Zerohedge is a great source of economic and financial information you won't ever find on the Wall Street Journal.
Unfortunately, it also attracts more than its fair share of "Gold Bugs" and believers in "The Holy Free Market".
They have an article that essentially blames fiat currencies and government debts for the current economic mess.
I decided to submit a comment...that ended up long enough to be a dKos diary.
I hope you find my little rant to be resonant and enjoyable:
Allright, let's stop all this happy-horsesh!t nonsense about how this was the inevitable failure of a fiat system. Or how this was the inevitable failure of government intervention in markets.
Talk about cognitive dissonance!
Firstly, if a gold standard was the panacea that its proponents claim, then there would have been fewer economic problems when the US was on a gold standard. In the lead up to the Great Depression, the US was operating under a gold standard.
Secondly, economies that relied solely on precious metal coinage were just as vulnerable to currency debasement as paper money economies. The etymology of the term "debasement" is based on the fact that gold coins had their gold content "debased".
Finally, the governments around the world are unwilling to risk the wrath of their populations for a very good reason. Because they know that their populations are being setup to clean up the mess caused by the kleptocrats, like Goldman Sachs.
This goes back to Howard Jarvis, Proposition 13, Reaganomics and "starve the beast". After 3 decades of movement towards low-wage, low-tax and high-debt economies, the chickens are all coming home to roost.
The dirty, ugly secret that the financial press and the corporate media are hiding, is the fact that the economies which are best suited to weather this storm, are the high tax social democracies in Scandinavia (which have average tax burdens of over 50%).
We've had three decades of policies which enabled a kleptocracy to loot the US Treasury and steal the US middle class blind. The people who stole this wealth should be forced to return it, VIA HIGHER TAXES. Instead, we get this f#cking smoke screen about exploding government debt.
The reason why government and personal debt exploded, was because the kleptocrats used cheap debt to hide the fact that they were stealing trillions of dollars. It was just another ponzi-embezzlement scheme, financed with trillions of dollars in public and private debt.
Governments are naturally reluctant to ask their citizens to pay higher taxes and do with fewer services to clean up this mess, because the citizens know who is really responsible for this mess.
What we have here is the inevitable result of Ayn Rand's "Objectivism", implemented as economic policy by her most devoted acolyte: Alan Greenspan.
There is no Santa Claus, there is no free lunch. An unregulated system of local agents seeking local optimization does not lead to global optimization. Market forces are not the solution to the problem.
If you really believed market forces can do things, like protect the environment better than the EPA, then you wouldn't hesitate to disband the entire Department of Defense and let market forces defend the territorial integrity of the USA. If markets are capable of making the rational choice of protecting the environment, then they are just as capable of making the rational choice of protecting national security.
If national security is too precious to leave to the tender mercies of market forces, then your whole theory about the the superiority of market forces is a fraud.
People who don't believe in Santa Claus and Free Lunches understand that the world is a complicated place. A truly rational person understands, there isn't any ONE simple solution to the world's problems. Market forces have a part to play in a rational and civilized world; SOCIALISM ALSO HAS A PART TO PLAY. If a penniless orphan child is raped and murdered, then the police must investigate, the courts must try the accused and then the State must imprison if there is a conviction. These SOCIALIZED services must be provided, if we are to have a civilized society.
The question isn't whether we should have capitalism or socialism. An ADULT understands that the question is HOW MUCH OF EACH should we have? The proportionality of the two also has to be fluid, so when economic times are hard, we can have more socialism.
We are in this situation, because the "theories" of Reaganomics and the Chicago School of economics have failed. However, these theories were enormously successful for the enrichment of their kleptocratic patrons.
Now the kleptocrats and their corrupted governments want us to clean up their mess..... AND set the table for them again.
Yeah, it is going to be very tough to sell that idea to the voters. But Faux News, CNBC, WSJ and the rest of the kleptocrat enabling media will be working 24/7 to make it happen. Why not? It's been working so far.