This, then, is the triumph of Reaganomics. An economy that does little else but create debt and arbitrage it, capturing the gains for an inner circle of cronies and socializing the losses for the rest of us.
Don’t get me started about the sleaziest, lying-est, zombie-army Replican campaign of my (rather long) lifetime. Joe Biden didn’t say it was patriotic to raise taxes the other day. He said it was patriotic to pay them. And he’s right. I’ve never minded paying taxes, even the couple of times that my income (unlike dynastic, inherited wealth) required that I pay a lot.
And here’s why. The government, even when it’s run by the Friedman-Strauss gang, takes our tax money anyway. Why shouldn’t it be used to actually provide public services? Build infrastructure? Educate our children? Free us from the oil pimps? Instead, for decades, and especially in this decade, our taxes have been squandered and siphoned off by crooks and given to their cronies as middlemen who hire others to provide only the illusion of government services, in service of a self-fulfilling prophecy that government doesn’t work.
Today's trillion-dollar bailout? One less phony war for oil and we’d have had the money. If we’d maintained authentic regulation of financial markets turned into casinos by Clinton’s acquiescence in the Great Gramm Scam of 2000, we might not have needed a bailout at all.
But that’s not how the New World Order works. The shock doctrine requires opportunism in facing (or creating) disasters, after destroying any confidence that government can provide essential services, whether they’re meals for soldiers or buses for evacuees. Middlemen rake off fees for hiring others to do what government used to do. Fortunes are made overnight by noble free-marketeers who get rich from doing nothing but passing on the work to someone else. The gains from no regulation of privatized everything go to crime-family bosses and capos. The losses get nationalized. Hmmm, could this be . . . national socialism?
In my mind, I keep replaying the scene from the 1990 film of Bonfire of the Vanities, where the bond-trader's wife ridicules his profession while they visit her parents, accusing him of making a living by scraping up the crumbs from someone else’s meal. In that story, her old-money family thought arbitrage was a quaint way to buy into a life of hobnobbing with the real masters of the universe.
Well, guess what? Under cover of a generation of "greed is good" propaganda, the Republic’s been hollowed out, rendered all but impotent by crumb-scraping phonies and their cronies. These days, the ruling class, every damn one of the insiders who are, or think they are, at the top of Bushco’s nasty racket, purchase the tranquility of cushy cossets in Maybach limos by arbitraging the debt that fuels a "service" economy dependent upon the rest of us buying more stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have. Pass the truffles, Muffy. We’re all crumb-scrapers now.