STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
The Fire Next Time: Protests Against Free Markets Fizzle?
By Staff News & Analysis - June 14, 2013

This crisis has proved that capitalism works … The G8 protesters have little support – there's no public appetite to blame the free market … The bull market may be having a breather, but economies have proved remarkably resilient to the financial crisis … Demos are not what they used to be. Perhaps I shouldn't speak too soon, but so far the anti-G8 "Carnival against capitalism" has proved a non-event – more a few discontents quarrelling in a squat than the mass rage against the system it was meant to be. In any case, G8 meetings of the global policy elite seem to have lost their power to enrage. – Telegraph UK

Dominant Social Theme: Capitalism is always evil.

Free-Market Analysis: First Occupy Wall Street and now the G8 protests – the efforts at further demonizing free markets seems to be failing.

It has an old history, of course, going back to US hearings in the 1930s that created public markets, self-regulatory organizations and, in fact, greatly hyped the regulatory state itself.

But as we have long pointed out, the next step was to have been taken after the latest great financial crisis. By now there should have been hearings in Washington, DC and elsewhere, special prosecutors assigned, Wall Street demonized, etc.

That is the Globalist Way, of course. Blame business, especially big business, for the economic difficulties created by central bank price fixing and impose yet more regulations on an over-regulated economy.

In fact, the powers-that-be must be frustrated about this outcome, which we attribute to what we call the Internet Reformation, that has educated a voluble minority of the public about how these dominant social themes actually work.

These days it is not so easy to blame freedom for the sins of neo-fascism. Here's more from the article:

In a recent appearance on Desert Island Discs, Sir Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, said he was surprised that people weren't more angry about the banking crisis, yet I think he slightly misdiagnoses the public mood. People are angry – very angry – about bankers, perhaps more so here in Britain than in the US, where the banking crisis began.

Many also feel badly let down by the political class in general. However, what on the whole they don't seem to be fulminating about is the free market system as such. It's financial excess that is blamed for our travails, not market failure. Now this could quite genuinely be seen as a surprise. Despite the deepest, most prolonged downturn in more than 100 years, together with the most sustained assault on living standards since records began, there's not much evidence of public disillusionment in free-market economics.

On the contrary. To the extent that a serious protest vote has emerged, it has benefited parties of the Right, such as Ukip, which, outside immigration and gay marriage, promotes a radically libertarian set of aims. The same is true in the US, where the big beneficiary of the protest vote has been the freedom-loving Tea Party.

This article, as you can see, dear reader, makes exactly the point that we've been making for the last umpteen years. As Internet information leaks out about the Way the World Really works, it is a lot more difficult to create new "isms" that the masses are willing to absorb.

In large part this is because the intellectual class itself is not convinced of such "isms" anymore. Communism, fascism, socialism, even capitalism are seen as manufactured products, injected like viruses into the bloodstream of otherwise vital societies.

The days of inoculating the cleverest and most voluble among us with yet another utopian fantasy have apparently been left behind with the other discarded ephemera of 20th century ideologies. We can't resist a little more:

To listen to the noise, you'd think American economics were the exclusive preserve of neo-Keynesians such as Paul Krugman and Larry Summers; yet beyond the "madrassas" of Princeton and Harvard, this is far from the case.

Among articulate young Americans, you are much more likely to find revivalist free-market thinking than backward-looking belief in interventionist solutions. Incumbent governments at the time the crisis hit – in Europe and beyond – have been toppled, yet voters have not discriminated between Right and Left.

These were not ideological statements, but punishment for the people that happened to be at the helm when the ship went down. Having since flirted with a more overtly Left-wing, big-government agenda in anticipation of an anti-capitalist backlash, Labour is being forced to tip-toe back to the centre ground. There's been virtually no dividend for the traditional Left from this modern-day crisis of capitalism.

There are troubles with this article that we will not bother to analyze, but much of it is correct and such analyses must be of concern to the powers-that-be. The days of manipulating the masses – and the intellectual class that speaks for them – seem to be over, at least for now … at least when it comes to the idea that government knows best.

George Soros helped fund Occupy Wall Street but the movement never seems to have caught on. The evil idea of setting one percent against 99 percent fizzled because it is not one percent doing the damage but an infinitesimal amount – so much less. After all, it takes only a few to dominate and control our central banking economy.

This article, even though it appears in the mainstream, goes a long way toward reminding us that in the 21st century the dominant social themes that have so hindered society are unraveling and fading away like the mists of a bad dream. What is left, apparently, as some feedbackers have recently observed, is an increasing determination to attack the only meme left standing … the idea of government itself.

Perhaps this is the ultimate – and desperate – plan to create the chaos necessary to transition to a truly global government. But if it is, we wonder if it will work any better than anything else in this day and age of the Internet Reformation.

After Thoughts

How does one inflict continued authoritarianism in an era of information-freedom?

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
loading
Share via
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap