Cheka. 1 Because it was more efficient. Certainly,
there were courts, and they tried and convicted and executed
people, but we need to remember that, parallel to them and inde-
pendently of them, extrajudicial reprisal went on at the same
time. How can one depict its scale? M. Latsis, in his popular
review of the Cheka's activity, 2 gives us material for only a year
and a half (1918 and half of 1919) and for only twenty provinces
of Central Russia ("The figures presented here are far from com-
plete,"* in part, perhaps, out of modesty): those shot by the
Cheka (i.e., without trial, bypassing the courts) numbered 8,389
persons (eight thousand three hundred and eighty-nine) ; 4 coun-
terrevolutionary organizations uncovered — 412 (a fantastic fig-
ure, in view of our inadequate capacity for organization
throughout our history and also the general isolation of indi-
viduals in those years and the general psychological depression);
the total of those arrested — 87,000 5 (and this figure smells of
understatement).

This is from "The Law as a Child" and he goes further to state that in Tsarist Russia there were concerns about the death penalty but the number of people put to death in Tsarist Russia was less over decades than those executed by the Cheka over an 18 month period.

http://www.archive.org/stream/Gulag_Arc ... o_djvu.txt

[Trevor]

well, trials in the Soviet Union were in name only. People confessed when they were told: "Do it or your entire family will be slaughtered". Course, after they did so, Stalin decided to kill their entire families regardless.