Ten Years Of Hell

I posted earlier about the collapse of the USSR, and how the defensive spin was that "Communism didn't fail; the Soviet leaders just weren't true to the core tenets of Real Communism."

We've been hearing the same crap from the Bush apologists (we need more conservatism because Bush wasn't really a conservative and didn't stick to conservative values), and now we're hearing it from the Free Market purists.

From Dan Geldon at The Baseline Scenario:
Over the past year, there has been much discussion about how the financial crisis exposed weaknesses in free-market theory. What has attracted less discussion is the extent to which the high priests of free-market theory themselves destroyed meaningful contracts and other bedrocks of functioning markets and, in the process, created the conditions for the theory’s weaknesses to emerge.

The story begins before Wall Street’s capture of Washington in the 1980s and 1990s and the deregulatory push that began around the same time. In many ways, it started in 1944.

In that year, Frederich von Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, putting forward many of the ideas behind the pro-market, anti-regulatory economic view that swept through America and the rest of the world in the decades that followed. Von Hayek’s basic argument was that freedom to contract and to conduct business without government meddling allowed for free choice, allocated resources efficiently, facilitated economic growth, and made us all a little richer. Milton Friedman built on Hayek, creating an ideology that resonated with conservatives and ultimately became the prevailing economic view in Washington.

With apologies to Mr Gandhi: "What do I think of free market capitalism? I think it's a good idea - you should try it."

We've evolved an economic system that doesn't actually produce anything. The point of the exercise in business now is all about Acquisition and Disposal of Assets, with the goal of Equity Extraction by way of Debt Leveraging - whatever the current lingo is. It's become a zero sum game of 'I can't win if you don't lose'. The system can't sustain itself because eventually it has to eat itself.