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Comment by drumdance | Hacker News Reader

It's about money creation and the use of that to ramp land prices in order to compel everyone to hand over part of their labour.

If you could point me to a single bank president who says his goal is to "compel everyone to hand over part of their labour," I might find this believable. Otherwise it reads like an Us vs. Them Marxist diatribe. Red meat for the proletariat, no different than the Tea Party.

I agree that there are systemic forces at work, and that they should be changed, but it's silly to impute dark intentions.

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It's not very fair to say "I'll only believe that an esoteric motivation exists if the party motivated by it explicitly states that publicly."

(By esoteric motivation, I mean either an "underlying" motivation or an "epiphenomenon" that feeds back onto itself.)

It is not necessary to acknowledge or even to know that you are behaving as part of some esoteric motivation, for it to be either a true or at least useful model. For example, think of "selfish gene" type explanation of reproductive / behavioral biology. That is a useful model for thinking about behavior even if the parties themselves talk about courtly love, religious morality, etc.

Particularly in the case of a highly developed financial economy, there are lots of decisions that have effects, which effects tend to reinforce making those decisions, without anyone explicitly talking about those effects.

For example, the political decision to create and maintain the tax-deferral advantages of e.g. 401k accounts, is bipartisan and widely touted as helping to advance the cause of retirement security and broad prosperity. However, in a very real way, it's also about shunting vast quantities of "dumb money" into a relatively high-fee intermediary industry of 401k administration, mutual fund management, and etc. In turn, those intermediaries employ vast numbers of well paid personnel, as well as enjoy concentrated financial returns to their ownership -- and the owners and workers of the intermediaries lend massive poltiical support to perpetuating and extending those types of program (see e.g. the successive creation of more and more favored account types: Roth IRAs, 529s, Coverdell ESAs, HSAs, FSAs, etc. etc.). This means that Congress is compelling the nation at large to turn over a higher % of GDP to financial intermediaries.

It would be disingenuous to claim to disbelieve this unless a Senator stood up and said his goal is to "turn over a higher % of GDP to financial intermediaries." That is certainly not his exoteric goal and probably not even something that he thinks about. But it is a very real consequence, and the feedback loop from the beneficiaries (lobbying, jobs, contributions) most certainly influences him and makes it "about" that.

> It's not very fair to say "I'll only believe that an esoteric motivation exists if the party motivated by it explicitly states that publicly."

I'd go further: it's plain daft.

> It's not very fair to say "I'll only believe that an esoteric motivation exists if the party motivated by it explicitly states that publicly."

Who said it has to be explicitly stated publicly? There are thousands of lawsuits every year and millions of pages of testimony. That's why you can point to Jeffrey Skilling or Bernie Ebbers or George Madoff and say "those guys are frauds." But you can't just point at bankers and CEOs as a class, and with no evidence, claim to know what they believe in their hearts.

> It is not necessary to acknowledge or even to know that you are behaving as part of some esoteric motivation, for it to be either a true or at least useful model. For example, think of "selfish gene" type explanation of reproductive / behavioral biology. That is a useful model for thinking about behavior even if the parties themselves talk about courtly love, religious morality, etc.

Very good point.

To give an example- oil companies advocate for the continued use of fossil fuels, because it is in their financial interest to do so. At the same time the employees of those companies have an interest to not screw up the planet completely for their own children and grandchildren. It's not as if those people are part of some dark conspiracy to destroy the environment, but they do seem to be trapped by the forces of the economy into which they have to participate.

Basically, you don't really need an "esoteric motivation" to have totally evil behaviour. You just need to be at the wrong position in the wrong organisation.

I agree that systemic forces are at work, but implying that people at oil companies or banks or other big institutions want "compel everyone to hand over part of their labour" adds more heat than light.

And if you actually want to change things, yelling "evil!" at the people you want to change is a terrible strategy.

> If you could point me to a single bank president who says

Why do you think they would say what their true goals are to you? People in positions of power are extremely judicious and strategic about what they say and to whom. They get daily exercise in this and only the best survive. The most effective are excellent at pursuing their goals while maintaining a socially credible exterior. The less effective use coded language (corpspeak or political rhetoric) to try to hedge through via indirection.

Is it dark intentions when the nature of a company is to make as much money as possible? The banks want house/land prices to go up so that they can charge one as much in interest as they can get from one's income, whilst making money on any land/property capital appreciation that they have. This is just capitalism surely.

My solution - nationalise the mortgage lenders and cap the mortgage to a 3 * multiplier of annual earnings.

Thank you for having a brain. You'd also need to have a new way of issuing money as mortgage lending is how we currently add fresh money as debt. I'd recommend something like social credit.

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