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"Obama at the G20: The last best hope for capitalism?"

With Angela Merkel and others gunning to remove "Cowboy Capitalism" by initiating international financial regulation and Barak Obama aiming for more modest reforms and government spending is Obama the free market's best hope?

How does this make you feel?

Should the world have uniform financial regulations?


That was the starting post in an e-mail list to which I belong. I responded with the following:
The free market? Can someone please point me to a substantial population of people who currently enjoy such a thing? Every single commenter who talks about the excesses, drawbacks, problems, downfalls, and viciousness of "the free market" or "unbridled capitalism" or "laissez-faire" and so on is guilty of a massive category error. Nothing even close to those systems exists today in any sizable population. This is a world of profoundly mixed economies and the trend for the last 100 years is firmly away from the individual freedom necessary for actual capitalism.

Obama is not going to be capitalism's savior. He doesn't support the voluntary exchange of private property and services on whatever terms to which the seller and the buyer agree as long as each party is the legitimate owner of the property they propose to peacefully exchange. On the contrary! Whatever principles he has are incompatible with that economic system, full stop. He may be slightly less worse than Brown and substantially less worse than Merkel and Sarkozy, but they are all market interventionists at heart.

Obama won't even be the existing situation's savior. He does't want the current (im)balance between market and government. He's comitted to major changes towards increased state control and is firmly in line with the other big players with that goal.

What Obama and company want to save is enough economic wealth so they can build the coercive egalitarian societies they think we ought to have.

The entire circus makes me sick and the only uniform economic regulations humans need are prohibitions against theft and fraud.

adios,
-Charles

Posted by drizzten on April 2, 2009 10:49 AM |

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