Given the almost universal acknowledgment that the US government’s policy should be to bail out any large entity whose failure would have a powerful downward effect on the overall economy, isn’t that an all-but-explicit acceptance of the desire for a government that actively controls the economy? Would anyone care to split that hair in a meaningful way? I don’t know at what point this happened, but capitalism is dead, isn’t it? It may be face-saving to insist that we live in an unregulated dog-eat-dog competitive economy, but isn’t it just class warfare to allow massive, ruinously expensive bailouts of entities like banks and investment banking houses and auto manufacturing industries while it’s offends Americans to throw sums of money to the poor, the disadvantaged, the ill etc? Seems to me the fear that SOME of the first group might end up anywhere NEAR the living conditions of the second group drives us to allow bailouts of the first but to demonize bailouts of the second group, who of course are already living in the conditions that are simply unthinkable for the first.
Think about it: the rationale for the bailouts of financial and manufacturing giants is ultimately that the economy will go so badly absent the bailout that middleclass folks will suffer the worst effects of homelessness, poverty, broken families, lack of opportunity, despair so we must do anything, no matter how hypocritical it seems in a capitalistic economy, to prevent that from happening. But it is already happening to other people: if we apply the same exact principle to them–throwing money at them that they haven’t earned, and some cases have had in their grasp but foolishly squandered, to raise them from these awful conditions–that’s “socialism” and that offends Americans.
The bailouts may not be laissez-faire capitalism, but they sure as hell aren’t socialism. There is no attempt by the bail outs to take ownership and control of the commanding heights of the economy away from individual ownership and place it under popular control. Even when the government is buying shares, they are explicitly buying non-voting shares.
That makes it even worse than socialism: In true socialism, the government would take over both the advantages and the responsibilities of an industry. In the bailout, the government is just taking over the responsibilities, but letting the companies keep the benefits.
The first one, or as one dictionary puts it: “a scale of continuous gradation; continuum.”
In other words, even the most non socialist is necessarily a little bit socialist. From there on to full blown socialist and beyond, it’s merely a matter of degree. Everyone is a socialist, it’s just a question of how much and in what ways.
The money channels like CNBC are even calling it capitalism for the profits and socialism for the losses. They keep everything they stole. When they lose it is a tax payers problem. The best of both worlds . We spread the losses among the tax payers.
They do not distribute the profits,only the losses. That is a twisted system for sure.
whack-a-mole The Domestic security force is actually kind of disturbing. Blowing off such fears isn’t reasonable. What he needs to do is just not deploy the National Guard overseas. Creating another Domestic security force is scary in a way Homeland Security is scary, but even more so. It’s pointless and suspect.
Hmm. I thought this was to handle reconstruction efforts. Now, I’m generally not in favor of nation building, but if you’re going to do that, I think you should have an organization outside the military to handle that task. The military isn’t going to set up a stock exchange or the banking indstury. But I guess this is for domestic deployment?
It just sounds like more redudant bureaucracy to me.
If he wants to expand the foreign service he should do that. If he wants to have a force that can be deployed for disaster relief domestically, he should bring the National Guard home. Why create yet another agency that does what existing agencies already do?
