Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to "Mortgage subsidies"?

Worst of all possible worlds
TB — (archived)

The government/corporate circle jerk that you point out is the inevitable result of giving a government too much power over economic activity.

The socialist delusion is if you just give the state enough power, the big economic powers will fade away under the pressure. The actual end result is that you look back and forth and suddenly you can't tell the pigs from the farmers. The companies who play by the rules are smacked down by the ones who grease the palms in Washington and help make the laws governing their own industry. Oddly, many of these laws tend to keep competitors out of the business.

The real solution is reducing the power of the state, but nobody wants to go there. The politicians make out like bandits under the current system as much as the private abusers.

So we end up not with private, not with public, but with a screwed-up chimera of both that is open to abuses free of either market forces or rational regulations. And all of it instigated and run by people whose ignorance of the laws of economics is amazing.

The same was true of the original savings and loan debacle, which "deregulated" an industry while maintaining the insurance safety net under the industry. "Go ahead, do something stupid. We'll catch your customers if you fall."

Or the "deregulation" of the energy industry in California, which for some insane reason forbade price increases to the consumers.

If you think this is "capitalism," try again.

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