[ExI] Economy: "The Big Takeover"

[Damien Broderick]

At 11:57 PM 3/24/2009 +0100, Dagon wrote:

>Annoying that only now the world starts looking critically at the 
>US-central free market
>paradigm, after it more or less *caused* a worldwide economic 
>meltdown (and more
>to come).

Yes, but as we've read here and elsewhere, the reply from free market 
advocates is that the current USian system is *not* free market, it's 
almost the antithesis.

On that view, it's a corrupt consortium of public officials largely 
buffered against consequences, ruthless tax gatherers without sense 
or pity, government largely by rich lawyers funded lavishly by 
special interests in exchange for favors, voters with their hands out 
for unearned benefits, and above and behind it all immense industrial 
and military oligopolies with little self-control yet able to command 
the resources of the nation without any serious internal or external 
checks or balances.

And yet the oligopolies are what many people both in the US and 
elsewhere think capitalism *is*, and it seems to be what ideologues 
tend to champion against horrid "socialist" alternatives (especially 
top down direction or supervision by elected deputies or their civil 
servant class operatives). But no, it's actually the travesty 
pilloried and reviled in the bible of honorable capitalism, ATLAS 
SHRUGGED: a cabal of facile unprincipled shits lacking in reason or 
self-knowledge, unwilling to contribute but eager to grab and retain 
what they can, seeing themselves as an aristocracy of entitlement. 
Maybe so, maybe so.

Damien Broderick