"Occupy" Superthread

Yes that is what they should be doing.

So update on the obvious hub of this entire movement, Occupy Tucson.
They basicly stood around for a while, then they trashed a perfectly good park, just 'cause.
That's about it.

Also the lead political supporter for this movement is a Green who supports forming eco-communes or something. Relocalization or some shit. I don't even know.

No that's right you don't...

Well of course it is. You need government intervention to stop economic collapse. If you don't you end up with the Wall Street Crash or the financial crisis we're in at the moment. Every single time the free market has been allowed to run freely it has crashed and burned and destoyed thousands of lives. So is the short term profit you can make from it really worth it? In the long run a regulated market will lead to a more stable growth.

The financial crisis that we're in at the moment could not exist in a completely free market. Not to say that the free market is an economic messiah, but it's a mechanical impossibility for it to create the situation that we found ourselves in back in '08.

I've not seen it and don't intend to. In any case the reason for the recent crisis was, at the core, one of moral hazard. An expectation for the public to pay for excessive risk. That's only possible if government is involved in the market.

Now had we never repealed Glass-Steagall the crisis would also have been averted, and I think it would be preferable to complete deregulation, but this issue cannot be blamed entirely or even mostly on the free market.

Got to be honest Kali, you're talking shit. The moral hazard was a factor but it wasn't the main reason.

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner, professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, Paul Krugman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/opinion/08krugman.html

That's akin to someone punching you in the face and it being OK because there are no cops, and that you could get help for a broken hand. It is still not OK.

And on your claim that free markets don't crash because of financial institutions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?pagewanted=all

-Wiki

Well now you're just avoiding the question/issue. If the government hadn't bailed those pieces of shit(that's just how I feel) out the crisis would be even worse. The US isn't a free market, but intervention was/is mostly applied when a crisis happen, and not before. I really don't know a lot about the legislation, but from what I've heard it's nowhere near enough to control the speculation and banking that was going on before the crisis. If you don't start to regulate these things you will end up with another crisis. I don't know when, but it will come, and it could be avoided or at least lessened by government intervention in the market. Bailout when a crisis occur is not the answer.

This is making John Huntsman look more and more like a genius. (refer to John Huntsman's Big Idea if you have no idea what the hell I am talking about).

The reason that excessive risks were taken was because firms had the expectation that the public would pay for mistakes. In other words, moral hazard. That expectation simply can't exist in a society that doesn't have the capacity to pay for it. Krugman says that deregulation was bad; sure, it was, but that doesn't change the fact that in an economy where the government can't interfere, moral hazards cannot exist. Risk taking would have to be done with the assumption of risk being placed on the investor, because no one is obligated to help him if he fails.

I didn't claim that, I claimed that it's mechanically impossible for the crisis that we experienced in '08 to come about in a completely free market. That's why I specifically left out the '29 crash.