"Does it feel to anyone else that we are in a national rut?" (Kos diary)

[BlooInBloo]

I'm always a sucker for high-level interpretive overviews.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/3/6/10302/42404/660/705140

Does it feel to anyone else that we are in a national rut? That the entire economy of the United States has been predicated, for the last decades, on the following ingenious business cycle?

1. Someone -- probably Phil Gramm -- pushes for deregulation of a particular subset of a particular financial marketplace (see: energy markets, corporate insurance markets), or fervently insists that a newly discovered loophole in current regulations remain open.

2. Using the new loophole or deregulatory act, the companies that requested the financial deregulation in the first place make money hand over fist by exploiting that unregulated marketplace in increasingly sketchy ways (see: Savings and Loan crises, Enron, AIG). Someone who pushed for the deregulation -- probably Phil Gramm -- happens to have a relationship to one of the companies in question, and profits handsomely.

3. The unregulated financial sub-marketplace becomes so sketchy, so loaded with either implicit or explicit fraud, that it collapses under itself, taking the savings of millions of Americans with it (see again: Savings and Loan crises, Enron, AIG). Someone -- probably Phil Gramm -- calls on Americans to stop whining about it, it's just how the world works.

4. The government is forced to step in and repair the damage, but is restricted by the policy prescriptions of multiple somebodies -- usually including Phil Gramm -- to re-regulating the industry in the most minimal possible way, bailing out the companies that got themselves willingly into trouble through their own sketchy or asinine behavior.

5. A thousand other somebodies -- usually followers of Ayn Rand, the most communistic anti-communist to have ever lived, the woman who proposed that the rebellion against communism should consist of starting a commune, but being, you know, more selective about the membership -- chafes violently at the proposed fix in the process, because even in most gentle form it is far, far too harsh on those that created the problem in the first place. Rinse; repeat.

Are we becoming a nation intent on scamming itself, a nation that only values work or inventiveness when it is applied to new ways of squeezing more transactions between the same market endpoints, or milking out one more tenth of a percentage point in income by taking on thirty times that in risk?

[Warpy]

1. People will always try to cling to the world they know

even when it hasn't worked very well for them for a long time. I'm afraid it's human nature to try to paste a bad system together after the signs are clear that it should be junked and rebuilt from the ground up.

Rebuilding seems like an insurmountable task and learning to cope with a whole new set of rules is daunting.

That's why FDR spent two years trying to support prices by destroying farm produce in front of hungry people instead of giving those people a paycheck to buy it and it's why Obama will continue to throw good money after bad trying to prop the banks up instead of temporarily nationalizing them.

In other words, don't expect any improvement at all over the next year and a half and only incremental improvement after that until another New Deal is formulated and the ultra rich are taxed back into being merely the rich.