From elastic!lethe!geac!herboid!whome!infoshare!ott.istar!istar.net!van.istar!west.istar!n1van.istar!van-bc!unixg.ubc.ca!noc.van.hookup.net!hookup!news.uoregon.edu!hunter.premier.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!news.sgi.com!enews.sgi.com!insync!apollo.isisnet.com!ccn.cs.dal.ca!ap435 Sat Sep 21 12:59:48 1996 Xref: elastic can.politics:91784 ont.general:55222 Path: elastic!lethe!geac!herboid!whome!infoshare!ott.istar!istar.net!van.istar!west.istar!n1van.istar!van-bc!unixg.ubc.ca!noc.van.hookup.net!hookup!news.uoregon.edu!hunter.premier.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!news.sgi.com!enews.sgi.com!insync!apollo.isisnet.com!ccn.cs.dal.ca!ap435 From: ap435@ccn.cs.dal.ca (Neil Alasdair McEwan) Newsgroups: can.politics,ont.general,alt.politics.british,alt.politics.correct Subject: Re: EVEN GEORGE ORWELL SAW FASCISM AS SOCIALISM Followup-To: can.politics,ont.general,alt.politics.british,alt.politics.correct Date: 15 Sep 1996 20:54:42 GMT Organization: Chebucto Community Net Lines: 112 Message-ID: <51hqei$ku5@apollo.isisnet.com> References: <3238361F.63B0@sympatico.ca> <51a4nh$p78@apollo.isisnet.com> <3239cae8.3986456@nntp.netcruiser> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.150.72.25 X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Calvin Bruce Ostrum (cbo@netcom.ca) wrote: : In <51a4nh$p78@apollo.isisnet.com>, : ap435@ccn.cs.dal.ca (Neil Alasdair McEwan) wrote: : | : take George Orwell's warning about 1984 seriously. Orwell warned that a : | : crude and brutal totalitarianism would come from the Left of politics and : | : subvert the liberal democratic freedoms we are all supposed to enjoy. ... : : | Yes he did, and with good reason. He saw that the fatal flaw of : | socialism is that you cannot have centralized economic power with a : | correspondingly centralized political power to enforce it, and this : | guarantees that any truly socialist state will be a police state. : If Orwell saw all this, then why did he consider himself a socialist? It's not a matter of "if" -- he actually *did* see it, if you read his review of Hayek's 1936 book "The Road to Serfdom". My only guess as to why he remained a socialist is because capitalism remained so unpalatable to him that he kept hoping for a miraculous solution that would bring socialism without a loss of freedom. And after all, many of today's socialists are in the same position -- for every hundred of them, it seems as if only one or two is willing to put forward a coherent proposal for an alternative system. The rest simply have "reactionary" views: they know what they don't like, but they're not sure what to do about it. : | I have : | read many leftist fulminations in my lifetime but I have never read any : | that resolved this dilemma in the slightest. : Have you read David Schweickart's "Against capitalism", or Robert Dahl's : "Preface to economic democracy?" or Carol Gould's "Rethinking democracy", : or Frank Cunningham's "Democratic theory and socialism"? No indeed, tho' now that you mention it those titles have been duly noted. Still, let's keep this interesting during the time I run off to my local library, get the books, and read them: why don't you summarize the views of these authors for me and we'll take this discussion from there? : | Was it "the Right" that eliminated democracy in China? In Russia? : | In the Ukraine? In Byelorussia? In Poland? In Latvia? In : | Czechoslovakia? In Lithuania? In Estonia? In Bulgaria? In Romania? : | In Albania? In Georgia? In Kazakhstan? In Kyrgyzhstan? In Armenia? : | In Azerbaijan? In Hungary? In Moldova? In Tibet? In Cuba? In : | Cambodia? In Vietnam? In North Korea? In Mozambique? In Angola? In : | Ethiopia? Get a clue, you moron. : Orwell warned about what could happen with totalitarian states and probably : would have predicted what happened in many of these locations. So why : do you think he still considered himself to be "on the left" and a : socialist? Do you have any ideas on this at all? Yes I do. In the first place, it's extremely difficult to deal with having been wrong, and in Orwell's case having been *publicly* wrong, for such a long time. My father-in-law is a staunch NDP supporter from Ontario, and since the late 1960s was personally