‘Unintended Consequences’: Former Bain Exec Sparks Controversy Over Income Inequality

[Eugene]

Source: Yahoo! Finance

'Unintended Consequences': Former Bain Exec Sparks Controversy Over Income Inequality

By Aaron Task | Daily Ticker – 2 hours 34 minutes ago

In, Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong, Edward Conard sets out to provide "a prescription for how to grow the economy."

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"Underneath the book is a moral argument," he says. "Talented people have a responsibility to get the training they need to be successful risk takers and go out there to take risks. What I see is surplus of talented people and a shortage of people willing to take the risks."

As a result, policymakers ought to "be cautious about lowering the payouts for successful risk taking," he says. "If we do that, we can slow down the growth rate of the economy."

Given this is an election year — and Conard is raising money for Mitt Romney — these are fighting words and, some say, an insight into how Romney thinks.

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Read more: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/unintended-consequences-former-bain-exec-sparks-controversy-over-132549284.html

[yourout]

1. What a load of crap.....Pay people a decent wage and the economy will grow like crazy.

It isn't rocket science.

This yo yo is just trying to justify his Ferengi like existence even knowing full well what really drives the economy.

[The Magistrate]

2. Among The Problems Here, Sir, is That The Rewards Of Defeat Need To Balance Those Of Victory

No real risk is taken if no real suffering attends the person who takes the risk when it comes a cropper.

Where the rewards are so outlandish as those received by modern financiers and chief executives, the penalties must be similarly outlandish if the system is to have any balance. For instance, to take one from today's head-lines: the losses at J. P. Morgan. A few people are being put out of their offices, forced to live on their millions of dollars of capital --- hardly a fate to reckon with even looking from the short end at long odds. Something ranging from confiscation of all assets to make good what can be on the losses, to breaking on the wheel in a public square, would seem a proper balance for the enticement of the millions and billions held out as reward.

The fact is that these purported 'risk-takers' risk nothing at all themselves. They put at hazard the savings and employment and lives of many other people, but put at stake for themselves only their current place in the game. They want risk premiums, but only from a fully insured position.