Legatum, Brexit, and the privatisation of the British government

It's common knowledge that "think tanks" play a part in forming government policy, but how large a part wasn't clear until recently.

There was a time when "think tanks" were seen as a useful method of exploring ideas and "out of the box" thinking. This was when they were still in their relative infancy (such as forty or fifty years ago), and their influence was slight. As they were, by their nature, peripheral bodies, they could easily be ignored. Think tanks were a "safe space" to explore unconventional ideas, where they would do no harm if they were shown to be mistaken. The lessons that were learned were learned in private and behind closed doors.
It could be said this changed when one think tank in particular, the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), began to seriously influence the thinking of the Conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher. Its thinking then went on guide large areas of her government's policy. It was not that the IEA controlled government policy, but Thatcher's thinking and its thinking overlapped to a large degree. The problem was that these ideas became self-reinforcing, and this thinking also led to massive structural change of Britain. Some of its "Libertarian" ideas were put into practice on the British population, in the form of deregulating and privatising large sections of the economy, as well as guiding some changes to social policy.

As "think tanks" are essentially used as vehicles of political agendas, its important to recognise that these institutions are, almost by definition, working to undermine the democratic process. At the very least, we can say that "think tanks" act to manipulate the political process in a way that in opaque and beyond the public eye. Whereas at one time they were seen as useful "intellectual laboratories" for political nerds, these days they have turned into an industry in their own right, thanks to the support of wealthy donors.
Where the likes of the IEA began, others have followed over the years. There is now a plethora of "think tanks" that seem to have some form of influence on the Conservative Party and its government; perhaps the most influential, thanks to Brexit, is the Legatum Institute.

An excellent analysis of this "think tank" looks into the people involved, their backgrounds, and their motivations. The government seems to have given this "think tank" the role of doing large areas of the government's thinking on Brexit for it. In large areas of policy regarding Brexit, the government seems to have deferred judgement to the Legatum Institute. In a sense, we can call this the "privatisation of government": in this case, it is government policy itself that looks to have been privatised.


A logical conclusion?

This is a logical conclusion of the "Libertarian" school of thinking that came from Thatcherism. After privatising industries and services, it then led to the selling-off of government services themselves. The IEA had a large influence behind the scenes as it mirrored Thatcher's own thinking, thus reinforcing her own prejudices. By the time David Cameron came to power, there was a "second wind" of Libertarian thinking: under the auspices of the austerity program, there were further roll-outs of contracts for government services to the private sector.
Here we see how any event is used as an excuse to further advance the Libertarian agenda. Back in the '70s, it was used as the answer to the economic problems of the times. By the '80s, they had successfully changed the structure of the economy through deregulation, which ultimately led to the financial crisis of 2008; the answer to this (self-inflicted) problem was even more of the same agenda, now under the excuse of "austerity".
The "Brexit Agenda" was yet another furthering of the same cause: by freeing Britain of the "shackles" of the EU, it would solve the problem of "austerity". All the money that was wasted on the EU could be re-channeled to Britain. The use of the "Brexit Agenda" to dominate the political narrative was even more brazen than its earlier Libertarian incarnations, as it came about through the use of an outside force (UKIP) that didn't even have any serious representation in parliament. In earlier times, events were used as an excuse to further their agenda; nowadays, the events themselves are brazenly manipulated to further their agenda, regardless of how this demeans the democratic process. Brexit didn't come about through a "popular uprising", but through the insidious seeping of an agenda into the political mainstream.

The Legatum Institute fits into this "agenda" neatly, as it espouses the same aim using the same fallacies: that the EU was the cause of Britain's problems, and deregulation from the EU's constraints would allow Britain to thrive. Of course, this narrative all suits the agenda of those espousing the narrative: the agenda, as some of its advocates have argued, is to turn Britain into an economy like Singapore's.

The situation we are at is where the agenda that serves a narrow segment of society also serves to "privatize" government itself: with the ultimate aim being where the private sector can effectively make government policy, beyond the public eye and without proper transparency. While this idea is nothing new, as "lobbying" has been a part of politics for an eternity, its logical conclusion is the "Brexit Agenda": where the private sector runs the government, in the manner of a hierarchical company where Britain's citizens are its "worker bees".

Where a properly-functional democracy is meant to fit into this, is unclear.

