Crony Capitalism Strikes Back

It never really stopped striking, of course, but what is coming out about this great government rescue is truly frightening. Calculatedrisk has the details, and if you read through there you find nothing about the government doing any controlling at all. None. The industry is going to get money and a kiss on its cheek (some kind of a cheek) and it will be sent back to play the same game but with more money this time! Our money.

I'm shocked to almost wordlessness. Truly shocked. I never thought that the Bush administration wouldn't even bother to pretend that there would be some kind of government control, in exchange for all that yummy taxpayer loot. But nope. There will be no oversight, no control. Even the people who will run these new funding organizations will be picked from Wall Street.

Let me see if I can summarize what they are doing right now in the simplest possible terms: There's a market who has acted like the Robber Barons of old, with no ethics, no real rules but lots of money for the inside circle of participants. There's a market which has been allowed to do this in peace and quiet by those who were supposed to oversee it. Then this market collapses, whines and whines and whines. So the supposed overseers give it lots of money, tell it to mind the money themselves and go back to play just as they used to. The only difference is that now the people bearing the risk are those who never got the returns at all. The people getting the returns are still the people who behaved unethically and got us into this mess to begin with.

We are being treated like suckers, my friends. Or like the peons of the rich and wealthy. But much more importantly, the market will be in the same shit almost instantaneously, because the rules of its game have not been truly changed. And the lesson the market is learning here?

If you are rich enough, you get communism and socialism when YOU need it. If you are rich enough and you whine enough you will be handed all you desire.