Restraints and Deterrents in U.S. Markets?

[Guest ValueCarl]

Hang the BASTARDS. >:(

 

http://www.thechinamoneyreport.com/2011/11/10/chinese-fund-managers-sentenced-to-death-after-cheating-investors-out-of-1-billion-usd/

 

HANGZHOU – Two brothers and their father were sentenced to death on Monday for cheating 15,000 investors out of over $1.1 billion in east China’s Zhejiang province.

 

Ji Wenhua, president of the Yintai Real Estate and Investment Group, was sentenced to death for the crime of fund-raising fraud, said the Intermediate People’s Court in the city of Lishui, where the company was based.

[Guest ValueCarl]

“Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done?” she said, referring to politicians. “It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed — a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.”

 

Because her party has agitated for the wholesale deregulation of money in politics and the unshackling of lobbyists, these will be heard in some quarters as sacrilegious words.

 

Ms. Palin’s third point was more striking still: in contrast to the sweeping paeans to capitalism and the free market delivered by the Republican presidential candidates whose ranks she has yet to join, she sought to make a distinction between good capitalists and bad ones. The good ones, in her telling, are those small businesses that take risks and sink and swim in the churning market; the bad ones are well-connected megacorporations that live off bailouts, dodge taxes and profit terrifically while creating no jobs.

 

Strangely, she was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them.

 

“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners — the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”

 

Is there a hint of a political breakthrough hiding in there?

 

The political conversation in the United States is paralyzed by a simplistic division of labor. Democrats protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big money and enhanced by government action. Republicans protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big government and enhanced by the free market.

 

What is seldom said is that human flourishing is a complex and delicate thing, and that we needn’t choose whether government or the market jeopardizes it more, because both can threaten it at the same time.

 

Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/us/10iht-currents10.html?_r=2&src=tp&smid=