dissecting capitalism

• Capitalism too heavily discounts the future value of cash flows as it seeks to raise debts: “Your grandchildren have no value.”
• "For example, let us say that a firm’s current actions are going to cost society at large a billion dollars’ worth of harm in 50 years. Further, let us agree that all of the costs will definitely be imposed on the company. The company would feel that pain today as equivalent to only a mere $1 million hit to earnings. Why should they care?" 
• Companies foolishly reward executives for taking on debt: “Total remuneration ... for senior officers ... rose as a percentage of the average worker’s pay from 40 times in Eisenhower’s era to over 600 times today with no indication of any general improvement in talent.”
• It’s about profit, not people: “Capitalism in general has no sense of ethics or conscience. Whatever the Supreme Court may think, it is not a person.”
• The more people borrow, the more they just gamble: “Leverage ... increases your returns over and over until, suddenly, it ruins you. ... There are no Investors Anonymous meetings to attend.”
• This time, it’s not so different: “Ignore the ... inevitable cheerleaders who will assure you that this time it’s a new high plateau ... even if that view comes from the Federal Reserve itself. No. Make that, especially if it comes from there.”
• Washington is becoming a corporate subsidiary: “What Capitalism has always had is money with which to try to buy influence. ... The issues they influence are precisely ... the ones that are most important to society’s ... very existence.”
• Big companies can’t help it: “Ethical CEOs can drag a company along for a while, but this is an undependable and temporary fix.”
• Economic theory ignores natural laws. It suffers an “absolute inability to process the finiteness of resources. ... Capitalism wants to eat into ... limited resources at an accelerating rate with the subtext that everyone on the planet has the right to live like the wasteful polluting developed countries do today.”
• It’s not just inexpensive oil we are running out of: The “loss of our collective ability to feed ourselves, through erosion and fertilizer depletion — has received little or no attention.”
• Americans are too optimistic: “They adopt a hear-no-evil approach to life and listen exclusively to good news. ... There are always a few experts lacking in long-horizon vision, simple common sense, or whose co-operation has been rented, like “expert” witnesses at a murder trial, who can be dragged out to reliably say that everything will always work out fine.”
• Governments must step in. “To interfere with Marx’s apocalyptic vision, we need some enlightened governmental moderation ... before capitalism gets so cocky that we have some serious social reaction.”
• Where Marx and Engels got it wrong was in thinking workers would unite. “It’s going to be hard to have a workers’ revolution with no workers. Organizing robotic machine tools will not be easy.”

http://www.zerohedge.com/print/444576