{"id":569,"date":"2008-04-18T14:54:51","date_gmt":"2008-04-18T21:54:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stardel.com\/eg\/?p=565"},"modified":"2008-04-18T14:54:51","modified_gmt":"2008-04-18T21:54:51","slug":"entering-the-economic-quagmire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/2008\/04\/entering-the-economic-quagmire\/","title":{"rendered":"Entering the economic quagmire…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read an article over on Making Light<\/a> and it got me to pondering.<\/p>\n

What libertarians (and the softheaded quasi-libertarian burghers of science fiction fandom, most of whom think the Economist<\/em> is a voice of reason) need to learn is that capitalism is never about free markets, or in fact \u201cfreedom\u201d of any sort; it\u2019s 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. \u201cPrivatize the profits, socialize the losses\u201d is the logical consequence of capitalism\u2019s prime directive. What we wind up with is socialism for the powerful<\/a>, and tough shit for everybody else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Privatize the profits, socialize losses” seems to be a very apt description of Wall Street Capitalism.\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n

But I did start to ponder about the full matrix that the statement creates.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Privatize profits ——socialize losses<\/li>\n
  2. Socialize profits——socialize\u00a0 losses<\/li>\n
  3. Socialize profits——privatize losses<\/li>\n
  4. Privatize profits——privatize losses<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \n
    1. is straight Wall Street Capitalism<\/li>\n
    2. is probably straight Socialism<\/li>\n
    3. is never going to happen, or is it philanthropy?<\/li>\n
    4. is complete anarchy\/ true capitalism<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      I must continue my pondering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      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 \u201cfreedom\u201d of any sort; it\u2019s … Continue reading Entering the economic quagmire…<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[48,52,24],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics","tag-economics","tag-politics","tag-stupidity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4NpF-9b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}