Ridiculous Strawman Watch (Part 1 of ???)
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 16 years ago, in 2008, on the World Wide Web.
Finance capital — possibly the single most heavily regulated market in the entire global economy, which is shaped by the dictates of literally hundreds of government central banks around the world, which is constantly carried on with a background promise of bail-outs by government agencies like the IMF, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the European Central Bank, etc., and which is overseen by so many different regulatory agencies that they often can’t even decide which is supposed to be regulating a particular subset of the market — is empirical proof that Financial markets have been given their freedom, and they have disgraced themselves. As my Scottish headmaster used to say [sic!], back in the 1950s, privileges that are abused will be withdrawn. The time has come to put markets back under strict controls and restrictions, such as those under which they laboured from the 1930s till the 1970s.
Also, little did I know how much cause I had to rejoice: I never realized it, but it turns out that the libertarian movement [conquered] the world
at some point within the last 40 years. It’s true: I read it on the Internet.
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The most irksome part is the closing passage:
But too many of us have been duped by the free-marketeers’ seductive arguments: market freedom will generate more prosperity for everyone and, in any case, whether you like this strategy or not, there is no alternative (T. I. N. A. – remember that nickname for Margaret Thatcher?) This is a classic ploy of people who are determined to get an unpopular policy accepted; they simply tell us, over and over again, that it is the only possible policy. Eventually, most people come to believe them.
Not only have economies in the last 50 years been the most heavily regulated ever, it’s the ones who want regulation who “tell us, over and over again, that it is the only possible policy”. Remember “too big to fail”? How about all the TV pundits saying government solutions are the only reasonable ones?
I think I see the problem. Sibley, instead of living in our universe, lives in… BIZARRO WORLD!