Thursday, April 16

Anything too big to fail is too big to exist.

The headline above sums up the essence of an article in The Atlantic that is a warning to all of us. When any industry or bank becomes too big to fail, we’re all in trouble. The way-too-cozy relationship between government and very large private enterprise (such as banking) eventually harms the populace. When the too-big-to-fail enterprises start to fail, the government “saves” them at taxpayers’ expense. It is happening now in the United States, and will affect the entire world. Here is the article’s introduction:

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

The beautiful experiment in liberty launched by the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution is being methodically corrupted, and that makes me very sad.

No comments: