The Early Days of a Better Nation

Posted 10:55 am by Ken

Anarchist bankers

At a Libertarian Alliance conference a few years ago, I heard an anarcho-capitalist economics lecturer explain that financial regulation was no big deal because the speculators were always one step ahead of the regulators - as soon as the regulators had one financial instrument tied up in red tape, the financial services industry came up with another instrument even more complicated and opaque than the one before, and by the time the regulators had caught up with that one ... and so on.

Britain has now had a run on a bank.

Posted 6:01 pm by Ken

Down the rabbit-hole

There I was, about to plug the latest dire warning from Paul Craig Roberts, when it occurred to me to emphasise his right-wing street cred, and to mention in this connection his great book Alienation and the Soviet Economy (1971, 1991). Building on the brilliant insights of Michael Polanyi's The Contempt of Freedom, Roberts explained, much more clearly than Hayek or Mises ever did, exactly why the central planning of an industrial economy is impossible - impossible 'in the sense', as he put it, 'that it is impossible for a cat to swim the Atlantic'. He did more: as the title indicates, he linked Marx's critique of the market to the actual attempts of Soviet and Soviet-type economies to replace the market. He described how these economies were not, in fact, centrally planned despite continuous efforts to centrally plan them (which explained both how inefficiently they functioned, and why (despite that) they did function and didn't simply collapse like all actual centrally planned industrial economies have invariably done).

But while googling up various references to his work, I discovered to my astonishment that after all that and more to his lasting credit, he's a 9/11 Truther! (He never hints at this in his articles that appear on Counterpunch and Antiwar.com, neither of which will touch 9/11 Truth with a bargepole.) This shock followed on the heels of my dismay at seeing the redoubtable Robert Fisk taking an exploratory trip down that same rabbit-hole. The slightest serious recourse to the internet Fisk so despises whould have shown him the naivety of his rhetorical questions. (The temperatures at which kerosene burns and steel melts are not the same. Makes you think, dunnit?)

Last summer I stumbled across 9/11 Truth while researching conspiracy theories for the novel I was writing, and was intrigued enough to go downstairs and watch for the first time the videotape I'd made of the news on the fateful day. I replayed the impacts and the collapses over and over - slo-mo, freeze, second by second, rewind - and came away convinced that the official, government-approved, state-sponsored, media-hyped truth about the physical causes of the collapse of the WTC towers was beyond reasonable doubt. It's astonishing to watch Truther videos that show the collapses side by side with clips of controlled demolitions, which make the contrast between the phenomena as clear as clear can be, with a voice-over insisting that they're identical. The only similarity is that the towers fell vertically. How, I ask, would you expect a tower slammed near the top by a jetliner and weakened by fire to fall? Sideways?

Suppose it were true that the some sinister cabal in the US government pickled the Roswell aliens, shot JFK, faked the Moon landings and brought down the Towers. You know what? Compared with what the US and other governments do in plain sight, these would be as dust in the balance. The real radical challenge is to make that as evident to your neighbours as it is to you.