Latest experiment is socialism ending the same as always...

Do you ever look at the portfolio to see what they're investing in?

Yeah @Lanzman - I'd love to see the source for your quip there.

a) I rarely use the GooFY, so not typical

b) the claim wasn't false.

4) eat a dick

I have to agree with Bill Mayer that the happiness reports are all subjective bull shit. Every year it says the world would be the happiest ever if we were all peasant hill farmers in Bhutan making $0.25 per day and shitting in a field. Nope.

Spoken by someone who has no idea of how any of this works. When people save for retirement, they don't take $100K they have laying around and invest it, they set aside a small portion of each paycheck towards their retirement in some kind of savings plan. It might be a 401K, it might be a Roth IRA, or it might be the services of someone they know and trust who works in the markets. In the case of Madoff, it was a combination of all those. People who had no idea of who Madoff was found that they'd lost a significant chunk of their retirement savings discovered that they'd lost everything (or most of everything) because the brokerage firm they (or their employer) had hired had invested in Madoff, and they didn't know the details of it (because if it showed up in their annual reports was deeply buried).

Yes, there were a few (and I do mean a few) people who had what you or I would consider to be large sums of money to give to Madoff, but for them, when they made the investment, it wasn't a significant portion of their income. To them, however, it wasn't necessarily a large amount of money, at that time. It only became critical when they were retired (or nearing retirement) and they found out that instead of having enough to live comfortably for the rest of their lives, they had nothing. Then it becomes a bit of a crisis.

When my grandfathers retired, at age 50 (and this was in the 60s), they expected to live only a few years after they stopped working. My one grandfather lived almost 20 years after he retired, my other grandfather nearly hit 30 years from when he retired before he passed. Neither one of them were what you would call wealthy when they were alive. My maternal grandfather was a beat cop who retired with the rank of sergeant from the Columbus police department. My paternal grandfather was a fertilizer salesman. Neither one of them wanted for anything in their retirement, thanks to their pension plans. Now, imagine if something had gone wrong with those plans at either near the point they retired or sometime after. What would you have them do? There were no Wal-Marts with door greeters in the area at the time, so that option was out. Do you think that in the early 70s anyone would have accepted the idea of a beat cop in his 70s? (That particular grandfather did well enough on the tests to become a detective, but office politics kept him from getting the position.) As for my other grandfather, he had the issue that he had to worry about his wife who was in bad health after they retired.

Now, how things played out, in reality, was different than one might expect. My paternal grandmother died when she was in her 60s, while my paternal grandfather died when he was in his 70s. On the maternal side, things were reversed, to a degree. My maternal grandfather died when he was in his 70s, while my maternal grandmother died when she was in her late 90s. (Said grandmother was born in 1900, this will become important later.)

Smoking killed my paternal grandmother, but despite this fact, my paternal grandfather (who was also a heavy smoker) out-lived her by over a decade. Had he died before her, he would have wanted to make sure that she was financially well taken care of since women of her generation were expected to be nothing more than housewives. Had neither of them been smokers, and lived to their normal life expectancy, they still would have outstripped the models when they were born. Or even within a few years of their deaths. Had their retirement income (outside of Social Security) dried up, they would have found themselves in very bad places. Essentially begging their children for help to maintain some semblance of being able to live on their own, even though they were largely in complete control of their mental faculties. (My paternal grandfather had issues which I think might have been related to Alzheimer's, but neither my father nor my step-mother would admit this. They thought that he was "just old." Because thinking that the cordless phone we had was the remote for the TV was "normal.")

On the maternal side, my grandmother outlived her husband by 20+ years. She was born in 1900, and she never learned how to drive a car, since that wasn't "lady-like" when she was growing up. (True fact, there was a woman in the town I lived in, who died in the late 80s/early90s who never had electricity in her house. The WPA offered to electrify her house in the '30s, but she'd decided that there was no point to it then, and then proceeded to live another 50+ years after.) My maternal grandfather would have done anything he could to ensure that his wife could enjoy her life after his death in any manner that he pleased. Someone like Madoff would have appealed to both my grandfathers as a person who could ensure that their widows would be well-taken care of after their deaths. In the case of my paternal grandfather, it didn't work out that his wife outlived him, but in the case of my maternal grandmother it did.

