Selling stocks short is a pure violation of an owners property rights by SovereignJim
(libertarian)
Saturday, December 26, 2009
The outlined definitions below are from Wikipedia. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A free market is a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to regulate against force or fraud. This is the contemporary use of the terminology as used by economists and in popular culture; the term has had other uses historically. A free market requires protection of property rights, but no regulation, no subsidization, no single monetary system, and no governmental monopolies. It is the opposite of a controlled market, where the government regulates prices or how property is used.
Free market theory holds that within the ideal free market, property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged solely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers. By definition, buyers and sellers do not coerce each other, in the sense that they obtain each other's property rights without the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or fraud, nor are they coerced by a third party (such as by government via transfer payments) [1] and they engage in trade simply because they both consent and believe that what they are getting is worth more than or as much as what they give up. Price is the result of buying and selling decisions en masse as described by the hypothesis of supply and demand.
Supply and demand is an economic model of price determination in a market. It concludes that in a competitive market, price will function to equalize the quantity demanded by consumers, and the quantity supplied by producers, resulting in an economic equilibrium of price and quantity. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Supply and demand" is defined with terms for fungible commodity trading. Stock shares are property, even though they are traded as fungibles, the definition becomes......It concludes that in a competitive market, price will function to equalize the quantity demanded by want to be owners, and the quantity supplied by owners, resulting in an economic equilibrium of price and quantity......Note that there is a commonality between "consumes" and "want to be owners" and also between "producers" and "owners". There is no honest commonality between "producers" and "short sellers" where producers actually create something and a short seller only collects cash along with a promise to buy at some time in the future which may never have to be fulfilled.
I assume that you agree with the above and with my definitions for honesty, morals and ethics.
Honesty requires freedom from deceit or fraud.
Morals are rules or habits of conduct with reference to standards of right and wrong:
Ethics are a set of principles supporting moral rules or supplying justification for moral rules.
The moral I am advocating is that one should not sell something where one does not posses sovereignty over what is sold. In addition, short selling of stock shares is contrary to an honest free market and violates a market operating by the forces of honest supply and demand.
The ethic I claim is that it is wrong to violate another’s property rights where property rights belong only to the sovereign owner of an item of property.
What are the property rights due an owner of a share of stock of a company? The most important right is that of determining the last traded price of a share.
Note that the public information about the entire worth of a firm is the last price times the total number of issued shares until a trade is made at a new higher or lower price. The owner of the shares sold in the last trade is the sole decision maker about the last price in the absence of short selling. No trade can take place, in the absense of short selling, without an owner's decision to accept the bid price of a want to be owner. A short seller steals from all the owners their collective right to establist the total worth of the company they own.
QED
Did you like this article? If you did, Thumb It! 1
thumb so far
The views expressed
in this article are those of SovereignJim only and
do not represent the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates.
SovereignJim is solely responsible for the contents
of this article and is not an employee or otherwise affiliated
with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.
Posted By: Jahfre Fire Eater
Date: 2009-12-28 09:28:20
Hi Jim,
Your rationale rests on a fallacy. From that starting point, all of your meticulous defining and qualifying, assertions and assumptions amount to fallacious presumption.
The basic false premise underlying your position is that a right is an entitlement. Like promoters of "health care" and all the other social engineering "rights-as-entitlements" notions that leftists gravitate towards, you make the same implications.
Phrases like "rights due" are obvious red flags that force, oppression or violence must be applied to ensure those "rights due" are delivered to those you decree are entitled to them.
I have described this pattern of illogical rationale for entitlements in my article "What Right Do I Have?" If you're interested you can read all the details there. I do not associate honesty and trust with folks who moo about liberty from the safety of a friendly herd. I put those who stand for sovereignty while simultaneously demanding they have "rights due" that must be delivered to them by others in the same category.
You have the rights you exercise. Period. I don't owe you any "rights due" and you must force me to do so. There goes your argument. When you presume the conclusion, as in mathematics, only one single counter-example is necessary to disprove the entire assertion. I am the counter example to your premise.