acquainted with many NDP figures there. He worked his whole life just to see the NDP in power in Ontario. Now the NDP government has come and gone -- and what was the result? Incompetence, corruption, bad economic policies, and staggering unpopularity. Now, this man is in his fifties, and everything he worked for turned out to be a joke. But he's not going to admit that he's been wrong, even though what happened depresses him very much. You see, socialism is not so much a political programme as a quasi-religious philosophy. Unlike capitalism, it demands faith, since according to socialists there never has been a "true" socialist state. Utopia is like heaven, you have to believe in it, and you have to dedicate your life to bringing it about. Naturally like any other religious conception of the world this is very hard to shake off. After years of believing that your ideological opponents are greedy self-interested moralizing hypocrites, which is more or less the standard Left view of capitalists, it's very difficult to all of a sudden turn about and say that perhaps *they* were the ones with the right idea -- it's a bit like Pat Robertson coming around to the conclusion that maybe Satan just had bad PR. My conclusion is that Orwell saw what was wrong with socialism but was nowhere near being ready enough to turn back and endorse capitalism. Instead, near the end of his life he began to lay more of an emphasis on common decency and morality, rather than on grand social schemes. I think he was on his way to becoming a liberal, believe it or not -- a person who believes that "cruelty is the worst thing we do", as Rorty put it. But he had not yet reached that stage when he died. : | universities are effectively dead when they allow ideology to override : | and eliminate truth -- especially when it's the truth of mass murder. : | There's no such thing as "corporate welfare". What you are : | referring to is the money that corporations legally earn and avoid having : | to fork over to the government. Real welfare by contrast is a handout : | from the government to the recipient. When a mugger tries to take all of : | your money and you manage to save some for yourself, he has not given you : | "welfare". Got it? : Is this an example of the "truth" that you feel has been overridden and : eliminated by "ideology" in the universities? Yes. If you disagree, say so and explain why. Le meas, Neil A. McEwan -- From elastic!lethe!geac!gts!whome!infoshare!n2ott.istar!ott.istar!istar.net!van.istar!west.istar!n1van.istar!van-bc!unixg.ubc.ca!rover.ucs.ualberta.ca!news.agtac.net!news.cadvision.com!usenet Sat Sep 21 13:16:53 1996 Xref: elastic can.politics:92449 ont.general:55565 Path: elastic!lethe!geac!gts!whome!infoshare!n2ott.istar!ott.istar!istar.net!van.istar!west.istar!n1van.istar!van-bc!unixg.ubc.ca!rover.ucs.ualberta.ca!news.agtac.net!news.cadvision.com!usenet From: naleckid@cadvision.com (Derek Nalecki) Newsgroups: bc.politics,ont.general,ab.politics,can.politics Subject: Re: Would Libertarians legalize Insider Trading? Date: 19 Sep 1996 05:19:20 GMT Organization: A poorly-installed InterNetNews site Lines: 103 Message-ID: <51ql4o$4fb8@elmo.cadvision.com> References: <51intf$3td0@elmo.cadvision.com> <323dcb6d.4940580@nntp.ix.netcom.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: agtc70.cadvision.com X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.92.6+ In article <323dcb6d.4940580@nntp.ix.netcom.com>, bberg99@ix.netcom.com (B. Bergmann) says: > >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > >naleckid@cadvision.com (Derek Nalecki) wrote: > >>In article , sranta@macwest.org (Steve Ranta) says: >>> >>>In article <598717085@f47.n340.z1.ftn>, Ken Wiebe >>> wrote: >>> >>>. . . There's no evidence that >>>> 'inside traders' do any better or any worse than >>>> anyone else on the stock market. >>> >>>This is a partial summary of the argument in a book recommended by Ken >>>Wiebe, leader of the B.C. Libertarian Party, who claims that insider >>>trading should not be illegal. >>> >> >>"Insider trading" is just a straw-man invented by regulators to allow >>themselves a better leverage againsts the matkets. Ken is correct that >>there is absolutely no statistical evidence that the "insider traders" >>do