thole: What's your point?

Socialists are more concerned about saving souls than pursuing self-interest. They're not for change for the better, but Change you can Believe in. They're remarkably incurious about economic phenomena.

All religion is bad because it is based off of myth.

I don't believe in souls. I believe in maximising the health and happiness of people.

You would prefer to free people up to pursue their own desires, whatever they may be.

>.> I don't know how I feel about this statement. Religion is a cloak wrapped about human nature, a scapegoat for greed and violence. An excuse for war. A projection of goodness to disguise acts of evil. And a cage to keep the status quo firmly entrenched for the hope of a reward. But it's still just a thing. An idea.

Posted By JHBowden on 19 Aug 2009 08:25 AM

I don't believe in souls. I believe in maximising the health and happiness of people.

So you're telling me you've never done anything that did not involve maximizing happiness.

You would prefer to free people up to pursue their own desires, whatever they may be.

Absolutely. I see government as an umpire, not as a Nanny.

Note, if everyone's behavior is determined, it is illogical to proclaim some super secret gnostic insight into reality that few others have. There would be no way for you to escape the general doom!

Socialism not only reduces economic output, it creates chaos by incentivizing family breakdown with free government goodies. A fatherless society leads to juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, and violent crime.

In the 60s and 70s, American socialists promised to eradicate poverty within a generation; instead, their policies devastated our inner cities.

If we want to talk propaganda, note that socialism persists, despite its destructiveness, because the left controls Hollywood, most of the media newsrooms, and Academia.

    i just finished a book "the lost literature of socialism" by an oxford don.  it is available from amazon.

    i was struck by his quoting marx and engels about the destruction of backward nations, i.e. genocide,

    and the author claims in review of nineteenth centure literature the only literature that advocated 

    genocide was the socialist literature.   he also points out, before  the book  "liberal facsism"  that  hitler

             was an admirer of marx, a revolutionary and the head of a national socialist party. 

         in the newer book   Liberal Fascism  jonah

     goldberg disputes the placement of nazi, i.e. national socialists on  the right.   he points out that

     both communism and fascism are socialist heresies, with communism seeing itself as international

     socialism and fascism as national socialism.  and who was the founder of fascism.  benito mussolini

     who was  the son of a socialist, a socialist himself, and an editor of a socialist newspaper.

     while  communists wanted the state to own the means of production the fascists wanted to direct and

     control the corporations  that owned the means of production. just different forms of state control.

    also the rabid jew-hatred of  the nazis was not characteristic of  italy and spain,  where in italy before

    the germans took over the jews were not only safe but in the thirties many were leading fascists, and in

    spain, no jew was sent back to hitler once he crossed the border unlike even switzerland which did

    sent some jews back.

     i grew up the playmates whose parents had concentration camp numbers on their arms and had a

      classmate who told the riveting story in seventh grade about how he and his family had escaped

    from communist hungary during the 1956 revolution.  they needed a guide, they crawled through the

    mud and under barbed wire. and reached austria unseen by border guards.

     when writers talk about the evils of capitalism i wonder if they know what real evil is.  it is only

      under a market economy where man has a chance to escape the grinding power of the state.

p.e.l.

Nice post. The first few chapters of Liberal Fascism are outstanding. The chapter on Mussolini is great; he was adored by progressives in the 1920s the same way Hugo Chavez is worshipped today. Here in progressive Chicago we even named a major street after Mussolini's heir apparent, Italo Balbo. I find the eugenics chapter also to be well-done -- we forget that John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Sanger, H.G. Wells, and anyone who was hip enough to be progressive championed the idea. Conservatives like Chesterton were derided as superstitious oafs for writing against it.

Progressives never shut up about McCarthy's antics, which were often directed against other Republicans like Eisenhower. Yet they will never allow themselves to be reminded about their own revolutionary sins and experiments, which they shluf off on traditionalists and conservatives.

The worst part of the left is the doublethink.  They don't act as if induction is rational. If something fails 100 times, that means that, ceteris paribus, we have no reason to believe it will work the 101st time. But the left says we need to have hope! They also don't take facts at face value, as if what is evident must never be taken as evidence. This is the nonsense we hear about "root causes," from crime to terrorism. Progressivism is an epistemological black hole, as if we won a game of basketball and someone proclaimed in response that a jump shot is just a social construct. I'm not certain how to reason with illogical people without going through the basics of how to reason first.

if you discuss the left you might get some insight from tomas sowell the black economist who wrote"Visions of the Annointed" back in the 90s, also "the quest for cosmic justice". one interesting point he makes in another book is that american blacks have a different culture than blacks who emigrated from the carribean and other places and the immgrants and their children do very well i.e. colin powell.

about 40 years ago i had a conversation with my father.

