As I’ve been following and researching the bailouts for the last few months, I have noticed a lot of pundits observe that “deregulation” of the banks is what allowed the crisis (soon to be crises, ;)) to happen in the first place. Now, of course, I’m a full-blooded ancap, so I don’t lend any credence to what most of these people have to say. However, the use of the term “deregulation” annoys the hell out of me. Think about it. If I killed ten people, live on national television, and then received no punishment for my crime, would it be reasonable to also say that murder had been “deregulated”? Would there be calls for murder reform?
Even within a statist framework, deregulation can only mean that the government assisted the banks or at least didn’t stand in their way. So these pundits talk about deregulation without blaming the state. Not that I need those guys to validate my own emotions, but damn. It is quite shocking to me that men and women in the 40’s-70’s, who are educated and at least successful enough to be on a MSM news network get away with being so stupid.
Anyway, instead of saying, “Deregulation caused the crisis,” they should be saying, “The crimes committed by the guhment/bank partnership led to this crisis.” And since they won’t do this, I will remain irritated.
Another obvious disconnect I see is when people refer to themselves as “anti-capitalists” and say stuff like, “capitalism failed us, just like we knew it would” (referring to the bailouts). These people are actually anti-corporatists or even anti-state-capitalists as far as I’m concerned. Throw in semantic molotov cocktails like “deregulation” in the mix and you have these so-called anti-capitalists believing that state capitalism/corporatism are the same thing as free markets.
They don’t see it as a partnership, hence the issue. Anytime the government and big business collaborate to screw people over, it’s because the Big Bad Capitalists bought favoritism from politicians and bureaucrats who are always categorized as either: corrupt and not worthy of office; pure of heart but for some reason helpless to refuse bribes from the Big Bad Capitalists. The government holds the final say and all the legal power, but somehow has convinced most people that it is the victim in these situations. Or for some reason people think things are just a matter of obedience, so if they say to their politicians, “Make bankers behave ethically,” and those politicians say to bankers, “Thou shalt behave ethically,” anyone who screws up is deliberately breaking “the rules” and should be punished. That sometimes people of perfectly good will screw up because they were acting in part on distorted information or according to distorted incentives delivered and set up respectively via the government, is beyond them.
For example, they simply will not see the disconnect between maintaining high standards for loaning money while at the same time artificially pricing debt below market and socializing any potential default losses. They don’t see it because their view of the world is limited to an explicit, top down, command and control understanding of how they order their personal lives where they generally have command of enough information to make decisions. They don’t see the market’s role in disseminating information to facilitate implicit cooperation from all directions among people across various disciplines and what not, and thus how that process breaks down when the information sent out is distorted.
What might help is a thought experiment or model of some kind that shows how an individual in personal decisions comes to a standard for making a choice based on easily available information that doesn’t require a market to deliver it, and then juxtaposing that with a similar model of decision making that does require a market to deliver relevant information. Say comparing a subsitence farmer and forrager to a commercial farmer. The former uses only his own resources, the latter depends on markets and other people. And you could then show why the latter might mistakenly grow corn when wheat is in higher demand because the government messed with prices.
This one I just don’t get. The definition of capitalism is pretty clear, so these people are just morons who simply accept what the lobotomy box tells them. And if paying bankers billions of dollars is capitalism according to the box, then that’s what they believe. That the very idea of taxation is anti capitalist, much less taxation for the purposes of such blatant redistribution, simply won’t move an idiot. And they sure as hell won’t be moved or even willing to entertain the thought that all taxation is for purposes of redistribution.