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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> On the second point, the elephant in the room is that smart people in the US can make 2-3X as much in software or finance as they can in manufacturing, so what do you think they're going to pick?

Make unions stronger and kill off all of Wall Street finance shenanigans that's purely devoted to creating money out of thin air or skimming (especially HFT). That house of cards is going to crash hard anyway, so best tear it down in a controlled fashion than risk yet another 2008-style uncontrolled implosion.

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"We've gotta destroy the economy to prevent the economy destroying itself!" isn't a rallying cry that is likely to garner much support.

Do you have any favored proposals for preventing "finance shenanigans"? Given the amount of money involved, I expect any government-driven reformation will be corrupted to serve private interests.

> "We've gotta destroy the economy to prevent the economy destroying itself!" isn't a rallying cry that is likely to garner much support.

That is exactly what you need to do though, blow up the dam now and release the water instead of waiting for it to build up and destroy the entire city. They do that small scale by increasing interest rates already, but sometimes you maybe need to do more.

The economy of Wall Streeters is divorced from many natural economies these days. Perhaps they have already rendered their desires irrelevant and countervailing to mine and those of others.

> especially HFT

People deciding to kill things in domains they haven’t the vaguest conception about is how we wound up in this situation. (Killing HFTs would be a major boon to Wall Street. You’re mandating an increase in transaction costs.)

We wound up in the situation we are because we let the forces of the free market have free reign in creating all possible sorts of quackery and bullshit.

> Wall Street finance shenanigans that's purely devoted to creating money out of thin air

Creating money out of thin air has literally been the primary economic function of banks since the Renaissance. You have some people willing to provide useful goods and services, but there aren't enough standardized IOUs to pay them, so you issue new standardized IOUs.

Perhaps there is no saving it via a soft landing and the smartest move is to crash it now instead of letting more pile up for a bigger crash later.

>Wall Street finance shenanigans that's purely devoted to creating money out of thin air or skimming (especially HFT)

Society is so damn lucky that techbros are politically irrelevant.

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