"dad, the gov report says that poverty causes crime"

"son, i grew up in the depression when nobody had any money and there wasn't crime like this."

he was right. there wasn't.

finally just finished charles murray's "losing  ground".  he documents how welfare actually increased poverty.  he has a table with a comparison of mean unemployment  of blacks of diffent age groups         comparing 1950-65 and 65-80 after welfare.  the older age groups had up to -38% change, ie more work and the younger workers 20-24 +18.6%  and 16-17 +72.4%.  the left blames unemployment on racism but how does racism couse more work for older blacks and less for younger?

well welfare was radically overhauled in the 90s but the destructive effects linger.

you might also enjoy the work of eric hoffer the  longshoreman-philosopher who wrote "the true believer" in the 50s.  he is quoted as saying "every great movement ends up as  a racket"  i think of him every time i see al sharpton on tv.  unfortunate after the true greatness of martin luthor king who led a nonviolent revolution like ghandi. a few months ago i read "churchill and gandi" another interesting book.  more later

Posted By sbalbom on 19 Aug 2009 09:16 AM
thoke,

The poorest street bum in America has access to better health-care then the richest person alive did 40 years ago. That is a fact.  

I think you're wrong on that. A bum does not have access to health care at all. Zero multiplied by 1000 is still a zero. Your statement that the poorest state is richer than most European countries is also incorrect. US overall have a higher GDP per capital in the ladder but it does not tell the full picture. Salaries for middle-class people are higher in the mature EU countries. And they get better social security on top of that.
 

Though JHBowden advertised himself as being an expert on socialism I don't think he fully realizes how it works in a modern society outside US. Let's take public health-care for example. Opponents argue that it limits people's inherent right to choose at the individual level. But what good is that right if you have to work your ass off just to pay the medical bills once some shit happens? When you're dead, you're dead and you don't care about rights anymore. And on the society level it makes more sense to provide those services for free so that everyone on average scale would be healthier and more productive. Europeans tend to look at their governments as tools to achieve better quality in life and not as umpires. Thus it has little to do with redistributing wealth but rather how to make government work for people more effectively.

Regarding the original argument on capitalism itself it can be a lengthy discussion which I don't have a luxury to afford right now. But the problem in a nutshell is that it makes no sense. For it really is a rat-race: everyone is kept busy but is not really moving anywhere at all.

On a more fundamental level capitalism is based on two cornerstones: ability to own property and lending money for the interest. And both of them are flawed. The first one creates social injustice: we are told that if one works hard then he/she might achieve anything they want. But the truth is that some people are just born into money or have acquired it through illegal means - and they get dividends from the society nevertheless. Even more the principle itself ensures that most of the property eventually will  fall into the hands of the minority and these people will get the power to shape the society. A human born into such world has his/her choices seriously restricted - he/she can either join the rat-race to try to get into that minority or be denied of the wealth. So for example a person who has natural talent for some skill will be tempted to join business school instead because that's "a smart" thing to do if you want a big house, a yacht etc. (your own dreams get substituted by those engineered at the top)

The second principle effectively creates the illusion of false growth which by itself is unsustainable. I won't get into technical details (you can read them yourselves) but the end effect is that we do not have real money anymore - it is created out of thin air by banks. So if banks go kaput everything goes with them. Interest from the credit create inflation because structures like FED do not just distribute money - they lend it to banks. And that loan needs to be repaid with added monetary units that did not even exist before so the only solution is to constantly borrow more. That's the real reason why we have an economic crisis now. Marx himself predicted this systematic weakness in capitalism which eventually will bring a doom upon itself. Because it can only exist when there is sufficient room for growth - unused resources, underpaid labor. If growth stops, capitalism implodes and the illusion suddenly disappears. So that's what US have been doing for the past 50 years as the worlds superpower - hunting down resources and abusing weaker countries to support it's growth.

Tamagochi--

Talk of rights and social justice is pure poetry.

