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Bob Barr interviewed on trillion dollar ripoff What does Bob Barr have to say about the latest debate? “Booorrrrrinngggg!” But then, I knew that ahead of time and did not even bother to follow either it or any of the predictable coverage and pontification about nothing.
If you are interested in Bob’s take on the DC feeding frenzy, you can go here to listen.
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Well, nothing startlingly new in Barr’s interview but in this swirling ocean of statist “solutions” it’s nice to listen to a libertarian, a bit like reading your Bible as the ship goes down. Won’t do any good, you know what it says already, but it’s comforting anyway.
Drifting rather off topic now I’ve just come up with a conspiracy theory regarding Crash ’08 or World Depression II or whatever we’ll be calling this in the future. First off, whatever Barr or Paul or any libertarian/free marketeer may wish to say, this whole debacle is a disaster for free marketeers. We’re living through the formation of another great myth as with Great Depression I; the narrative will be (and already is) that “capitalism failed” and only socialism can save us. We’ll be suffering from this for decades. Now like everyone else I’ve been busy pointing fingers and declaring what caused what to all and sundry, and talking in generalisations about credit expansion, interest rates, the CRA, Fanny and Freddy. But markets are just a bunch of individuals doing stuff, and the key thing is why all the individuals went running over the cliff right now. The probably answer is “it had to happen some time, and now was just the random dumb point all the bad credit became unignorable”. But that’s no good for conspiracy theory, so here’s something more conspiratorial.
We know throughout the history of our mangled managed markets that super-rich individuals have been able to exert enormous influence on markets; Rothschilds and Carnegies and JP Morgans and so on. Indeed Morgan “saved the market” in 1907 with a private bailout. Of course, those guys were all ultra-capitalists, state corporatists, whatever. But suppose you had somebody with similar market influence, but who was a nutball socialist with profound political motivations. What would we expect such a person to do with their power? Well, wouldn’t they want to knock the whole economy (of the world!) over, right before a US election, to prove the “failure of capitalism” and get an out-and-out socialist elected as President? Were looking for somebody here with enormous wealth and market influence, who has a record of deliberate politicised market interventions, who could use their wealth to maneuver a chosen puppet into the presidential race. Somebody who has used their money to set up a network of socialist political organisations in the US that virtually control the democratic party. Somebody who deliberately crashed the pound sterling out of the ERM and gloated about doing so and thus flexed his muscles at using the markets for political ends, whose choice of Democratic candidate sponsorship destroyed Clinton’s run at the nomination, who funds ACORN who Obama was an activist organiser for, who has written many articles declaring that capitalism doesn’t work. Who would have every incentive to knock the markets over right at this crucial time *just before* the presidential election?
Has anyone looked at what George Soros was buying and selling and otherwise doing over the past few weeks?
That’s my conspiracy du jour.
Not a bad theory, Ian B. Certainly plausible.
Ian,
The Cloward-Piven Strategy
Someone beat me to it.
So, someone and Alisa…the Cloward-Piven strategy is another way of describing a Reichstag fire?
Just because I am paranoid doesn’t mean there is no conspiracy:-P