A good thing, too. You know what the oligarchs did in Europe with the Great Depression of the 1920s, right? Oh, you don’t think the Great Depression happened in Europe in the 20s? It was a wonderful time when things were shaken up, of course.
When things are “shaken up” due to economic turmoil it is the oligarchs who continue in comfort while the rest of us starve and fight each other and die. People in the libertarian movement think this is good because it “motivates” the little people into giving oligarchs and warlords—who brand themselves libertarians or socialists or Christians or communists or whatever label is convenient to the time—the power they ask for.
I’m amazed at how people who call themselves libertarians today try to turn every conversation into nihilist, genocidal propaganda to serve the master-owners. If there’s a weak point in regulatory capture, it is in government-issued global monopolies granted in the form of exclusive patent rights, but in the propaganda produced by all the oligarch-funded “libertarian” institutes and racist conspiracy websites you’ll never see exclusive patent rights mentioned at all, except as a historical footnote. Why is this? Because patents and market power are how their masters leech rents out of the economy. Monopoly rents are why they are able to buy lawyers and officials and politicians. If they had to compete in the marketplace they wouldn’t have the spare cash to waste on their vanity-project political jihads.
If we stop granting (and protecting) exclusive market power for people wealthy enough to buy and sequester the ideas that markets trade in, the oligarchy will lose a fundamental prop to their power. Bitching about bailouts and regulatory capture is just a stalking horse for getting rid of democracy altogether. We do need a shake-up, but the shake-up we need is in the special protections in the law for the rich, not the ability of the economy to function.