Median household income is much higher in the United States than it is in Europe. This can be empirically quantified. For instance, using purchasing power parity, the average American household brings in $50,233 yearly, while the number is only $39,000 in the United Kingdom. And those poor souls have to pay exorbitant taxes on it.

The poor get free health care through Medicaid in the United States. Your argument is already unsound from the outset.

The United States easily outperforms Europe when we consider waiting times for surgery, survival rates for serious illnesses, and the availability of advanced technology. For example, only 5% of Americans wait longer than 4 months for surgery; that number is 27% in Canada and 38% in the United Kingdom. The USA has four times as many MRI machines per capita than Canada. Your odds of surviving prostate cancer, or breast cancer, or colon cancer etc. are much higher in the United States -- not waiting for months in the queue has something to do with this.

USA's health care is flawed because our welfare state funds over 50% of it as a consumption subsidy, and because of a tax break for employer-based insurance which disables the competitive mechanism. Both these things drive up the cost for those not getting a goodie from the government.

Marx's theory is flat out wrong. He predicted the rich would get richer, and the poor would get poorer in the 1840s. Why the average citizen is swimming in science and technology today in 2009 is a mystery under the Marxist theory, since capitalism supposedly isn't sustainable.

The dirt worshipping environmentalists reach an even deeper level of stupidity. I remember a bet made between Paul Ehrlich and Julien Lincoln Simon about resource depletion. Simon had Ehrlich pick five commodity metals of his choice that should rise in price over a decade. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. All five went down in price.

Why does this happen? Because capitalism feeds off greed-- producers compete to make happy customers by increasing productivity, always doing more with less.

p.e.p.--

I've read Hoffer and a lot of Thomas Sowell, but haven't read Charles Murray yet. Thomas Sowell as a writer did more to move me from the left to the right than any other thinker. I was really pissed off after reading Vision of the Anointed around 2000 after my conservative uncle recommended it -- having one's worldview crushed to dust is never a pleasant experience.

I love Sowell's style as a person-- he is plain, direct, and simple, never answering questions with an evasive BUT in every sentence like the leftists do. There's a fundamental honesty about Sowell, a willingness to follow evidence wherever it may lead. While we can be disinterested, our choice of interests is never purely abstract; Sowell's work always has the improvement of the American black community lurking in the background. Sowell may never get the attention he deserves during his lifetime, mainly for the same reasons our culture does not give black CEOs attention for their achievements -- it doesn't fit the hopenchange template.

Richard Rorty complained that Continental philosophy is unconcerned about conceptual analysis, while English-speaking philosophy generally remains unconcerned about social problems, and wanted to bridge the two ways of looking at the world. Well, we already have that man in the person of Thomas Sowell, who has a robust theory of knowledge and decisions, cultural transmission, economic trade-offs, and visions of how we see ourselves in the world.

That I've encountered another human being who has read Thomas Sowell has made my day! I'm so sick of dealing with destructive morons who feed their minds with the puerile, jesting gestures of illiterate jokers like Jon Stewart and Senator Franken.

Cheers,

Jason

it was said years ago the last refuge of communism is the american university. certainly even in china the cp promotes capitalism while it retains political control.

i have been to cuba (legally) and have no illusions about how bad it is there.

i have been to the killing fields of cambodia and seen the stacks of skulls.

unfortunately the left never learns and still lives in its dreams.  perhaps in the 1920s or 30s it was possible to believe in the dream because the press did not publicize stalin's great crimes.  even now i am struggling to finish "execution by hunger the hidden holocoaust" by miron dolot a survivor of the political starvation of the ukranians.  i say struggle because i find it so emotionally painfull to read of the brutal tactics used to persuade  "volunteers" to sign up for communes. i haven't even got to the worst parts yet. oh yes, communes were not even new, they had been tried before under the tsar.

the times reporter walter duranty hid the truth and malcolm muggeridge who smuggled truthfull reports out it diplomatic pouches was fired from his job as a reporter and blackballed by the socialists editors and writers. stalin's  "usefull idiots" indeed.

it wasn't just duranty and it isn't just the reportors idiology.  a totalitarian government will revoke the visas of reporters it doesn't like and damage their careers as access is everything in these countries.  even sadam did this and one cnn leader even admitted this in an op-ed in the wsj or nyt, explaining why they could not tell the truth about iraq

jason

you might also enjoy listening to the free dennis prager podcasts on townhall.com . i like them so much i subscribe to get the commmerical free version.  i listen while i take long walks with the dog.

i have been reading sowell for over a decade now. an ex-leftist david horowitz is also interesting for his website frontpagemag.com.  he used to edit Ramparts, a left wing rag i used to devour in college in the 60s.

one my my high school friends was marxist from a whole family of marxists. he tried to teach me the dialectic, but it got nowhere giving my childhood experience with the victims of marx.

i don't mind people who are marxists as long as they are the groucho type

I think you're wrong on that. A bum does not have access to health care at all. Zero multiplied by 1000 is still a zero. Your statement that the poorest state is richer than most European countries is also incorrect.

