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How New Default Consensus Realities Instantiate

17 March 2008

Ignore that Little Free Market Capitalist Farce Behind the Curtain!

by metavalent

"I am the great and powerful unfettered market!"

Oh, except when The Central Planners decide it needs some Fed Fettering to keep them in power! The quotation below is courtesy of the indomitable Dennis Gartman, whom I hold in the highest possible regard; and yet, inadvertently, he provides here the PRECISE RATIONAL for many of the private sector Resource Skew Correcting proposals made on this site.
<blockquote>We are now at the endgame of the sub-prime mortgage and derivatives problem, but it can be a very long, very frantic, and very volatile period as this endgame plays out. Prices of things are going to be harder and harder to discern, and volatility is going to leap skyward…

We shall applaud those in a position of power for having had the courage to act when they did. Had they not… had they remained “pure” free market theorists and allowed [Bear Stearns] to sink into oblivion, the very foundations of the western capitalist system might well have become unhinged.

That was not to be, nor could be, allowed. </blockquote>Could not be allowed? How interesting. The persistent mantra from the Right is always, “don’t meddle with the market, don’t meddle with the market, don’t meddle with the market” … UNTIL they’ve so skewed and constipated cash up the colons of the top two percent, that it requires Money From Helicopters to the masses and turning up the Printing Presses to keep the hoarders well lubricated.

ACTUAL CAPITALISM is once again sodomized at the alter of “orderly markets.” The Right can’t have it both ways. It can’t both spout the Kudlow Creed AND Fed Fettered Financing and retain any semblance of intellectual continuity.

I want to take the greatest of pains to not impugn the valiant personage of Mr. Gartman himself; in fact, it is the height of irony that the Good Gentleman’s statement emerged this week as the economic theory equivalent of Eliot Spitzer’s squeezebox, “Kristen.”

We only really mean Free Market when it doesn’t hurt those of us holding all the cards; like Spitzer only really meant “ethics” when they didn’t apply to him.

The quotation above illustrates the height of economic theory hypocrisy, and the legendarily intellectually honest Mr. Gartman laudably concedes this to some extent in his eponymous letter; yet, he is apparently compelled to rationalize interventions by The Central Planning Committees out of survival of his own position in the machine. I do not fault him for this behavior, far from it. I only point out that this requirement that we each are forced to ultimately belie our own deepest convictions – out of threat of poverty and want – only goes to prove that the Wage Slave Trade presses well up the value chain … perhaps as high as the short end of the second percentile of liquid wealth hoarders.

Which is to say: perhaps even Mr. Gartman is in the same boat with us. Will the Good Gentleman perhaps consider the Giant PIFWOD Bomb or some derivation thereof, as a Private Sector method for correcting the unsustainable Privately Caused Resource Skews?

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