Well, this is incongruous but so is the issue. There was a time, not even that long ago, when most villages had their blacksmith. He would exercise his trade for which he was paid. And what he did was crucial to the well being and prosperity of the village. His labor was a key contributor to the societal wealth of his neighbors and community. And that was how the economy turned. Tradesmen and laborers performed services, made things, plowed fields for which they received remuneration generally reflective of the services provided or goods produced.
And yet today there is a transformative malevolence that has embedded itself into our system which has cast away all balance between labor and reward. A malevolence that is beginning to impose a threat to our very institutions and our sense of the fairness in the way they now function.
Here we have a Mr. John Paulson of Paulson & Co. who in the course of last year has amassed a pay chest of $5 billion going long and short stocks, bonds and commodities. All without having contributed a single iota of productive addition nor economic benefit to the economy, unless if one calls riding the markets to a casino style $5 billion killing 'beneficent.'
Not even functioning as an investment bank supplying capital to start up businesses or corporations in need of expansion capital, one of our system's necessary and worthy banking functions. Last year's $5 billion comes after having amassed $15 billion just a couple of years ago. Paulson has accrued enormous benefit on the back of the labor and economic turbulence of others. No smithy he. Why get your hands sullied if you have a hotline to Goldman Sachs, and "expert networks" and as in years past, instead of supplying capital for growth, marshaling capital to bet against sub-prime mortgages in consort with Goldman Sachs expediting the destruction of value in homes in great swaths of the country.
Mr. Paulson is cited here simply because he is the most public of his clan of financial operators. Not for any nefarious reason other that he stands out as an exemplar of a financial system that has gone off the rails, where speculation is rewarded in dimensions greater than actual productive labor in degree close to being beyond measure.
With today's headlines of Wall Street's record payout while millions are still out of work or dispossessed from their homes something is clearly wrong. And if those responsible for our governance do not soon take heed Cairo's Tahrir Square will be but one subway stop away!