今年CS是打破头。非常热的还有...

Musings     My Books     Archives     Books/Films How Empires Fall: Moral Decay April 20, 2019

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What are initial public offerings (IPOs) of unprofitable Unicorns but a form of institutionalized, commoditized fraud based on the sale of worthless securities to greater fools who are gambling that a second wave of even greater fools will pay a premium to gamble that the worthless shares can be sold to a third wave of supremely greater fools?

There is a name for this institutionalized, commoditized fraud: moral decay.

What are stock buy-backs but a form of institutionalized, commoditized fraud in which insiders borrow vast sums to reduce the number of shares outstanding to boost the per-share profits and hence the valuation of their portfolios and stock options? How does civil society benefit from this hyper-financialized concentration of wealth and thus political power?

There is a name for this institutionalized, commoditized fraud: moral decay.America is fatally riddled with institutionalized moral decay, and so are the competing powers of the EU, Japan, Russia and China.

Moral decay is the only possible output of systems that place the accumulation of personal wealth and political power above all other civic and economic values. When every system is nothing but a means to institutionalize and commodify fraud and extralegal privilege, there is no saving such a perversely asymmetric system from internal collapse.