Capitalism: A Love Story
February 28, 2010Henry Baum No Comments »
Saw this last night. Good. I defy anyone in the Tea Party to watch this movie and not agree with much of it. Do you get it, Tea Party? The left is just as furious with the corporate takeover of the country as the right. I shouldn’t say anyone in the Tea Party because anyone who thinks Sarah Palin is the answer for this country is serial killer insane. Likewise, anyone who talks about our problems being illegal immigrants or welfare mothers has the wrong targets. The poorest people are hardly the cause of our problems. Our problem is what made them poor. If a populist revolution is ever going to happen in this country, some elements of the right and left would have to come together, because there is overlap in some areas.
Here’s Dennis Kucinich, that famous conservative Paulite, using the same terminology used by the Libertarian right, “The Federal Reserve is as federal as Federal Express.” (around 4:00):
True lefty, socialist liberals hate this system as much as the Ron Paul right. Only the left wants to bring back the regulations that were stripped out during a Democratic administration (by Robert Rubin et al.) contributing to the financial crisis. And Ron Paul writes, Why More Regulation Makes Things Worse:
The other problem is the trust that people blindly put in regulations, and the moral hazard this creates. Too many people trust government regulators so completely that they abdicate their own common sense to these government bureaucrats….The free market works so much better than a centrally planned economy. With central planning, everything shifts from one’s own judgment about safety, wisdom and relative benefits of a behavior, to the discretion of government bureaucrats.
Yes, but how about the moral hazard of letting people roam free? Is government intervention perfect? Obviously not. But when given unfettered rein to do whatever they want, profiteers will do what they’re in the business to do: profit. I can’t claim to be an expert on the economy, but Paul’s argument doesn’t seem to hold up. Because it’s the lack of regulation that led to the crisis.
In many cases, the nanny state goes too far. But Libertarians take this idea too far by saying that all regulations are evidence of the nanny state. The financial crisis proves that rabid capitalists will destroy the system if given the opportunity. As Michael Moore points out in “Capitalism,” I don’t trust these guys to be guided by their own moral compass:
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