Why Is the Republican Field So Extreme? (Read 2137 times)

Man, I hate those jerks.

 

A few years out of date, but this is a more balanced and accurate profile of CEOs: http://content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/Statistical_Snapshot_of_Leading_CEOs_relB3.pdf

 

I doesn't disprove any point you were making other than not all CEOs are Ivy league MBAs - some of them slummed it at Stanford...

Lots of CEOs from University of Wisconsin...shouldn't be surprised, when I went out there to run the Madison Mini Marathon back in 2009 it was one of the better organized races I've run.

The corruption inside the beltway has its mirror over in the corporate world, I'd suggest.

The rich owners have natural self-interest pushing them to buy laws, and protection and favoritism, to ensure that their successful companies are not threatened by upstarts. If they can establish their companies as de factor monopolies, and extract rental income, so much the better for their bottom line. Not so great for the rest of us, but too bad for us.

Similarly with the revolving door between regulatory oversight and oil companies, to pick an obvious example, after the gulf debacle. It seems fairly natural that the govt workers were inclined to turn a blind eye to corruption and law-breaking, because by so doing they enhance their post-govt retirement income, when they can rotate out to work for the same companies they once oversaw. And of course the higher management had all the pressure and incentive in the world to cheat and lie as much as possible, to increase profits and reduce costs. And if things went really bad, well, they had the whole system of "incorporation" to protect them from ever being personally responsible for their actions; that is really the whole point of incorporation.

And of course the "revolving door" and "you butter me, I'll butter you" has been infamous for decades in the defense industries.

I suspect that corruption is actually fairly natural to human desire and behavior, and suspect it may become even more so, as more wealth is accumulated.  Heck, slavery is probably a natural tendency of humans -- it sounds like a most profitable way to arrange labor.

I've seen that poster flying around facebook. 

 

It strikes me as rather progandistic though -- it almost reminds me of some farcical speech by massuh's favorite slave, lecturing the field slaves on how they need to work harder and be more diligent, because he (massuh's favorite) made it good, and never once backtalked, and never once raised his eyes to a white woman, and never once even thought about escaping.

Seriously. We seem to have taken the victim mentality to a whole new level. No system is perfect and ours has its faults but if you are diligent, prudent, savvy and willing to take some risk, you have a better chance of success here than in most any other place on the planet. It's not going to be given to you and you have to go and work for it and therein lies the challenge for the crowd I see. Lazy in life.

I think a few years just trying to survive in a "developing" country might change a few minds of the OWS crowd about our system.

As a high school senior I could have said almost the same thing as the douche with the sign. A couple advanced degrees and a half dozen surgeries for my wife later, I'd say he is as naive as they come. We even had to go to a developing country once to get health care. Now I have enough income to put me in a high tax bracket and enough debt that we've been hovering above and below the poverty level for most of my adult life. 

I'm not sure why trying to live within one's means makes that individual "a douche", unless I am misunderstanding you?

Sometimes life throws you a curveball...like unforeseen medical expenses....I don't think that makes the signmaker a douche, or you and your wife bad at financial decisions.  It's just part of life, and very different from the types of expense and choices the sign discusses.  Certainly, if you start out in a strong financial position you are better-equipped to handle such unforeseen expenses than if you load yourself down with unnecessary debt right out of the gate.

I came out of undergrad broke but debt free...dirt cheap state school.  My first advanced degree (free to me via the university) encountered some issues and I elected to leave it early and pursue a second....and very expensive...one.  Had I loaded myself up with debt in undergrad, I would have put myself in the position where I would not have been able to pursue the expensive degree that has really been responsible for me landing my career.  I believe that's more along the lines of what he was getting at....making good choices.  I doubt your medical expenses were much of a choice.

As for your degrees, I too pay a substantial part of my income to student loans for myself and my wife's advanced degrees.  However, it is because of those degrees that I can afford those loan payments plus life.  In other words, that is "good debt", the kind that delivers an acceptable return on investment.  When you and I have our student loans paid off we will be much better off for those choices.

Now, if someone feels the need to go to a private school at $30-50K/yr for a bachelor's in English that will land them a $28K/yr starting teacher's salary, and fund it with loans, they need to take a few math courses to figure out why that's a bad idea.  I have no pity for them and they have no reason to complain when they could have gotten the same degree for a fraction of the price.  If they have to rent <<gasp>> for a few years to save up 20% down for a 30-yr fixed-rate loan, since the banks won't give them a 0% down ARM anymore, cry me a river.

