Saturday 4 April 2009

The “good news” about what came out of the G20? [updated]

Who’s kidding who.  “There is no good news about what happened yesterday,” says Yaron Brook. “Basically what’s going in London is world leaders have come together to establish a kind of global socialist system.  .  .  There was no one there representing capitalism, because capitalism is the dirty word right now.”

UPDATE:  “Say Cheese,” says the Rational Capitalist, who, when he first saw the picture at right thought it must have been “a doctored photo created to mock the absurdity of this meeting. “

When I realized it was not a joke it dawned on me that it is actually a perfect concretization of what is happening. I think that the frivolous connotation of the photo is the result of several related factors…

The most telling of those factors being, as the Rational Capitalist notes in a fine piece [hat tip Per-Olof Samuelsson], that these men are all pragmatic power-lusters, for whom action without thought is  their only absolute, and power over others their greatest joy – which explains both the photograph and their plan, said by Gorgon Brown to mark the emergence of a “new world order.”  An “order” in which stimulus is king, faking reality is paramount, and a crackdowns on tax havens is more important than addressing the real causes of economic collapse.

“Never waste a good crisis,” is the motto of the pragmatic politician, which is the only way to explain the link between a banking insolvency crisis and cracking down on people trying to keep their own money.

As Eric Crampton notes [hat tip Anti Dismal], it makes sense only in “Higgs sense,” in which (contra Klein) crisis is the health of the state.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,
Couldn't find a contact email for you so I'm using the comments instead.
This was the speech that preceded Dan Hannan's and is well worth a watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDwQEEAZhWM

Per-Olof Samuelsson said...

Did you find out about "The Rational Capitalist" from my Facebook recommendation of it? Goes to show what a wonderful invention the Internet is!

I have been reading that blog for some time, and I am getting more and more impressed by Doug Reich's writing and reasoning.

Peter Cresswell said...

Per-Olof: Sure did.

Anonymous: Sure did.