any better on the stock market than anyone else. >>Fr every "spectacular" trade you could claim was the result of an "insider >>trade", I could show you a better one that wasn't. >>So in conclusion, there is no reason to make "insider trading" illegal, >>but then there is no reason to make farmers selling their grain to >>willing customers illiegal, there is no reason to make self-defence >>illegal, etcetera, etcetera... > > Far from a "straw man invented by regulators", insider trading >laws have evolved from the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 into an >effective means of preventing the abuses that exacerbated the >financial roller coaster of the first half of this century. The >maintenance of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders is key to fair >and balanced market participation, Oh-vey. I _do_ get tired of repeating this simple and straight forward historical fact... hmm.. mayhap _that_ is what you are after?!?!? The "financial roller coaster of the first half of this century" was actually the roller coaster of the 1913-1929 period. It was cause single- handedly by the creation of Federal Reserve Board in the US and other "central" banks in the West. (The Bank of England was not _created_, it did exist before, but it was only following the creation of the FED that it become a "central" bank able to issue currency backed by government fiat not an intrinsic value held by each individual bank as deposits). It was this separation of currncy being issued, from the base of deposits held - iussue based solely by the assumption of the government's power to collect *future* taxes, that caused the speculative roller coaster on every stock exchange in the west, and subsequently the Great Depression. Banks which hitherto could lend only based on how much deposits they held - and in the event of running down on deposits increased the interest rate and dried up the borrowing demand - could now effectively loan an unlimited amount of money, at interest rates regulated by the government. They did, as much as possible - because it made money *and* to offset unreasonable rates set by those governments. People who borrowed the money at artificially low rates - hey "free" money!!! - invested it in stock market. By 1929 the prices of most companies traded on world stock exchanges, New York in particular, had absolutely nothing in common with the actual value of the assets of those companies. Guess what happened when people holding, what now was worthless stock, realized this?!?!? Ah-ha! One giant cry of "sell" hit every stock exchange in the western world. Presto, the Great Depression. Curtesy of your government and its central bank. > > A hypothetical example from Industry Canada: I _do_ love those "hypothetical" examples. Tell us the one about the aliens from Ursa Major taking over the corporate boardrooms. ...and the connection of this to reality would be... [sniped a tale of what happens if something or other...] > > In both the U.S. and Canada, insider trading laws are only >violated if the information is confidential, non-public and when used >to advantage while trading in the corporation`s securities. Hardly an >onerous regulatory requirement, rather a necessary attempt to stop >abuse. Onerous or not - and I _will_ agree it is not as bad as most, it is unnecesary, self-serving (for the government) and thus wrong. derek n, RdNck, Pen-Arm of the Righteous, esq. "Never initiate force against another. That should be the underlying principle of your life. But should someone do violence to you, retaliate without hesitation, without reservation, without quarter, until you are sure that he will never wish to harm - or never be capable of harming - you or yours again." (F. Paul Wilson - 'THE SECOND BOOK OF KYFHO; Revised Eastern Sect Edition') ********************* MY OTHER COMPUTER IS A LAP-TOP ******************* From elastic!lethe!geac!herboid!whome!infoshare!n2ott.istar!ott.istar!istar.net!n3ott.istar!news.synapse.net!news.flora.ottawa.on.ca!freenet-news.carleton.ca!worldlinx.com!news.zoo.net!news Sat Sep 21 13:19:02 1996 Xref: elastic can.politics:92568 ont.general:55623 Path: elastic!lethe!geac!herboid!whome!infoshare!n2ott.istar!ott.istar!istar.net!n3ott.istar!news.synapse.net!news.flora.ottawa.on.ca!freenet-news.carleton.ca!worldlinx.com!news.zoo.net!news From: Victor Levis Newsgroups: bc.politics,ont.general,ab.politics,can.politics Subject: Re: Would Libertarians legalize Insider Trading? Date: 19 Sep 1996 20:18:17 GMT Organization: ZooNet, Inc. Lines: 80 Message-ID: <51s9qa$rp8@bear.zoo.net> References: <51intf$3td0@elmo.cadvision.com> <323dcb6d.4940580@nntp.ix.netcom.com> <51ql4o$4fb8@elmo.cadvision.