Try again Mr. Jim. No matter how you slice it, that emperor ain't wearing no clothes.
As you suggested, I first read your "What Right Do I Have?"
Let me begin on a positive note. Your paragraphs below are right on!
This damage allows the forces of oppression and those who intend to wield government force to eliminate their opposition to advance in the confusion. The progressives progress while their intended victims bicker over minutia. They didn't bring this country to the brink of collapse into socialism over night. They didn't waste energy trying to promote a third party or demonstrating in the streets. They spent a few years and a few million lives taking over the Democratic Party and controlling it for the past 70 years. They spent the last 40 years taking over the GOP and now progressives control both parties. Bickering over the emperor's new clothes will not undo that rot and set this country on a course for peace and prosperity. It takes effort to go into those parties and physically take control back from them, one position at a time.
As with any government enforced entitlement program, the rationale behind their existence is the political value found in promoting the good intentions of supporters. When one ignores consequences, and instead, substitutes good intentions as rationale for their behavior, they have entered the world of politics. In this world, intentions and popular misconceptions drive the behavior of a significant segment of the population such that political victory is not much dependent on real-world consequences but more so on perceptions, whether they are true or not. The simplest description of politics is the art of getting people to believe intentions and consequences are the same thing.
There is very good reason the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" has been so common for so long in so many cultures. Basing action on good intentions without regard to the direction it leads is a really, really bad idea that is pretty obvious to anyone who bothers to look at the consequences those actions have delivered in the past.
However I fail to see their relation to a discussion about rights.
You begin your attack on rights with
What is a right?
I ask this because the word "rights" is so pervasive in political discourse. It seems to be one of those words that describe something everyone knows when they see but nearly everyone has a hard time defining.
At the end you switch to using the concept of the word “liberty”, in its positive sense, as a substitute for the flawed “rights” without saying
What is liberty?
I ask this because the word "liberty" is so pervasive in political discourse. It seems to be one of those words that describe something everyone knows when they see but nearly everyone has a hard time defining.
I have extracted the following lines from your text to summarize and help me understand your argument.
1. They establish the concept of rights as entitlements.
1. For a right to exist it must be exercised. There are no potential rights or theoretical rights; there are only exercised rights and stories about them.
4. A Right must meet the following criteria to be recognized through the ages:
a. The consequences of exercising it must be first survivable and then advantageous to the individual and finally advantageous to the rest of the affected society.
b. It must be "secured." There must be a means of preventing those who oppose exercising the right or who would inflict dire consequences from doing so.
The main points that comprise my take on securing rights are:
... finding ways to secure our rights is the driving force that shapes our civilization.
The key to securing rights is unity.... . Securing rights requires unity FOR something
I like your words just above after "main points".
I offer the following for a proper concept of rights.
First are the rights held by a subject of a sovereign which are responsibilities of the sovereign. See my article “Sovereignism”.
What follows pertains to relationships between sovereigns.
I am FOR the concept of contracts, verbal and oral, and FOR their enforcement. A contract is an agreement. A contract defines obligations on the parties to the contract. My obligation in a contract with you is a right that you have. A group of people can individually agree to a contract to come to the aid of a group member under attack by an aggressor. They can also agree on what an item of property is and what are the rights of a sovereign owner of a property . They can also agree to employ an agency( Government ?) to protect those rights and to punish those who violate them. A sovereign owner’s right on a property object is referred to as a property right, for short hand.
Sorry Fire Eater.
Your overlong objection to my claims about short selling without citing a single claim with a simple explanation of what you think it is wrong with it is worthy of a bottom dweller politician. Your statement ”You have the rights you exercise. Period.” is a wonder. It seems to imply that I do NOT have a right to have the local fire department attempt to put out a fire on my house if I am not there to exercise that right, whatever “exercise that right” might mean in that context. You are not only being wordy but you also sometimes write unclearly. Also how does the “rights you exercise” phrase apply to a share owner's rights?
