Ron Paul : People resent our current crony capitalist system
It's a "recipe for social instability"
The above is an understatement of course. People on the right resent it. People on the left resent it. Basically any decent person who isn’t tapped directly into the crony system resents it.
Years ago Ron Paul (and a handful of others) warned us that we were marching toward a truly corporatist (crony capitalist) system. The Crash of 2008 was when it finally metastasized.
There were many other events before The Crash. Many of the “reforms” of the progressive era, one hundred years before, long heralded as being for the good of the people, laid much of the foundation for our current crony system. The institution of the income tax in 1913 was one example and even more consequently the institution of the Federal Reserve, also in 1913. Then came the FDR era, where the state was again expanded and further incorporated into the lives of everyday people. Then post-World War II there was the expansion of the Military Industrial Complex. Then on the tail end of the Vietnam War Nixon ended the gold standard which enabled the financialization of the world. (Not to mention all sorts of other economic interventions including price controls. Nixon was no conservative.)
Then we had the attacks of September 11th 2021 which juiced the surveillance state (a subset of the Military Industrial Complex). Then, after the Federal Reserve kept interest rates too low for too long after the attacks, spurring an artificial housing boom (and the bust), the economy collapsed.
It wasn’t “capitalism” that created the collapse, but the absence of actual capitalism, with real price discovery and honest markets, that facilitated the collapse.
But was there a reckoning for the people who created the global economic disaster? Generally speaking, no. The big banks got bailed out. I will never forget Goldman Sachs distributing its bailout money to its employees two quarters after The Crash for fear that Congress might claw the money back. Goldman Sachs had been leveraged somewhere between 20 to 50 to 1 when The Crash happened. Meanwhile millions of homeowners who were hardly leveraged at all lost their homes at that time.
The powers that be took notice. The Federal Reserve and the federal government was there for them because they were “too big to fail”. Everyone understood. Corporatism, the fusion of state and corporations (and other private interests including unions etc) was were it was at. There were/are two groups, the people subject to the harsh reality of a marketplace that is manipulated at its core, and those who benefit from this manipulation. The lesson from 2008 for many people and businesses was get on the “good” side of this equation.
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