You wake up in the morning and once again the financial weather report calls for the Apocalypse followed by brief showers of despair. Seeking a ray of hope, you turn on the television and settle in to watch a Capitol Hill hearing. There in the hot seat is the man who holds the entire U.S. economy in his hands. And he looks like Harry Potter….
We do need strong leadership. The world is in chaos. There are riots from Greece to China. Iceland has collapsed, and Mexico teeters on the edge. Pakistan is broke, melting down and awash in nukes. Yes, the stock market soared with Geithner’s toxic asset plan, but didn’t he and Obama dismiss Wall Street’s response when the first version of the bank bailout landed with a thud last month? Don’t we hate Wall Street? Obama and Geithner subsidize hedge funds on Monday and come back with heavy regulations on Thursday. What gives?
Gradually it becomes clear. This is not just a global economic crisis. It’s a global leadership crisis. Obama is still finding his footing, Gordon Brown is on his way out, Hugo Chávez is nuts and Wall Street management is larcenous. Isn’t there someone somewhere with decent values, a firm hand on the tiller and at least one big new idea? Where have all the leaders gone?
Very clever, but wrong. We have NOT had a free market but a very regulated one that highly favors the Superclass and Global Elites he has written about in the past. Their Trojan Horse is the Federal Reserve which has allowed them to pervert capitalism and the free market to their own use. The Fed must be abolished before we can return to capitalism and a truly free market.
The problem with blaming free market capitalism is that we haven’t tried it. What we have allowed is an ersatz facsimile that is stripped of the elements necessary for free market capitalism to work its wonders.
The classic historical argument on this point was the 1912 debate between ex-president Theodore Roosevelt and president-to-be Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt espoused what came to be called the “New Nationalism” or the view that economic “trusts” were an unavoidable component of the mature economy and all the state could do to moderate their excesses was to regulate them. Wilson pressed for what he called the “New Freedom,” a program of trust-busting to reduce the scope of industrial combination. Once in office, Wilson swiftly conceded much of the case to the New Nationalists and championed the establishment of the Federal Reserve.
The question I have, Dilbertnomore, is whether we’ve ever actually had free market capitalism in its pure form. Trust-busting has been tried at various times in American history but with limited success and, after all, prescribing combination is itself an interference with the market. Even in the early 19th century, many nations – including the United States – went through periods of protectionism for nationalistic motives that further skewed the economic picture.
Right Jeremy, will we ever learn?? Can you or anyone else tell us who said “..if we don’t remember the lessons taught to us by history we most assuredly will have to learn them again!!”.
The ever-helpful Wikiquote confirms my recollection that it was George Santayana, though the phrase he used was “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
On that point, I wonder is Bishop Cummins is watching the present unpleasantness with a certain wry humor (especially given that he never had the consolation of powerful supporters elsewhere in the world).
Jeremy, i am certain we have never tried completely free market capitalism. Much as I would like to see it, the pure form would likely kill us. When Congress wades in to control the market they never seem able to avoid the toll extracted by the Law on Unintended Consequence. And the more Congress tampers the more strongly the LoUC asserts itself.
Rothkopf: “….Many people bought into the idea of government as the problem…”.
Comment: It was the push for subprime loans by the government that initiated this problem. The resultant derivatives are either worthless gambling contracts or insurance contracts – no one has addressed this issue. AIG did them out of the country in England in order to avoid this government. These are what we taxpayers are covering. Fannie, Freddie, Barney, Chris, Franklyn Raines ….. It’s the government.
Rothkopf: Where are the leaders when we need them ? ….
Comment: Certainly not within the George Soros-Democrat Party-funded Wall Street milieu.
Rothkopf: Obama represents “… the hopes of a nation and of a world … surrounding himself with powerful, independent-minded advisors …” ( This is pathological shuck and jive. ) Then he goes on to suggest “… they look like a poster child for the early warning symptoms of groupthink….” ( Rothkopf can’t seem to figure out whether they are “powerful” or suffer from “groupthink”. This is a generation of wannabe smart people – Rothkopf is just another one of them – 5 miles wide / no depth. )