Look Who’s Screaming for Socialism!
The free market is good!
Government is bad!
Regulation is terrible!
Let’s get the FDR pinko liberals out of our hair and the government off our back!
These were the battle cries of banks and investment banks and insurance companies ever since Reagan – actually since Andrew Mellon and then Ayn Rand – until the freewheeling free-marketers ran aground, lost their gigantic bonuses, and managed to put the whole financial system at risk.
At that point, Morgan Stanley cashed in all of its lobbying chips to get government intervention against short-sellers. Former Goldman Sachs chairman. now Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was busy working up plans for the government to bail out Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, and then AIG.
Now short-selling has been banned, at least for a while, the government has come up with another $500 billion to buy up all the abusive mortgages, and yet another truckload of taxpayer money to insure $2 trillion worth of mutual funds.
In other words, they’ve nationalized the financial markets.
And whose tantrums forced the bureaucrats to take over? Those same mighty brokers, bankers, fund managers, and insurers – Ayn Rand’s “men of genius” — who used to ooze contempt for the banana republics, the “European socialists,” and other “looters” who once intervened in the private sector on a much more modest scale.
Meanwhile, the men of genius were gambling your house and your pension at mindless levels of leverage because they thought they had it rigged so that they would make a bundle even if you were wiped out in the process.
Now the government owns them all, including three of the largest financial firms and all their fraudulent mortgages, and is lending out money (yours and mine) to most of the others.
Well, why not? Fat cats are people, too.
Comrade, under the new socialism they’ve brought down on their own heads, masters of the universe have a right to receive the same generous pensions that FBI agents, bus drivers, and letter carriers get.
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