The Invisible Library

I was hoping to live long enough to see the US adopt some Socialist ideas, I just didn’t expect it to happen like this, or this quickly. Yikes. John Quiggin:

A couple of days ago, I thought my call for full-scale nationalisation of the banking sector would remain beyond the pale of political acceptability for at least a week. But in today’s paper I read the following, very sensible assessment

“Inevitably, the US, Britain and Europe are going to end up with nationalised banking systems in one form or another, and with governments guaranteeing not only their deposits but probably all their liabilities. The nationalisation will be a temporary emergency measure. But for some time at least the systemically important banks effectively are going to be public utilities and must be regulated accordingly.

This taxpayer rescue of banking systems opens up a new and potentially very important avenue for unfreezing bank lending and restoring the flow of credit. If governments effectively control the banks, what is to stop them from demanding that they start lending again?”

And what wild-eyed socialist wrote this? Alan Wood in the Australian.

Meanwhile, calls for a guarantee of bank deposits are gaining force.

Of course, none of this constitutes a shift to socialism in any meaningful sense of the term. But it does mean, for quite some time to come, the end of neoliberalism (or free-market liberalism or whatever you want to call the set of ideas centred on the proposition that markets can do a better job than governments in managing risks of all kinds).

As John Quiggin points out, this isn’t Socialism in the usual, “let’s feed everybody and make sure we have health care and education” sense but in the, “let’s make sure the rich don’t suffer the depredations we gladly heap on the poor.” We being the Bush administration, which means that, as usual, it’s Conservative ideals turned all wibbly wobbly, so that now Free Market Capitalism = Socialism for the Rich. Swell.

The upside being that the next time some jackass politician* gets on TV and tells us that gollygee, we’d love everyone to have Universal Health Care but we just can’t afford to go down that road just yet, sorry, they are, as usual, full of shit. 700 Billion for bank bailouts is a hell of a lot more than Universal Helathcare would ever cost. I mean, that’s only slightly more money then we’ve burned in Iraq.

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* Sadly, that jackass politician may turn out to be Obama.