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 As my Scottish headmaster used to say [sic!], back in the 1950s, privileges that are abused will be withdrawn.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.

See also:

• GT 2008-01-04: Cognitive Dissonance of the Non-Libertarian Left
• GT 2008-05-03: Am Denver Burning?
• GT 2007-11-08: Sprachkritik: Privatization
• GT 2007-10-25: Radical healthcare reform

Dana Perino is under strict instructions … to not talk about the dollar.

Q I’d like to follow up on their refusal to talk about the dollar, if I could. I mean, we’re in a kind of a bad situation here, when OPEC says the reason for $105 or $106 a barrel of oil is the falling value of the dollar — and you won’t address that issue. Where do we go to find out who is right?

MS. PERINO: Well, as he just said, the Treasury Secretary is where you go to talk about the dollar. It’s a longstanding policy that predates this administration, and I’m not going to change it today. But Treasury can talk about it.

Q I don’t expect you to change it, but I do expect you to be able to say whether OPEC is completely wrong about this, or whether there is at least something to their claim that the dollar is responsible for the high price of oil right now.

MS. PERINO: Wendell, I’m under strict instructions, and have been from the beginning, to not talk about the dollar, and I’m not going to get fired to satisfy your question.

— White House Press Briefing, Friday, March 7, 2008.

Had you just sat through a long presentation on the rotten economic situation in the U.S., which studiously avoided any mention at all of the collapsing value of the government’s fiat currency, you might also want to get a some answers. In particular, answers about the calculated policies of the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to make the world safe for finance capital–and doing it by exercising the federal government’s money monopoly, so as to suck every last drop of purchasing power out of working people’s wages and cash savings (which increase, if they ever do, much later, and much more slowly, than the commodity prices that we have to pay in order to go on driving and eating).

You might want some answers; however, you’ll have to get them from somebody other than the White House press flack. She believes that if she says word one about the situation, she’ll likely be fired for it.

(Via Crooks and Liars 2008-03-11, via Lew 2008-03-12.)