Royal Bank of Scotland under state control - Times Online: "The Chancellor will move to take control of the Royal Bank of Scotland today by injecting £20 billion of taxpayers’ money.
The Government is also expected to take over HBOS in the most dramatic extension of state ownership in the British economy since the war. The bank’s rescue takeover by Lloyds TSB appeared to be on the brink of collapse last night.
As governments around the world scramble to prevent the collapse of the global financial system, Alistair Darling will unveil plans for a £40 billion “recapitalisation” of the banking sector."
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Marx said capitalism would collapse and be replaced by socialism. Maybe he was right after all. I hope not.
3 comments:
Marx said capitalism would collapse and be replaced by socialism. Maybe he was right after all. I hope not.
All in all, capitalism is doomed, no matter what replaces it in the future. It's going to be one rocky future.
Now is the time for anyone committed to a free society to read Karl Polanyi. If you want capitalism and markets to survive, you have to realize that they are not innately in human nature as Adam Smith claims. Smith was completely wrong on this point, actually, and even Milton Friedman grossly underestimated the importance of free and transparent information to his own theories. Capitalism will eat itself if it's not regulated. If, on the other hand, it is regulated, it still does better than anything else out there. But it has to be transparent. It has to be required to manage risk properly. And it has to accept some downward redistribution of wealth in order to ensure that everyone can play in the system to at least some extent.
If Republican and conservative fundamentalists persist with claiming that the conditions I have outlined are "socialistic" and therefore should be stopped at all costs, it will be to the detriment of the market economy and of a free society.
dbx, I agree with that and you expressed it very well. This blind faith in so-called free market principles also drives the libertarian defense of homeowner and condominium associations--particularly the opposition to even the most obviously necessary oversight by government. I think that private communities could suffer from under-regulation just as easily as over-regulation.
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