US overall have a higher GDP per capital in the ladder but it does not tell the full picture. Salaries for middle-class people are higher in the mature EU countries. And they get better social security on top of that.

Though JHBowden advertised himself as being an expert on socialism I don't think he fully realizes how it works in a modern society outside US. Let's take public health-care for example.

Opponents argue that it limits people's inherent right to choose at the individual level. But what good is that right if you have to work your ass off just to pay the medical bills once some shit happens?

When you're dead, you're dead and you don't care about rights anymore. And on the society level it makes more sense to provide those services for free so that everyone on average scale would be healthier and more productive.

Europeans tend to look at their governments as tools to achieve better quality in life and not as umpires. Thus it has little to do with redistributing wealth but rather how to make government work for people more effectively.

Regarding the original argument on capitalism itself it can be a lengthy discussion which I don't have a luxury to afford right now. But the problem in a nutshell is that it makes no sense. For it really is a rat-race: everyone is kept busy but is not really moving anywhere at all.

On a more fundamental level capitalism is based on two cornerstones: ability to own property and lending money for the interest. And both of them are flawed. The first one creates social injustice: we are told that if one works hard then he/she might achieve anything they want. But the truth is that some people are just born into money or have acquired it through illegal means - and they get dividends from the society nevertheless. Even more the principle itself ensures that most of the property eventually will fall into the hands of the minority and these people will get the power to shape the society. A human born into such world has his/her choices seriously restricted - he/she can either join the rat-race to try to get into that minority or be denied of the wealth. So for example a person who has natural talent for some skill will be tempted to join business school instead because that's "a smart" thing to do if you want a big house, a yacht etc. (your own dreams get substituted by those engineered at the top)

The second principle effectively creates the illusion of false growth which by itself is unsustainable. I won't get into technical details (you can read them yourselves) but the end effect is that we do not have real money anymore - it is created out of thin air by banks. So if banks go kaput everything goes with them. Interest from the credit create inflation because structures like FED do not just distribute money - they lend it to banks. And that loan needs to be repaid with added monetary units that did not even exist before so the only solution is to constantly borrow more. That's the real reason why we have an economic crisis now.

Marx himself predicted this systematic weakness in capitalism which eventually will bring a doom upon itself. Because it can only exist when there is sufficient room for growth - unused resources, underpaid labor. If growth stops, capitalism implodes and the illusion suddenly disappears.

So that's what US have been doing for the past 50 years as the worlds superpower - hunting down resources and abusing weaker countries to support it's growth.

Also, Tam you articulate very well Thank you for contributing.  Surely we all want to see the best for our fellow men and women.  We only dissagree on how we get there.  I am pleased we have a diversity of opponion here on the boards and will never censor anyone here for having desenting views. 

-JHB Brilliant as always. I'm glad you are half on my team....

I think you're wrong on that. A bum does not have access to health care at all.

-JHB Brilliant as always. I'm glad you are half on my team....

Posted By JHBowden on 08 Sep 2009 06:11 PM
Talk of rights and social justice is pure poetry.

 

Poetry is important INFJs have this concept of "poetic justice" that appeals to us.

Posted By sbalbom on 08 Sep 2009 07:35 PM
I think you are reading myths from leftest propaganda. A bum on the street has access to the same state of the art medical care from the same doctors and hospitals that I do. And because he is a bum he gets it for free or nearly so. In the US it is a crime for a hospital to deny someone in need of help. Not only that but it is state of the art. Odds are he sees better trained doctors and has access to the best drugs and treatment, better then in your country.

