I read an article over on Making Light and it got me to pondering.
What libertarians (and the softheaded quasi-libertarian burghers of science fiction fandom, most of whom think the Economist is a voice of reason) need to learn is that capitalism is never about free markets, or in fact “freedom” of any sort; it’s about using the power of the state in order to make it easy for large amounts of capital to get together and rearrange the rules for its own convenience. “Privatize the profits, socialize the losses” is the logical consequence of capitalism’s prime directive. What we wind up with is socialism for the powerful, and tough shit for everybody else.
“Privatize the profits, socialize losses” seems to be a very apt description of Wall Street Capitalism. Every decade or two we seem to need to learn the lesson all over again. If rules and regulations get set up, the players learn to game the system while continually trying to undermine the regulators – Oh! they’re not needed anymore since we learned that lesson!
But I did start to ponder about the full matrix that the statement creates.
When I looked earlier at LJ it didn’t have my posts for the past month and wouldn’t let you comment on the LJ test posts. Now they are all there with comments. Boy, Elaine is good. Didn’t even get on the PC and fixed the problem.
My Live Journal postings have been scarce for the past month. This has been because I typically write my posts on eg and let a crossposter put them in my Live Journal (not quite Live Journal) But, Word Press was updated and the crossposter didn’t work for a while. Elaine finally figured how to make it work. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to change the parameter that allows LJ comments to stay on LJ. It looks like for the moment you have to jump over to eg to comment.
Not all observers, however, think that China’s unstinting appetite for commodities is super. The most common complaint centres on foreign policy. In its drive to secure reliable supplies of raw materials, it is said, China is coddling dictators, despoiling poor countries and undermining Western efforts to spread democracy and prosperity. America and Europe, the shrillest voices say, are “losing” Africa and Latin America.
I read this paragraph and immediately thought “How is this different from what the US has been doing for the past 100+ years? ” I might include the Europeans as well, after they had to relinquish their empires – coddling dictators indeed, setting them up in the first place, that’s what they were doing.