I believe the overall point of the sign, and the reason I posted it, was that this person took responsibility for themselves and lived within their means, making wise fiscal decisions, rather than expecting to live high before they'd earned the privilege to do so...and did not feel entitled to all those things.  While I totally agree with some elements of OWS (CEO pay is out of whack, banks were given a sweetheart deal at the expense of taxpayers), there is a strong element of entitlement and victim mentality in this.  

And I disagree with little of that--it's the self congratulatory nature of the sign combined with achievements that are supported by public funds and acts that aren't available to most people.

Fair, I can see that.  I think part of the reason behind hiding behind the sign was to decouple the point being made from the person -- the self-congratulatory -- at least that's how I took it.

Part of my reaction is I see a lot of these people out there in their early/mid 20s complaining about how hard the world is for them and they're not living the American dream....I am entering my mid-30s and up until the last few years I was poor.  At their age I was DIRT poor...but investing in a future, IMHO that's how it works, you start at the ground and build your way up.  So I have a hard time sympathizing with much of their argument.

MTA:  For the recent college grads, I can sympathize with how hard it is for many of them to enter the workforce today.

I think the overall point of the sign misses the point of the actual protestors.  They tend to get generalized by the media as whining about being the victim or about being pissed that someone has more money than them, but this isn't the message that I got talking to a few of the Occupy Boston people on my way to/from the ECS conference in Boston this week.

 

 

Part of the problem is they don't have a coherent point   We are left to guess.  Of course, as Jeff has covered, maybe their point is that they don't have a coherent point?  

I need more coffee before I try to digest that.

Posting a long rant is fun, so here's another.

One thing that leaves me somewhat confused at times is the cognitive dissonance of competing stories.

The US was founded by hardy individualists who worked hard, and saved, and made it good.

The US was founded on genocide (driving off or killing all the inhabitants), slavery, and indentured servitude.

The US is a land of hardy individualists.

The US invests heavily in incarceration, far more so than any other developed nation, and has large profit-making businesses built upon keeping people imprisoned.

The US is a land of healthy, hardworking people.

The US is a land of morbidly obese people, with a healthsystem which has costs spiralling way out of control, out of the range of affordability of any individual; only the super-rich can afford to be ready to drop hundreds of thousands for an uninsured medical incident, so only the young, daring, childless, and lucky, can afford self-employment risks -- except for the rich trust fund kids, of course.

The US is a famous, world-leading democracy.

The US is led by cronyist, corrupt companies in bed with the government and the regulators, through constant money pouring through lobbyists and PACs and campaign contributions.

The US fosters free-market capitalism.

The US tendency toward purchasable legislation fosters rent-seeking monopolies, and discourages competition.

The US is founded heavily upon protestant ethics.

The US corporate world is heavily invested in the concept of incoporation, and refusing personal responsibility for actions -- even to the point where "apologies" are always worded to refuse any responsibility for wrongdoing.


Such contrasting stories can be told.

Some like to sit around smugly blaming the poor for their laziness, their inability to save, and their unwillingness to work hard enough to raise themselves from poverty.

Some like to sit around angrily blaming the rich for the greed, and inequality of our country.

Personally, I like to partake in both camps equally: blame them all, that's what I say.

In the end what I suspect is that we're going to get hung by our structural dependence on vast overspending, by our structural dependence on a two-party system (both parties of which are hugely committed to vast overspending), by the spiralling costs of healthcare, by our inability to consider letting people suffer and die (instead of spending ourselves into oblivion "saving everyone at all costs"). The general feel-good, patriotic anthem song of "at all costs" is certainly part of our undoing, in my mind.

We want to beat people up in wars, no matter the cost. We want to save every baby, every sick person, every cancer patient, no matter the cost. We want to give everyone a chance to get back on their feet economically, no matter the cost. We want to save our banks, our car companies, our steel companies, our high-tech defense contractors, no matter the cost. We want to help, even coddle, our old, and sick, and infirm, no matter the cost. We want to keep our oil firms strong, no matter the cost. We want to invest in alternative energy, no matter the cost.

After all, it's our money to print.


(And I didn't even touch on the incendiary issue of Microsoft and Exxon and Enron and all the other big guys shipping all their profits to the Caribbean, to avoid paying US taxes -- heaven forbid they should pay taxes like us serfs. Nor the incendiary issues of welfare, or healthcare for unemployed, or for illegal immigrants. Darn it.)