Thieves
“Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”
~G.K. Chesterton
The process of determining who is to blame for our current economic crisis is daunting. This is because for each villain one discovers, one must then discern the villain’s motivations; what historical conditions facilitated or inspired the villain’s capacity to harm; and then whether those historical conditions are part of a larger systemic or cultural or socioeconomic failing. So, for instance, when we dig a little and find the overseers of the current meltdown – the CEO’s of the financial institutions whose black magic created this fiasco – we then become compelled to dig deeper still. After all, where was our government in this debacle? Isn’t a government’s purest purpose to protect its citizens, both from abroad but also from within?
Then again, to lay the blame at the feet of the government is terribly short-sighted as well. After all, the government’s lack of oversight in this matter is essentially in keeping with the general trend of deregulation and modal monopolization of markets, and especially financial markets, that has defined the past few decades. We need to dig deeper yet. Philip Blond describes a modal monopoly as
“a model of monopoly that extends beyond whether an individual company has undue market influence to whether a certain mode or way of doing business constitutes a cartel. For example, the great housing crash is primarily the result of the absorption of all local, regional and national systems of credit into one form of global credit.”
What strikes me about this is how similar this concept of modal monopolization is to the concept of an increasingly all-powerful centralized state. Big government and big business seem to grow apace; and at the same time, globalization and the rise of the financial industry to a predominant position in our modern economy seem also to be directly linked.
March 9, 2009 15 Comments
