As you may imagine, current circumstances have put me in mind of past discussions of economics and politics. I ran across this article:
Well, yes, it is people who have failed. This was the entire knock on communism as it played itself out; the notion of "to each according to his need, from each accoding to his ability" sounds great theoretically, but people are well-known to be selfish and lazy. So in a real economy, real people gamed that system to drive the most goods towards themselves with the least effort on their own part. That wasn't part of the system's design; it was a flaw in the system's conception.
This is also just what I've always believed about capitalism and the free market (as I've remarked often and at volume). These may be great ideas in the abstract, but people are no damn good, and without accounting for that, the system has the same fatal flaw that communism had. (Some) real people will cheat, lie, bribe, intimidate, steal, collude, and conspire to direct the maximum money, influence, and power possible into their own pockets at the expense of others. In my (admittedly socialist) view, that is the role of government: to protect the average citizen from unprincipled thugs and villians, whether that be foreign hostiles, internal criminals, scoff-laws, or financial scoundrels.
Yes, of course, they will also attempt to contort the government to their own ends as well as everything else they touch, but it is only government in which the average working guy has a chance to assemble a credible force to advocate for his interests against the powerful and well-connected. The collection of taxes is the only way for people of modest means to accumulate enough resources to battle the well-financed and bad-intentioned.
Whether in the employment situation or "the market" (or government itself,) it is not the philosophical design of the system which hurts us, but the fact of bad acts by bad actors. In my opinion, it is simply an unacceptable design of a proper social order to allow our nation to careen down the road from one disaster to another while a system supposedly purified by de-regulated makes its adjustments at the expense of innocent and powerless people just trying to get by.
Some of us will always be without the years and wherewithal on tap to wait for the eventual recovery or "market adjustements", if any. Interestingly, Ron Paul had a column on the subject in the local paper here (which embraces a libertarian view) that the fault has been, of course, NOT ENOUGH deregulation. I like the simplicity of the idea: Let's just do away with laws and enforcement mechanisms against fraud and theft, and just set our valuables out on the curb each night ... it'll all work out.
Ironically, since our family has been in a position to save rather than spend much of what we earned (i.e. since daughter graduated college), our conservative and "diversified" portfolios of invetments have had really crappy returns, through good times and bad. They did okay during the Clinton years, returning enough to beat inflation by a little, but otherwise, our even-more-conservative CD's and insured passbook savings have beat them consistently. This past year or two is something new, though, with wholesale losses of 10%, 20%, 30%. It is not particularly comforting to a retired person to hear economists and investment gurus explain that eventually the markets will adjust - in five to ten years.
I don't know whether the bailout is a good idea or not. But, like military service, agree with it or no, I know we'll pay the price for it. I just visualize the hours I spent working alone in our architectural office, in some cases right through the next work day, which generated that lost money, and realize that in a very real way, I would have been better off at home with my family. The working classes of our generation who have tried to be responsible financially have been raped.
And I don't think it's over.
Not that I'm bitter.
