Saturday, March 21, 2009

WHEN PROGRESSIVISM KILLS THE FREE MARKET.

THE SAD STORY OF THE PERSECUTED LORDS OF FINANCE.

Why is everybody complaining about the American financial system? Is it because it is not enough of a free market anymore? In the past American financiers could buy and sell people. That was really free and easy going. George Washington, an astute investor, owned three hundred people when he died. He obstinately refused to free them, in spite of his friend Lafayette's entreaties. That was American character at its best. It's not because you have a French friend, and four-fifths of your army was French, and 90% of your ammunition was French, and all your navy was French, that you should make your civilizational practices French too. That would be like, well, slavery. Now Washington is dead, but his spirit lives in the capital named after him. To the extent pesky French progressivism has allowed it to. But it has been a rough ride.

OK, slavery was rough, too. Now, though, there is a huge improvement, it's more like serfdom. American people work hard, and then send all their money to their American Lords of Finance. So why are people complaining so much? The Lords of Finance are the best and the brightest, remember?

Let good Americans look up to Warren Buffet, an owner of one of these two or three (American) credit rating agencies that rule the world. These agencies allowed other plutocrats to build the worldwide pyramid, that Ponzi scheme of stealing the savers' money, and giving it all to the wealthiest of the rich, the hedge funds and private equity. The credit rating agencies gave them the respectability necessary to do so, just as Mr. Buffet, with his grandfatherly looks, personally gives respectability to the lure of the plutocrat. So does the crocodile look like an old tree trunk, and drifts reassuringly down the lazy river. Interview the plutocrat, or the oligarch, and he will gush respectably about sports and the home team, showing that this is all what this simple man cares about. it's not about ripping you off, and drinking all your money, or your blood, heavens forbid. Just if you can't pay for health care, why should you get it? Is it not a free market? Pay as you go? Don't pay, well, just don't go and die. Mr. Buffet, the friend of Obama (they both said), has made a fortune in health care. If slavery was around, no doubt Mr. Buffet would make a fortune in slavery. But, sadly, slavery is no more. Thank God for hedge funds, though: they make slavery without chains possible at last...

Interest rates on credit of the order of 30%, high enough to justify execution of the lenders in some jurisdictions in the Middle Ages, are a reality of contemporary American life. So just let all good Americans look at the positive side, watch sports on TV, get totally critical and knowledgeable about their silly sport teams, and manage their anger like good little sheep. Let the French get all worked up about human rights, and demonstrate in their stead. The French are obviously antibusiness: when the French proclaimed the Universal Rights of Man, and outlawed slavery worldwide, they interfered with American business. 75 years later the free market in human beings was abrogated in the USA, causing huge losses for American business (the economy of the American South had been growing tremendously, thanks to the fast growing use of slaves in industry; the civil war, and the abrogation of slavery destroyed that). One trembles to imagine what new antibusiness measures Europe intends to torture the American Lords of Finance with.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

No comments: