It’s funny how all the warriors of the right are so keen at claiming the success of free market economics. But no one seems too keen to claim the failures.
And, conveniently for them, most of the public and the commentariat don’t seem very motivated to make them.
No-one seems to want to shout the virtue of cowboy capitalism when massive financial institutions like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Babcock and Brown and are snapping like twigs.
That’s convenient, because apparently the rest of us should just shut up and pay for their mistakes anyway.
Case in point - today’s news that the world’s central banks last night poured $225 billion into the global banking system in a desperate bid to restore confidence to financial markets. Markets that are facing their biggest crisis since the Great Depression.
That’s public money. Our money.
Usually the faintest hint more public money is going to be spent on hospitals or schools or welfare would lead to howls of derision from the mahogany-lined halls of conservative cheerleaders across the world.
But when the billions are being used as corporate welfare to prop up their pin-stripe wearing mates in the private sector, who’s greed and failure has threatened our whole way of life, well that’s totally cool.
In these circumstances we simply have to shut up and bail them out.
There’s no reflection that perhaps it’s their greed, selfishishness and stupidity that’s got us to this point in the first place.
No discussion of the fact that nations like America might need to change its ways. Maybe by regulating their corporate cowboys. Or by properly punishing the corporate crooks.
Or that most of these shonks – who earn 30 times the average wage - should face proper pressure to bring their salaries into line with the rest of the population.
And what about occasionally these bail-outs lead to the people actually owning a bit of these market monoliths - when and if the crisis is over and done with.
No, we just hear the call for us to happy with the status quo. That there’s nothing weird about privatising the profits, and socialising the losses.
