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Monday, June 29, 2015 - 4:54amSanction this postReply
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You can categorize News links as Horror from a pull-down menu.



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Monday, June 29, 2015 - 4:57amSanction this postReply
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Thanks. I didn't notice that. Humor, too.



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Monday, June 29, 2015 - 8:40amSanction this postReply
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Murray Rothbard was advocating decades ago that countries repudiate their debt, saying that the bondholders were merely financing the looting in exchange for a share of the loot.  Whether this is advisable or not, it has the consequence that the country won't be able to borrow (at affordable rates) in the future.  Rothbard was probably more willing to live with this than the current Greek government is.

 

(And did you notice that Puerto Rico is officially broke, too?)



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Monday, June 29, 2015 - 11:48amSanction this postReply
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The centuries-old universal accounting equation states:

 

Assets=Liabilities+Equity

 

Supposedly a government not financed by liabilities would be financed by equity.

 

I have seen Dennis Kucinich argue this ages ago though I have no idea how that would work nor do I know much of him as a politician.



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Monday, June 29, 2015 - 5:32pmSanction this postReply
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I cannot pretend to speak for Dennis Kucinich, even though I grew up with him in Cleveland.  I will suggest that if we all owned shares in the government, we would get a dividend check, or our stocks would split -- assuming that the enterprise were profitable. 

 

However, for the success of unprofitable enterprises, I point to The Man Who Found the Money : John Stewart Kennedy and the Financing of the Western Railroads by Saul Engelbourg and Leonard Bushkoff (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996).  Kennedy financed J. J. Hill's Great Northern.  But before that he had a career of arranging the purchase of debts and equities. Even a failed railroad had assets: if not actual terminals and rolling stock and track, then at least (in the case of paper swindles) legal rights of way.

 

So, may be the government might have to run a deficit, but as long as they have roads and parks and things, they can be put into receiverships and re-capitalized. as were many of the railroads of the 19th century.



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