Ozandy

When you talk about the recent example, I am assuming that you are referring to the sub-prime crisis.

The subprime crisis started from the lending to people who are "sub prime" ie people who might not be able to repay, people who might have borrowed too much and did not have enough collateral.

But greedy people are greedy by nature, why would they lend to people who cannot repay?

The answer is that the US congress asks the bank to lend to minorities, and sub-prime individual. This is done to enable the poor, who does not have a mean to repay to own their own borrowing. This crisis was actually caused by the US government helping the poor, in the utopia you wanted.

The easiest thing is to blame the “rich people” but these people are not in the business of losing money. The subprime crisis was caused by the US democrate “do gooders” Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton. And through lack of regulation, greedy people found a way to make lots of money by lending out the money of the Rich. The US Government will now be left to foot the bill.

Yes helping the poor to have the minimal is beneficial in society. However, incentive must be given for them to aspire. Just giving them accomodation like what they did in America, will destroy a country. Which is what you are advocating.

Communism failed because since everyone earn a similar wage, there is no incentive to work harder. Since there is significant redistribution of income, the highest paid became the tax collectors, who can make a good living through bribery etc. Therefore the system stagnate and the wrong thing get rewarded. Any system that does not reward hard work/innovation... greed if you want to call that will always fail

A basic wage to assure that no one starves and a top wage to assure that no one wastes are the only conditions under which mother Earth can afford humanity

Dr Tomlinson completely skips over the reasons for the rise of economic rationalism - Keynesianism failed. It failed in the Great Depression in the US, it failed in the 1970s throughout the First World, and it spectacularly failed in Japan in the 1990s.

Amusingly, for all those interested in a guaranteed minimum income for everyone, the only party in Australia advocating such a thing are the Liberal Democrats (LDP), a moderate libertarian party who stand opposed to basically everything else Dr Tomlinson proposes. The LDP suggests a negative income tax to replace our current tax-and-welfare system, where everyone is guaranteed $9,000 a year if they earn nothing. And that's without mutual obligation, Centrelink hoops to jump through, etc. It's achieved by having a tax-free threshold of $30,000, and a flat tax of 30% above that and negative tax of 30% below.

I guess the old commie should vote LDP next time ;-)

Milton Friedman, the market economist, whose economics inspired the fiscal policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan advocated a negative income tax so people could be assured a basic income. This was consistent with his market economics since government would not be intrusive in any way to determine how the money was spent or who got it. The only determining factor was the person's income. I think it's a great idea. Apparently, some are so afraid of seeing that poor people are helped out that they yell 'communist' at any attempt to see that the poor don't live in misery. The most successful capitalist countries which have the highest standard of living and are the most productive of goods and services are the Scandinavian countries. They maintain a basic standard of living for all. Marxists are against those countries because they are capitalist. Some rich people are against those countries because they would pay more taxes. They would rather their taxes pay for jails and law enforcement bodies. There is a direct relation between poverty and crime. Some rich people such as Warren Buffett, possibly the second richest man in the world, advocate the maintenance of a basic standard of living. He is no more a communist than Milton Friedman.

I agree with the sentiments of this article but I disagree that the problems are caused by attitudes of the power elites or of the general population. Human kind is genetically tuned to cooperate and when we find situations where we do not get cooperation of which "greed is good" or "punish the poor" are examples, then the solution is to change the system that causes these attitudes to emerge.

Market places that work well are great examples of cooperation not greed or competition. Market places can be viewed as extensions of grooming where literally if you scratch my back I will scratch yours. Our brain pleasure centres light up when we give but not when we receive. As a species we have succeeded because we are great cooperators (and great communicators). When we find systems that do not reflect these fundamental attributes then we should look at modifying the systems for the solutions.

To illustrate let us look at two market based solutions proposed to reduce ghg emissions. The solution being advocated by the government is emissions permits trading where we punish people by charging them more for using polluting energy. Another solution is outlined in "Rewarding the frugal and charge the profligate" http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7085&page=0 The second market is based on the idea of cooperation not conflict and of doing a trade where both parties benefit. The first is unlikely to significantly reduce ghg emissions while the second will.