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: cougar-0.zoo.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.22 (Windows; I; 16bit) To: naleckid@cadvision.com >>>In article , sranta@macwest.org (Steve Ranta) says: >>>> >>>>In article <598717085@f47.n340.z1.ftn>, Ken Wiebe >>>> wrote: >>>> >>>>. . . There's no evidence that >>>>> 'inside traders' do any better or any worse than >>>>> anyone else on the stock market. >>>> >>>>This is a partial summary of the argument in a book recommended by Ken >>>>Wiebe, leader of the B.C. Libertarian Party, who claims that insider >>>>trading should not be illegal. >>>> >>> >>>"Insider trading" is just a straw-man invented by regulators to allow >>>themselves a better leverage againsts the matkets. Ken is correct that >>>there is absolutely no statistical evidence that the "insider traders" >>>do any better on the stock market than anyone else. >>>Fr every "spectacular" trade you could claim was the result of an "insider >>>trade", I could show you a better one that wasn't. >>>So in conclusion, there is no reason to make "insider trading" illegal, >>>but then there is no reason to make farmers selling their grain to >>>willing customers illiegal, there is no reason to make self-defence >>>illegal, etcetera, etcetera... >> >> Far from a "straw man invented by regulators", insider trading >>laws have evolved from the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 into an >>effective means of preventing the abuses that exacerbated the >>financial roller coaster of the first half of this century. The >>maintenance of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders is key to fair >>and balanced market participation, >> >> A hypothetical example from Industry Canada: > >I _do_ love those "hypothetical" examples. Tell us the one about the >aliens from Ursa Major taking over the corporate boardrooms. >...and the connection of this to reality would be... > >[sniped a tale of what happens if something or other...] > >> >> In both the U.S. and Canada, insider trading laws are only >>violated if the information is confidential, non-public and when used >>to advantage while trading in the corporation`s securities. Hardly an >>onerous regulatory requirement, rather a necessary attempt to stop >>abuse. > Libertarian theory precludes government using force to dictate terms of trade to a market, but it also precludes fraudulent practices of individuals in the marketplace. The solution to your postulated problem is not difficult. If shareholders of a company feel that they would be harmed by officers, directors and employees using confidential information gained from their employ by the shareholders to private advantage, they have only to insist that the employment contracts cover this eventuality. An employee who then used concealed information in violation of his contract could be judged guilty of either fraud or breach of contract by a court of law. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with private-sector Securities Commissions setting up voluntary standards in the interests of all participants, and refusing to sanction trade in stocks of companies that do not meet the standards. In addition, a Securities Commission could refuse continued privileges to trade to people who have demonstrated a willingness to flout the standards of the Commission. This way, the natural forces of free markets can be put to work to further the aims of investors and companies alike, without the big disadvantages and rights-violations when government imposes arbitrary standards on market participants, and selectively enforces them, to boot. The reputation of freely competitive Securities Commissions will be of utmost importance to them, and we can expect this to be a great improvement over the present, politicized system. Victor Levis