“Capitalism is, among other things, the revitalization of the world thanks to the opportunity to be lucky.  Luck is the great equalizer because almost everyone can benefit from it. The socialist government protected their monsters and, by doing so, killed potential newcomers in the womb.”

“Luck is far more egalitarian than even intelligence. If people were rewarded strictly according to their abilities, things would still be unfair- people don’t choose their abilities. Randomness has the beneficial effect of reshuffling society’s cards, knocking down the big guy.”

From The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Nicholas Taleb

“Here is the quickest way to determine if you are operating in an honest capitalist system or a corrupt imitation thereof: check the bankruptcy rates. For most of the last hundred years, the United States has had both the strongest economy and the highest bankruptcy rate of any reasonably large developed nation. By contrast, the old Soviet Union had a bankruptcy rate of essentially zero. Many state-owned enterprises were organized to function like businesses.  They had managers and employees, bought materials, made and sold products. But none of them ever went broke.”

“And that told the whole story. Socialism, the socialists say, has never really been tried. And in a way that is true.  The Soviet Union was not a socialist economy so much as it was a crony-capitalist economy. The Soviet government loved the nation’s businesses so much that it would never let them fail. The crucial mechanism for this failure rate of zero was an almost entirely fictitious currency, the ruble of infinite flexibility, endless liquidity, and minimal value to cover the lies.”

“Every Soviet business manager was well stocked with excuses for not meeting quote, or even better, with a sheaf of dummied documents proving he had.  The government had no impersonal mechanism to punish the inefficient.  In order to shut down a failed state business, the government would have to (a) tell the truth, which would mean confessing the government’s own mismanagement, and (b) take direct responsibility for things like layoffs, an unpleasant experience even for politicians who regularly get 99 per cent of the vote.”

From Panic- The Betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington by Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante

Life in a modern, money economy… is characterized by ever greater distances between means and ends. Determining how to attain our ends is a matter of intellect, of calculation, weighing, comparing the various possible means to reach our goals most efficiently. Thus intellect, concerned with the weighing of means, comes to play an ever greater role.

From Capitalism and the Jews by Jerry Z. Muller

The “ideology of modern finance” replaced the capitalist’s appreciation for free markets as a context for human creativity with worship of efficient markets as substitutes for that creativity. The capitalist understands free markets as an arena for the contending judgments of free men. The ideologues of modern finance dreamed of efficient markets as a replacement for that judgment and almost a replacement for the men.

Under the influence of contemporary financial theory, bankers and regulators abandoned basic tools of financial analysis and judgment for elaborate, statistically based insurance schemes and a blind faith in the efficiency of modern securities markets.

The result: it became impossible for either executives or regulators to fully understand the financial condition of any great modern bank. Believing that financial systems could transcend the need for human judgment the bankers and regulators combined to create financial institutions with balance sheets no one could judge.

From the inside jacket cover of  Panic- The Betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington by Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante

“Prevailing in Washington as on Wall Street were the most vile and self destructive assumptions of anti-capitalists everywhere who imagined they could wield capital even while abandoning the principles that created it; that systems could substitute for the moral standards they once embodied; or that men who lost trillions of dollars of other people’s money might somehow recover it if only the government would give them trillions more. Crony capitalists on the right and socialists on the left united as always behind their most fundamental belief, that wealth is to be captured by power and pull rather than created in the minds of men.”

from Panic – The Betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington by Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante