HUD FUD

[zthulu]

I've noticed a lot FUD lately, with some of my usually well-informed friends blaming Bush for the current economic crisis. Let's just take a little trip down memory lane, shall we

Comments

[ratbastrd]

Sadly, it's not actually socialism. It means that the risks are shared, but not the benefits. That's more feudalism than anything else.

[zthulu]

The benefit is clear -- it has saved us (at least temporarily) from a crash worse than 1929, from millions of retirement funds disappearing overnight, from life insurance policies becoming worthless... the cost, however, is our identity. France is pointing and laughing at us now (albeit in a friendly, 'welcome to the club' kind of way).

[den_down_unda]

Yeah, but they're French. They were pointing and laughing at us before.

[sprockey]

...And they smell!

Or so I'm told.

[ratbastrd]

Hmm, not so much. You see, the risk here - the new risk - is in essence universal. Its been placed on the tax payers, so its been spread to everyone in the country. The benefit inures only to a limited class - AIG and the people who have accounts at AIG. That may be a biggish class, but its still much much smaller than the class to whom the risk is spread.

[jfbat]

Hmmm. In Feudalism--or going back another couple of centuries, Manorialism--the guy in charge had to take a certain interest in the lives and livelihoods of those who provided him with the actual labor or he'd find himself in a bad way right quick. That sort of threat to the powers that be doesn't exist at this particular moment in time. (Though it did in the 1930s which is why the New Deal got enacted.)

What we have now is a weird selective socialism that Ayn Rand (who didn't understand capitalism or socialism from what I can see of her writing) dismissed as a "mixed economy." Proper socialism, when it's used as a descriptive term rather than a derogatory one, as you pointed out, means "Spreading the risks." But the risks we're looking at today are to major institutions of finance, not you and me specifically except for the fact that out tax dollars are paying for it.

I just call it "fun to watch."

[ratbastrd]

Yeah, I pretty much hold with George Carlin on this sort of thing. I don't mind the collapse of civilization, as long as I get a ringside seat.