Now, if in your father's will he had suggested that you take the money from his estate and invest it with a certain person, would you have questioned it? I don't know what your answer will be, and I'm not going to dispute it. His reason for doing this was so that your mother could continue to live as she did while he was still alive. That's a good reason, I'd say. I don't know if you'd disagree or not, but I think that I'm safe in saying that you'd want to make sure that your mother was well-taken care of. Now, imagine if everything you did wiped out the money that had been set aside to take care of your mother. You weren't trying to hurt her, and you weren't trying to give her the kind of life that only a very small number of people enjoyed. You just wanted to make sure that no matter what life threw at her, she wouldn't have to worry about it. If all of that was stripped away, and just keeping her alive meant a significant investment on your part (because treating a minor medical condition of hers still force you to cough up a week's pay), would you be happy about that?

Now, imagine a world where your mother could have any medical treatment she wanted/needed, and didn't have to think about the cost because neither she nor her husband didn't have to think about their retirement plan. Which world would you rather live in? I don't know about you, but I would absolutely rather live in a world where either of my parents wouldn't have to worry that their medical treatments didn't cause pain and suffering to me. Or them. That's what we're talking about here. Would you consider someone to be greedy if they did their best to have enough money set aside so that their loved one could see a doctor and not have to worry about the cost? Is it greedy to think that you might rack up a lot of medical bills in your old age and not want your children/grandchildren to have to pay for them?

Of course. I get a hard copy of every transaction.

My father outlived my mother by nearly 16 years. He outlived his second wife by 5 years.

Ok. That's a different statement to "I believe socialism is inherently corrupt", but we can work with it. So by your logic the more people employed within a system the greater the chances of corruption?

So, what exactly did this Madoff person do? It seems as though there are two conversations happening here, one where he took from a pension fund and one where he took from some high risk investment scheme.

EDIT: Sorry, posted this without having seen @Tuckerfan 's post.

Perhaps, I've got no problem deferring to the better source Lanz will be along with any post now.

Which doesn’t answer my question.

My father didn't have a will.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/if

How did you divide the assets, then?

The old farmhouse deed is in your name, no?

Most states have a legal process for dividing up assets in the case someone does not leave a will. Usually it is divided up equally by next of kin.

History is on my side. Large-scale socialism (as opposed to the capitalism with some socialist aspects models in your "happy" countries) has never produced anything but misery. Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, eastern Europe when the Iron Curtain was a Thing, VietNam, etc.

None of them seem to be pushing the classic state ownership of the means of production, sure, but Venezuela didn't start out doing that either and only started doing that later as Chavez wanted to crush all opposition in order to consolidate his power. For everyone's own good, of course, or so he said.

Wasn’t their economy’s largest sector already state owned when Chavez came to power?

Partially, in that the state oil company was state owned but there were a large number of other oil companies which also operated in the country. The rest of the economy was pretty much all private.

Chavez started out forcing out all the other oil companies without compensation then progressively went after just about every single other line of business claiming they were some how working against the people. Essentially, he nationalized businesses without compensation first off oil companies then of political opponents before finally setting price controls below the cost of production and nationalizing any company which didn't comply or who went out of business.

That is how you get 90% reductions in the private sector and a collapsing economy. Hell, at the end he was nationalizing even farms then giving out land to supporters who had never farmed, didn't know how to farm, and weren't really interested in farming. Thus why even the farming sector collapsed.

State ownership has been a cluster fuck of nonfunctioning failure ever since. Absolutely nothing works.

My dad divided his hard physical assets (land, buildings, vehicles, equipment) between me and my sisters several years prior to his death. When he died we took all his liquid assets combined them and then divided them equally. It has worked out much more amiably than I expected.

Lack of will seems to run in your family.

So you and others of your ilk have nothing better than to attack my family or my home.

Oh yeah, how big of you.

what if.....work with me here....the investment company you trust turned out to be a long-term scam and you (and thousands of others) ended up with nothing? Bet that bullet to the head of whomever took the money sounds pretty fucking good doesn't it? Just sayin'

give a man a gun, he can rob a bank.
give a man a bank, he can rob a nation

One word: Enron.

One word: Capitalism

Except the discussion was explicitly about modern western styled social policies and how it makes sense for them to be called something different.

"Progressivism" as you yourself label it wouldn't have/wouldn't go down too well in most of those countries you listed.

@Bailey just posted the top 25. I don't see Bhutan anywhere.