Letting non-citizens vote?

[De Selby]

Wait a second here, what's the dollar value of a 700 billion dollar loan? You have got to be kidding me - being able to get a loan of that size represents an outrageous figure.  And they got it on terms that no private entity would have given.  The value of that service is the amount of the gift from Government to large corporations.

The issue here is that rich people can, and do, vote to take other people's money.  This is a demonstrable fact throughout history.  The idea that somehow a massive corporation or a multi-millionaire has no interest in increasing its fortunes because it already has money is simply preposterous.  Rich people have just the same financial incentive (if not more, given the track record) to rip off the public as welfare queens.

[TommyGunn]

De Selby, if you don't like that, why don't you whine about it to the politicians who propose the loans, who sign off on them?? 
Given the regulatory nature of our government it would be a cinch for them to regulate that sort of cr@p into extinction -- right next to the dinosaurs -- if they wanted to.
But no .... GM, et al, they're "too big to fail."
"Rich people" voting to "take other people's money" includes most thugs in kongress.  There's a lot of 'em who seem to make out like bandits themselves, even after voting to steal from Peter to pay Paul.
And there's a lot of "Pauls" out there who gleefully support these greedy kakistocrats.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

In a moral and philosophical sense, even the poorest man has a vested interest in private property as a moral concept.  Even the man who lives out of his car has the sacred, individual, inviolable right not to have it ripped from him, and to be secure in its confines.

I'm not sure why you think this is less true for the rich than for the poor.

Everyone likes property rights but only the rich would be motivated to live in a world where stealing property is possible?  That just doesn't compute.

Wait a second here, what's the dollar value of a 700 billion dollar loan?

Value to who?  To the recipients of the loan?  To the government who issued the loan?  To the overall economy?

The financial bailouts were not done for the sake of the banks.  They were done for the sake of the entire economy, you, me, bankers, everyone.

And the value of a loan can, in fact, be quantified.  The value of the TARP loan was probably a few tens of billions (I don't have the exact numbers in front of me), hardly a sum that approaches the amount of money dolled out every year to the poor.

Unprecedented and massive as they were, the TARP loans still do not come anywhere close to justifying your belief that the rich take more from the government/taxpayer than the poor.  You're still off by a few orders of magnitude.

[Monkeyleg]

I guess all of those corporations who didn't want the federal money and the attached strings, and who wanted to give the money back, were greedy wealthy people stealing our money.

And the GM and Chrysler bond holders who got screwed in the bailouts, and had their money given to the UAW, were likewise stealing our money.

The unfunded mandates for Medicare and Social Security are now over $110 trillion. That money isn't going to the wealthy.

You've got some primo weed, De Selby.

[De Selby]

Yeah, I'm sure all those corporations were just running as fast as they could from that bailout money - the Government basically had to force them to stay solvent by taking it!  Or not.

The UAW members aren't living nearly as well as the GM and Chrysler management staff who benefitted enormously from Government backing.

Take a look at all the financial scamming that happened over the past ten years, all the Government payouts that were demanded to fix it, and all of the exec payment packages that went out, and it's really an impossible stretch to conclude "rich people will vote for freedom!"

Do you honestly believe the people who wrecked the financial system and then depended on Government to fix it are folks that would vote for principled free markets, and not for their own pocketbooks?  If you can't answer that question with a yes, I'm not sure how you can logically get to "wealthy people don't vote to take other people's money."

[De Selby]

Unprecedented and massive as they were, the TARP loans still do not come anywhere close to justifying your belief that the rich take more from the government/taxpayer than the poor.  You're still off by a few orders of magnitude.

You need to look at my first post, which was "more taxpayer money per head"...social welfare programs generally result in a few hundred dollars assistance going out to tens of millions of people.  The bailouts resulted in multi-billion dollar payment packages that primarily benefitted a few thousand people.

[makattak]

That is true, of course.

But it's not true that a person with a large amount of property is necessarily going to have a vested interest in freedom.

A large company, or interest group linked to said company will be tempted - reasonably - to lobby or agree to a regulation, if that regulation protects it from small competitors by the virtue of raising barriers to entry. As long as the regulation is not too onerous, and the company's assets aren't being seized, why not?

In a moral and philosophical sense, even the poorest man has a vested interest in private property as a moral concept.  Even the man who lives out of his car has the sacred, individual, inviolable right not to have it ripped from him, and to be secure in its confines.

There are reasons why any given class of people can be persuaded to turn from these principles - the middle class, the wealthy, the poor, intellectuals, engineers, young, old. But there's no class that's inherently anti-freedom or pro-freedom.

Prisoner's Dilemma

That's why we need hard rules that all citizens will follow.  (you know, like a constitution that keeps the government from deciding willy-nilly who they are going to benefit though regulation, tax rules, etc..., like we used to have before our government started ignoring it using the commerce clause to say they can do anything they want)

Once the government starts picking and choosing winners and losers, it is foolish for a citizen or company to try to play the "cooperate" game. It is now in their best interest to get as much as they can out of government, otherwise someone else is just going to screw them over.

[TommyGunn]

You need to look at my first post, which was "more taxpayer money per head"...social welfare programs generally result in a few hundred dollars assistance going out to tens of millions of people.  The bailouts resulted in multi-billion dollar payment packages that primarily benefitted a few thousand people.

And a "few hundred dollars assistance going out to tens of millions of people" over  six or seven decades adds up to a hell of a lot more than what was "given" out in bailout money -- especially if you adjust for inflation.

Yeah, I'm sure all those corporations were just running as fast as they could from that bailout money - the Government basically had to force them to stay solvent by taking it!

 
Ford ran away ... and they're actually doing pretty well in comparison to some others.

Do you honestly believe the people who wrecked the financial system and then depended on Government to fix it are folks that would vote for principled free markets, and not for their own pocketbooks?

Hardly relevant.  There are criminals in every element of society and proportionatly more so so in government, it would seem.  You will never be able to regulate away the vices of humanity.  All the government seems to do is to engage in class warfare in order to win votes from the "have nots" by redistributing from the "haves."  
IMHO we haven't really had a "free market" in decades.  What we have is an over regulated over taxed over burdened economy in which many of the more successful are moving to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places with less onerous taxes and less burdensome regulations.
Some of the most powerful elements behind that "wrecked" the financial system are in Washington D.C. -- and are about to be re-elected by their clueless constituents.

[Monkeyleg]

Yeah, I'm sure all those corporations were just running as fast as they could from that bailout money - the Government basically had to force them to stay solvent by taking it!  Or not.

There were many corporations that received TARP money and tried to give it back, but the administration refused. Go read some *expletive deleted*ing newspapers instead of Pravda, for crying out loud.

[dogmush]

Yeah, I'm sure all those corporations were just running as fast as they could from that bailout money - the Government basically had to force them to stay solvent by taking it! 

As I recall,  There were actually some banks/financial houses that upon reading the terms of the TARP loans refused the money, and were then threatened by the fed untill they took the loans.  So yeah, the government did have to force them to take it.