Making the World Safe for J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs
Read Murray Rothbard’s classic essay “Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy.” Among other vital points, Rothbard very concisely describes why U.S. banks have little to do with actual economic freedom:
Commercial bankers, engaged as they are in unsound fractional reserve credit, are, in the free market, always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Hence they are always reaching for government aid and bailout.
Investment bankers do much of their business underwriting government bonds, in the United States and abroad. Therefore, they have a vested interest in promoting deficits and in forcing taxpayers to redeem government debt. Both sets of bankers, then, tend to be tied in with government policy, and try to influence and control government actions in domestic and foreign affairs.
While the Iraq war dealt a severe blow to my Republican leanings the bank bail out has utterly destroyed it. The bank bail out will undermine all free market arguments for the next fifty years. Probably with some justification.
Yes, it was not the free market that caused this problem, but the banking crisis has shown that it is the banks themselves that opposse the free market (both before and after the crisis) and that the “free market” is as impossible a dream as true communism.
If that is the case then it becomes a matter of how (and who) we regulate, not if.
That is a game changer, politically speaking, as we get back to simple class warfare, which it may have been all along.