From Guru To Fallen Buffoon — Jeremy Grantham

Hardship and fear make people reveal their true self. Unfortunately for Grantham, it reveals his complete lack of understanding of the fundamentals and origins of the United States of America, his ignorance of economic forces, and his socialist penchant — with all the danger that this brings: love for taxation, big government, and so forth.

Here are some quotes from his July and August reports where he shares his position against capitalism and against free markets. I am gutted and amazed by such ignorance and — let's call a spade a spade — utter stupidity.

[...] Capitalism does not address these very long-term issues easily or well. It seems to me that capitalism’s effectiveness moves along the spectrum of time horizons, brilliant at the short end but lost, irrelevant, and even plain dangerous at the very long end.

[...] This is a severe, perhaps even fatal, flaw in traditional free-market capitalism, and there are others that relate to this general topic: capitalism has not easily handled the finiteness of our resources. This topic – deficiencies in capitalism – is a big one and I will try to do it justice next quarter.

It is a well known fact that corporations existence is to spend their cash in hiring employees they won't need, in order to have social justice. Right? WRONG!

Corporations are set up to make profit by selling products or services. If they do not want to invest their cash, it's their decision, their money, their private property. They have no purpose beside making money for their shareholders. If hiring helps them increase their profits, then, they will hire. If they do not see opportunities for higher profits by hiring more, they will not do so, understandably and obviously to anyone except to the socialists:

President Hoover bitterly railed at senior businessmen in 1930 and 1931 for sitting on their cash. President Obama would have felt sympathetic. Corporations today are doing very little hiring despite unusually high cash reserves. [...]

Justice — or more precisely, social justice! — is the typical goal of the socialists. Of course, this just a dream, an chimera, that cannot happen in the real world, but it won't prevent socialists to aim for it promote this beautiful, but in the end quite silly ideal. Let's also criticise those greedy bastards who dared to set up a company and employ people, giving them bread, butter, shelter by doing so. It's unacceptable. We should share those resources, and take away their money!

Ah, justice! There never was – and perhaps, with luck, never will be again – such a terrible comparison between the economic well-being of corporations and their officers and the economic ill-being of their ordinary employees.