Friday, January 09, 2009

Conspiracy, not c*ck-up

Michael Hudson sees the current crisis as deliberately fomented, and intentionally anti-democratic (htp: Anon, on Nourishing Obscurity). The economic is now shading into the political:

What do you mean “failure”? Your perspective is from the bottom looking up. But the financial model has been a great success from the vantage point of the top of the economic pyramid looking down. The economy has polarized to the point where the wealthiest 10% now own 85% of the nation’s wealth. Never before have the bottom 90% been so highly indebted, so dependent on the wealthy. From their point of view, their power has exceeded that of any time in which economic statistics have been kept.

You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards; it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite.

Meanwhile, Karl Denninger makes his case for the perpetrators of the credit crunch to be penalized under the US laws relating to mail fraud.

4 comments:

Paddington said...

And the rich will bring themselves down with the rest of us. The economy depends on a lot of technology, which in turn depends on education. Hurt that system enough (which is what the government has done in the US and the UK), and the whole of civilization collapses.

AntiCitizenOne said...

We're in this mess precisely because of Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions.

You can't "share" productivity by state extortion, you only destroy it.

Sackerson said...

I hear the New Deal was permitted because it looked as though the alternative was social breakdown followed by communism.

James Higham said...

Relating to mail fraud - that's a good angle.