Where did I put my bow and arrow?
Seriously, no, we shouldn’t go back to that, but we do need to invent a new “game” to play.
It’s not going to happen now. It will take decades if not centuries for a viable contender to the current scheme to evolve and replace it.
If you think back to when Europe was a feudal society, someone may have said “You know, I don’t like this and this aspect of the way we run our society”.
In response, someone may have replied “You are right, it’s failed. We should go back to being hunters and gatherers I guess.”
But of course, the first person couldn’t just sit there and invent the current market-based economy out of whole cloth and implement it in a couple of years.
It took decades and centuries for society to move from that old system to the one we have now.
And I expect it will take a long time for the current system to be replaced by a better one. But it will. Because it is broken.
The failure of the system that was, essentially, created in 1929 by law, which forced investment banking–a higher-risk venture–to be separated from commercial banking, essentially concentrating risk in a sector?
I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.
You’re right, the system we imposed on banking has shown itself to have problems.
More like daddy forced them to create schemes, while paying them to do it from mom’s purse.
Let me put it another way: The fundamental flaw with the current financial system is that it is a positive feedback system.
Positive feedback systems are inherently unstable.
The only way to stabilize a positive feedback system is with constant and frequent control.
So, we either keep the current system and increase the level and frequency of control, or we find a new system that does not suffer from positive feedback.
The latter will take a long time to develop (if ever), so we should be converging to the former option.
Do you also agree, though, that if, over the decades/centuries, we try different types of regulations and always end up with a crash, that maybe there is something fundamentally unsound about the system?
Let’s look at it a different way, as my last post may be seen to express something I did not intend. I am all for experimentation in creating a better free market. But supposing we could prevent various crashes is like saying we could create a system that cannot fail. Even rudimentary skepticism of the lowest order should be able to see that this is an engineering task that itself is destined to fail. Suggesting that there may be incentives the government can create that will avert some failures better is not to say that we cannot have economic failure. It will just be a different failure… maybe even a more spectacular one.
I know no one is paying attention to me but what the heck. I insist mixing market freedom and market regulation is a fallacy and only leads to misdiagnosing the problem. The problem in this case has zero to do with freedom of the market (which is a good thing) and everything to do with regulation of the market. The problem was that the market was poorly regulated, not that it had too much freedom. Freedom is always a good thing. Regulation can be good, bad, or neutral. In this case the relevant regulation was unsatisfactory and it was bad because of political motives. There are plenty of issues where politicians do not want to be the ones to burst a bubble and they may even contribute to create one but this is an argument against politicians, not against freedom of the markets.
What a fucking joke Shrub was tonight. Even in his failure he propogated the nationalistic spin that we are a “Capatilistic Democracy”. There was no Yellow cake and he lied. Just like him.
It’s “Social Democracy”…there, now was that so hard?
