Tag regulation

On Tuesday, I posted a link to a blog post from Rex Hammock wherein he listed some things that he had lost belief in due to the economic crisis we’re in, and then I added a few others that I felt were similarly discredited. In the comments, my friend Karan asked what I did still believe in and/or hope for (since Hammock had, at the end of his post, added a few on that score). Since I felt it would take up too much space to explain in a comment, I said I would write a second post along those lines, and so here we are. Given that the crisis itself stems from a lack of confidence in financial institutions (a well-deserved lack, I think), it’s much easier to point to things to be critical about, but I’ve come up with several things that I think would be worthwhile, not just in easing the strain on the economy, but in fashioning the paradigm that will replace the one presently burning itself into ashes.

Restoring the government’s role as the natural enemy of corporatism — In my view, the best role government has is maintaining an adversarial relationship to big business. Our government, by its very definition, is meant to protect the interests of individuals over the potential abuses of other institutions that can amass power: churches, military leaders, even the individual branches of the government as established in the Constitution. The founders also clearly wanted to circumscribe the power of corporations by limiting their charters and enacting other restrictions that held corporations in check for decades. By the latter half of the 19th century, the increasing economic power of some began to erode this adversarial position through the traditional route of corruption, but even the financial shenanigans of the late 1800s eventually overstepped a threshold and a new wave of governmental reform and regulation swept through Washington in the first quarter of the 20th century. The reforms in labor, in the social safety net, in the manifestation of “public interest” as a valid entity in regulation, and ultimately the sweeping financial reforms of the early part of FDR’s administration all served to rein in the monster of capitalism that came to life after the Civil War. In the years since World War II, however, and especially in the forty years since the election of Richard Nixon, government has been completely co-opted by business and now only works for the benefit of corporations. My personal belief is that it remains possible to resurrect the government’s identity as the antagonist of unbridled capitalism, though I also think it will take a few more years of drama and devastation to get there.

The adaptability of the human species — I am, quite honestly, utterly fed up with the popular fascination for Doomsday-ism, and have been for some time. Anyone who reads this blog for any length of time knows that I have zero patience or tolerance for people who are constantly looking for some catastrophe that will destroy life as we know it. While the failures of the global economy surely should not be waved away dismissively, the Doomsdayers were all too quick to latch on to this crisis and whip themselves up into a frenzy speculating over the degree of chaos it would cause, mainly because the economic crisis is a lot more real than waiting around for tsunamis, bird flu, killer volcanoes, asteroids, or glacier melting. Humans are nothing if not resourceful and adaptable, and I believe that it’s far more likely that people all over the world will develop adaptive responses to the situation rather than self-destruct. That’s not to say that there will not be unrest; indeed, there is a strong need for unrest in troubled times, as it is often the only way to shake the powerful out of their complacency and reorganize power structures to meet the needs of the many. However, to imply that all of human civilization stands on the brink of annihilation within the context of a financial collapse is simply deluded.

Money is bullshit — Money is probably the only mass delusion on Earth bigger, more powerful and more destructive than religion. What we’ve seen is that it’s possible for clever and unscrupulous financiers and businesspeople to simply invent wealth out of whole cloth in the form of credit swaps, derivatives, bogus consumer credit, and good old fashioned fraud. And then to have it all evaporate in the space of a few weeks, even though there was never any tangible wealth behind all that paper. And what is “tangible” about wealth? I hear and read a lot of people hollering about gold, but even our insistence on the value of gold is illusory. You can’t eat it or wear it; it has practical uses, but they’re limited and certainly do not justify the overall value we assign to it. The more money that appears to be lost, the more money that appears to be given away in “bailouts” and “stimulus packages”, the more it looks like the great big lie that it is in the first place. There must be other ways to effectively exchange goods and services that can be shielded from the effects of greed and fraudulence to such an extent that allows the basic material needs of all people to be met to a level that our civilized advancements can sustain for the very long term. And it’s not the All-Mighty Dollar, the Euro, or the yuan.