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Three rousing cheers for Goldman Sachs and free markets
web posted December 21, 2006

By Carl Langley
EdgefieldDaily.com contributing columnist



There’s nothing like a success story, or hundreds of success stories, to set our liberal scolds and complainers to weeping and wailing and screaming their protests against the free enterprise system.

Now, during the season of good will to all men, our socialists and communists, welfare advocates and plain old curmudgeons of all types are beside themselves over the generosity of the huge Goldman Sachs investment firm.

Goldman Sachs, its portfolios bulging with cash, is rewarding its employees from top to bottom, from vice presidents to secretaries, with cash gifts running from multi-millions down into the hundreds of thousands.

If you worked for Goldman Sachs in the past year you are now eligible to go out and buy a BMW, Mercedes or Lexus and pay cash, or make the down payment on a beach home, or set aside the thousands that will be needed to send children through college.

Don’t I wish I had gone into the brokerage business and worked for a company like that? I bet you do too, unless you are the owners of a few blocks of stock in this magnificent company.

Goldman Sachs, which reportedly earned more than $6 billion in the past year, has a long and distinguished history of financing companies large and small, at home and overseas, and turning the investment income into pyramids of cash.

Now the company has outdone itself in a year marked by a superheated economy, and the liberals unlucky enough to be on the outside looking in are out with their verbal knives slicing up Goldman Sachs.

The New York Daily News, a rag with an unapologetic leftward tilt, found the Goldman Sachs earning report to be obscene, wailing in an editorial that there is something wrong with the capitalist system when one company’s bonus pool is big enough to end poverty in New York City.

Goldman Sachs, apparently unknown to the Daily News, is not a social welfare agency. It’s an investments company, with an obligation to return the biggest dividends possible to its shareholders.

Goldman Sachs, to its credit, also knows who is responsible for the company’s excellent financial health and earnings power. It’s the employees, stupid, and that is where the bonus money is going.

The Daily News editorial writer didn’t bother to note that the poverty rolls in New York are created mainly by people who never bothered to get an education, fell in love with the bottle or drugs and inherited genes that tell them to avoid work at all costs.

I don’t own a penny of Goldman Sachs stock, but after reading the year end financial report I wish I did. I do invest in mutual funds and my accounts have done very well this year. My broker, Maralyn Henry, is one of the smartest women in this town, and I have left it up to her to keep me out of the poverty classification.

America’s enduring grace is that it is built on the capitalist system, called by one famed economist of the past as the greatest economic force ever devised by man and fueled by the democratic system. I wish the liberals, who believe everyone’s dimes but their own belong to the populace at large, could get the message that there is no free lunch. Someone has to pay.

The New York Sun, the only newspaper in the Big Apple to speak up for Goldman Sachs, noted in an editorial defending the company and the system that Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive who got a $54 million bonus, was the son of a Brooklyn postal worker.

Blankfein, the Sun said, applied himself in school, won a scholarship to Harvard and began his career at Goldman Sachs in the bottom tier. By his own intellect and hard work he rose to the top and now commands the biggest paycheck in the company. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work in our system?

The Sun also pooh-poohed the critics who claim Goldman Sachs’ only product is money. That is true, but the profits generated and turned over by the company are plowed into the capitalization of old and new companies who are engaged in the manufacture of products in countries around the world.

In short, Goldman Sachs’ financial support makes possible goods and jobs in practically every sphere of commerce. Take that away, and what will you have? You will have worldwide poverty, the very demon the liberals raise whenever they take to the streets and podiums to condemn the free enterprise system.

The best way to describe these critics is that they are intellectual midgets whose ignorance of free markets is lamentable, and it makes certain that they will be forever doomed by their Marxist philosophy.
 

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