That bum probably does not have access to all those expensive MRI machines, surgery procedures and Harvard graduates, does he? I guess you haven't watched Sicko from Michael Moore - a few lessons I have learned from it is that if you do not have insurance and somehow get a few of your fingers cut off then the doctors will not sew them back for free. You either choke up cash or loose them forever. Or what if you worked hard, economized on medical bills and suddenly got cancer when you're not "supposed to" (at your twenties for example). Then you have a preexisting condition and you cannot buy insurance anymore. You're doomed and out of luck. Both of those things would not happen in my country. And these are just a few examples. But I'm not saying that socialized medicine is perfect too. Scandinavia is suffering from the abuse of it's social system - when people refuse to work and just live off the overly generous allowances.

Posted By JHBowden on 08 Sep 2009 06:11 PM
The United States easily outperforms Europe when we consider waiting times for surgery, survival rates for serious illnesses, and the availability of advanced technology. For example, only 5% of Americans wait longer than 4 months for surgery; that number is 27% in Canada and 38% in the United Kingdom. The USA has four times as many MRI machines per capita than Canada. Your odds of surviving prostate cancer, or breast cancer, or colon cancer etc. are much higher in the United States -- not waiting for months in the queue has something to do with this.

It works differently in Europe than you have described. First of all we have access to public insurance and can receive treatments which are maintained by paying taxes. There indeed are longer waiting lines and the technology is a bit lagging in some places. But those who want can have access to private medical care also - there lines are nonexistent and the technology is up to date with US. The added benefit is that private companies are forced to compete with government plans so their price of insurance is lower than US for the same level of quality.

Posted By JHBowden on 08 Sep 2009 06:11 PM
Marx's theory is flat out wrong. He predicted the rich would get richer, and the poor would get poorer in the 1840s. Why the average citizen is swimming in science and technology today in 2009 is a mystery under the Marxist theory, since capitalism supposedly isn't sustainable.

Marx has made some mistakes and he is no hero of mine by all means. I was born in Soviet Union and got first-hand experience on how this theory got terribly wrong. The only reason I brought him up is that he showed some of the weaknesses in capitalism and we should be grateful for that. Because it allows us to improve current system for the better. But I'm no way advocating for the measures Lenin and Stalin took by forcefully redistributing wealth.

Posted By JHBowden on 08 Sep 2009 06:11 PM
Why does this happen? Because capitalism feeds off greed-- producers compete to make happy customers by increasing productivity, always doing more with less.

 

Greed corrupts We need a better foundation for social economics than that.

Posted By sbalbom on 08 Sep 2009 07:35 PM
You only look at dollars. If you look at what quality of life someone has in the US who makes a $26,000 and up has it is fantastic. If someone makes 30,000 a year which is low but professional they have everything they want. TV, nice apartment, all the great food they can eat, medical care, nice clothes and even can save for retirement. They might not become rich but they have a great quality of life. Making 26,000-30,000 a year in this country is on the low end for anyone who works and shows up to work sober.

A rich person who makes a million dollars a year enjoys a nicer car but I have a nice car. I have a ford they have a BMW. So what. I see doctors who went to Harvard, they see doctors who went to Harvard. They have a huge house. I have a roommate in a house. They live in a gated community. I live in a nice suburb of the city. They have nice clothes I have nice clothes. For 140$ a month I have a cell phone unlimited with unlimited internet and GPS. So do they. I have a nice computer... they may have two. I eat at home and eat out 2 twice a week. They eat out when they feel like it. I can't travel, they can travel as they wish. So what. There that is the difference between being rich and poor in America. Oh I do my own laundry and cook my food.

surprise surprise but it's the same case here also An average middle class salary man makes about 20K USD per year (after taxes) but prices are in general 2-3 times cheaper for most services so the purchasing power is equivalent to someone who makes 40-50K in US. And that's only after twenty years of capitalism. People in UK and Ireland have it much better by making 3-5 times more than us but they have 3 times more expenses. All in all quality of life has improved dramatically in our country under capitalism. But all I'm saying - let's not stop here. Let's search for ways to create wealth in a more sustainable way - one which would not rely on excessive consumerism and abuse of resources. Capitalism is good but it's not the best.

Posted By sbalbom on 08 Sep 2009 07:35 PM
50% of all pattens come from America. 50% of all advances, of technology of how to accomplish more with less comes from less then 6% of the world population. 45% of all research and development spending comes from this country. Most of the worlds lifesaving drugs and treatments come from this country. Millions around the world would be dead if not for a capitalist America. If you want better medical care for people you allow conditions that allow for more advances. Advances in drugs, treatments, medical technology are expensive and risky. The average cost to bring a drug to market is 8 years and over $100 million dollars. Have you ever funded a project or made an investment that lost everything? Most drugs don't get approved in which case the investors lose everything. The most efficient way to deal with the problems, like it or not is to have a free market where talent is rewarded for spending a good portion of their life and wealth for doing such crappy work.

