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| "Masters of Delusion" David Brooks & Alan Greenspan's Magical Thinking |
Take Brooks’ statement on “oligarchy”. Indeed, he would have
us believe that today’s corporate raiders, hedge-fund parasites, Donald Trumps and
legion of Trump wannabe’s are some kind of “vanguard” bent on the destruction
of America’s oligarchs. I’d have never guessed that the captains of Wall Street
and Silicon Valley were so deeply suicidal. Poor babies! After all, it’s not the
few shattered relics of the labor movement, hippie enviros or working moms that
bought out Washington D.C.
Curiously, the overseas economic engines he cites as
evidence of laissez-faire capitalism’s great success are hardly ‘laissez-faire’.
China’s capitalist revolution is firmly under the guidance and control of
Peking. South Korea’s corporate structure and government are symbiotic. Germany’s
economy is infused with government planning and regulation. It appears that a
well regulated economy and a tight partnership between government and capital
in which government is primus-inter-pares has been the key to success.
It’s become a bit of a cliché to use the term “magic of the
marketplace” today. Certainly no self-styled “intellectual” like David Brooks
would use it. But of course that is precisely what he is referring to. He must
have slept through the great crash a few years back. It’s not like it happened
because there were too many regulations; what few there were (and are) were not
enforced. The crash was not “creative”. We are worse for it, not better. It’s
simply amazing that after all that, the tired and discredited economic “thinking”
of a charlatan like Alan Greenspan is still credible.
More fool us. More fool
David Brooks.
Written by Gary Fitzsimmons
Written by Gary Fitzsimmons
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