From: Dehede011@aol.com
Date: Sat Aug 09 2003 - 17:58:50 MDT
In a message dated 8/9/2003 4:46:16 PM Central Standard Time,
lcorbin@tsoft.com writes: You are starting to scare me. What capital flight from the United
States? Is it major? Or is it just a trend that worries you? Do you have any
references?
Lee,
As the situation is at least debatable I prefer to give you my one
best reference and let you come to your own conclusions. You will find an
excellent article or article in the following site.
http://www.mises.org/articles.asp
In addition if you read Thomas Friedman's book Lexus and the Olive
Tree you will find other discussion.
However, yes, I am dead serious about the flow of internatioal capital
in and out of the US. As an example it has been said that it is the foreign
purchase of our government bonds that finances our deficit spending. Dire
predictions have been made about what would happen if those foreigners cashing in
those bonds as they came due and taking their money home.
Jeff wrote to discuss our economic situation and sounded as if he
wanted to pass some laws to correct our situation whatever that is. I don't think
you will convince many capitalists that we need any more laws.
The primary problem we face as capitalists is that the left wing wants
the government to organize us so that we all work for the "common good." I
don't think you could get a single congregation of Southern Baptists to agree
on what the "common good" is or how to translate that idea into practice -- and
if you atttempt to get the entire country to agree your problem only gets
worse. That was the role of Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin to determine
what the common good was.
Part of the brilliance of Capitalism is that every business leader or
owner in the country could be a committed monopolist or royalist for that
matter and it would make no difference if the law is properly administered.
People often discuss Enron but please note it was private folks that
caught them and to date have done much or all of the punishing. Arthur
Anderson is no more. If Enron survived it is only as a shell of its former self.
Several other companies also went down the tubes by a similar process.
Incidently at the time my accounting prof assigned me another of the high
flyers to analyse as a possible investment. My assignment was to culminate in a
paper I was to write analyzing the company. I got three annual reports and
read them before beginning to apply common accounting analysis procedures.
I began my paper by stating that I would report on a regular
accounting analysis so he could grade my knowledge of accounting but if this were the
real world the I had found a "show stopper" before beginning in depth analysis
-- i.e., a straightforward reading of the three annual reports plainly showed
the company was either lying, hiding data or both. They would never get a
penny of my investment money. He graded my analysis. When he handed the paper
back he grinned and nodded yes over my first sentence.
Ron h.
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