Let's stop and think about it for a moment. The fact is that most of the world today has embraced capitalism. Africa is running capitalism, China is running capitalism, my country is too. So why all the goodies still come from US as you have said? Why Africa is not advancing medical science? Can't you see a bit of contradiction here?

Posted By sbalbom on 08 Sep 2009 07:35 PM

Regarding the original argument on capitalism itself it can be a lengthy discussion which I don't have a luxury to afford right now. But the problem in a nutshell is that it makes no sense. For it really is a rat-race: everyone is kept busy but is not really moving anywhere at all.

Nonsense. You need to re-read classical economics.

I've found an amusing story to illustrate my point on how "wealth" is created under capitalism. It's translated from Russian. Enjoy

* * *

Imagine that you and two of your best friends are on a passenger plane somewhere over the Pacific ocean while having a really good time with vodka. After severe drinking you get wild and start to offend other passengers, sexually threaten the flight attendants and even rip off the toilet door. The crew has it enough of your inappropriate behavior and throws you all out through the baggage door into the ocean together with that door you're still holding. Yet somehow you managed to survive the fall and have landed near a small uninhabited island. After you've successfully settled on it you decide to name it "The United States of Alcoholics" just for fun. After all it was the cause of your unfortunate side-trip.

Your luggage, of course, remained on board and the only asset you have now is that toilet door you grabbed along. There are no other tangible assets on the island. As strange as it could be you then unexpectedly find a 100$ note in your pocket which somehow survived the drinking spree. The net balance of USA is now one tangible asset - the door, and the financial asset - money - yours 100$. Thus we could conclude that all tangible assets on the island are worth 100$.

After sobering up you all seek for some activity and one of your friends declares that he establishes a bank. He starts accepting deposits from USA citizens for the annual interest of 3%. That's easy money so you agree and make a deposit. The banker maintains his records under strict regulation and marks your contribution as a deposit in his balance.

But your second friend is also an entrepreneur. He had studied economics and knows how to take your door and your 100$ for himself - he establishes an investment bank. His offer is 5% annual interest for the obligation from his bank. The broker takes out his notebook and writes on the sheet of paper "an obligation for 100$ with 5% annual return". You're are so happy to get a bigger return that you go to the saddened banker, take back your deposit and give it to the broker in exchange for the security. He then goes to the bank himself, makes a deposit and one happy banker.

Everything could have ended at that point and the people of this island could have put themselves to some useful activities. Like climbing up the palm-tree for coconuts or fishing - to make a normal living in other words. But the broker is too smart-assed for that kind of work and he would rather engage in business activities rather then climbing trees. So he approaches you and offers to earn additional 1% of returns without any risks involved. For he has a plan: you should take a credit from the bank for 4% of interest and give that money to the broker for 5% obligation. And he writes out another obligation from his notebook and waves around your nose. So you do exactly like he advised - get the credit from the bank and now you have 200$ worth of obligations in your pocket. The broker makes another deposit and the bank now has a total of 200$ of them. But the broker did not stop here... Quickly he has issued a third obligation. You use your second obligation as a collateral at the bank and get another loan to buy more obligations. At the end of the day you own 5000$ worth of securities from the broker and he has 5000$ worth of deposits at the bank. At that point the broker comes and offers to buy a door from you for 100$. But the door is a valuable asset so you agree to sell it for 1000$. The broker accepts, instructs the banker to deposit 1000$ in your account and takes the door.

If you show this story to an certified accountant she would tell that USA now possesses tangible assets worth of 1000$ in a form of a door and 10000$ worth of financial assets in a form of deposits and obligations. Net wealth of the island has grown 110 times in one day. Less-educated people would notice three idiots who have spent all day ripping pages from a notebook instead of doing something useful. As real assets - the door and 100$ note - have stayed the same.

If the story is continued then at the time of credit repayment you would notice that you don't have enough cash for that. So the banker seizes your obligations. But the broker also does not have enough cash to buy them back. Thus the banker legally gets control of the door from him and the 100$ note. Such is the story of the Island's Great Financial Crash.