2011 documentary by Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson about wealth disparity in the US. There is an unflattering interview with Milton Friedman in there, along with a clip with Warren Buffet’s grand-daughter which paints the folksy billionaire in a not-so-benevolent light.

At the end of the day, this is where a jerry-rigged cronyist system gets you to, a hockey-stick shaped graph of wealth distribution with a protected aristocracy at the top.…

When I was a child, I was proud of my heritage and the fact that I counted among my distant relations none other than Otto Von Bismarck, the inventor of the modern welfare state as we know it today. As I matured and learned more about things like economics, math and the works of Charles Ponzi, I began to downplay my roots to Herr Bismarck.…

The post’s headline is a riff on the oft-cited response of Mohandas Gandi when asked his thoughts on Western Civilization. The implication being, of course, that the scenario asked about had yet to be attempted. As I watch the conclusion of part 3 of the BBC Documentary “The Love of Money” the narrator enumerates the fundamental axioms of thought which were slain in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis:

I was watching the BBC documentary “The Love of Money” on the fall of the Lehman brothers, and was particularly bemused by the closing comments of part two from non other than “The Maestro” himself, Alan Greenspan, offering his retrospective on “what went wrong”, why didn’t “the markets” function as expected in full meltdown mode?…