Margaret And The Monetarists: The 1970s, and How To Destroy A Decade

The 1970s as a decade has become forever associated with economic stagnation ("stagflation") and unruly unions. It is this association, continually repeated, that helped the Conservatives stay in power for eighteen years; and it is the almost faith-like acceptance of this perception by the likes of Tony Blair that has helped to  maintain the same economic system that led to the financial crisis in 2008.

Is this perception accurate? When we look at the evidence, the picture tells us a very different, and much more complex picture. What is most important to remember is in whose interests is it that the commonly-accepted perception of "The Seventies" not be questioned. 

The 1970s was not a decade of continual decline and paralysis by the unions. There were two real bouts of crisis, true, but there were various factors for these, which I'll go into later.
It is true that in general the UK had been in overall decline since the end of the Second World War, and that by the start of the 1970s the industries that had supported the economy during the British Empire - trade through manufactured exports, coal production and shipbuilding - were declining by worrying levels due to cheaper and more productive competitors abroad. Put simply, Britain was no longer as useful to the rest of the world now that it no longer had an Empire that depended on it.
But the position was not totally hopeless, and the leading politicians of the day still believed that the "post-war consensus" (i.e. following a basically Keynesian-style of economics) was the best formula. Both leaders of the two main parties, Wilson and Heath, believed in some form of government-led action to maintain the economic health of the country.

Things only really started getting ugly after the Yom Kippur War in late 1973. Before that, the British economy was generally doing fine. There had been the scare of the Miners' strike in early 1972, where Arthur Scargill became a household name through his action at the Saltley picket and had forced the government to make concessions, but this was more of a blip in Heath's first few years as PM. The first few years of The Seventies were not too bad economically. House prices were going up, but that was due to the trend to buy property that was fast catching on (and a clear indicator of perceived wealth). The Heath government had brought the UK into the (then) EEC.
In other ways, the Heath government had some very progressive ideas from both the left and right. There was the (very Keynesian) idea to build a new airport on the Essex coast (Maplin Sands), which was to be the impetus for an adjecent new city like Milton Keynes; therefore promoting growth through massive investment projects. On the other hand, there were some progressive right-wing ideas around reforming (i.e. privatising) how public services were ran, though the ideas were cautiously-envisaged compared to Thatcher's later reforms.

It was the Oil Shock after the Yom Kippur War, that was felt all across the West, that sent the economy into a death-dive. And this is the important thing to remember: every country in the West was affected badly by the Oil Shock. Then the miners' union, the NUM, had an idea: if the government can pay through the roof for oil, then why can they not do the same for Britain's coal? As a result of the government's stubbornness towards the NUM's demands, coal supplies quickly began to fall. So after the New Year of 1974, the government introduced the "three-day week", where power would only be supplied three days out of seven in order to conserve coal supplies. Shortly after, Edward Heath called a general election. The result was a hung parliament, when he tried to make some kind of agreement with the Liberals. He failed, and Harold Wilson returned as PM.

The experience of Edward Heath as Prime Minister had a schizophrenic effect on the Conservative party. Margaret Thatcher had been his Education Minister, but generally she was thought of as something of an aberration.
Unlike her contemporaries as Prime Minister, Heath, Wilson and Callaghan, Thatcher's politics as a young person had not been deeply affected by the Depression. These three one-time Prime Ministers were more-or-less Keynesians of one type or another because they had seen the desperate poverty the Depression had caused at first hand. Margaret Thatcher had not. She had grown up in Grantham, a provincial town in Lincolnshire, her father a family grocer who had made a comfortable success out of his life, and was a longstanding member of the council and mayor later on. She was able to take advantage of this stable background to get herself an education at Oxford, and met her rich future husband, Denis. From then on, her life in politics went from success to success. In short, Margaret Thatcher was a woman not familiar with failure.
Heath stood down after losing the election, and Thatcher put her name forward, though she was not expecting to win it herself. She was the kind recipient of the nebulous dealings of the Conservative party, however, and when she became the surprise choice for leader, her peers didn't give her much of a chance in the long-term.
One of these reasons was her personality, which did not seem very natural or humane. She appeared to struggle to relate to the public, and she had gained the notorious epithet "Milk-snatcher" while as Education Minister. Then there were the types of people she had become associated with.
The "Monetarists" was a term for economists and political thinkers who were attracted to the idea of freeing-up the economy from Keynesian "consensus", allowing "market forces" to run the economy and the government do much less in general . They had created a number of think-tanks where like-minded Conservatives and right-wing economists could discuss and plan a strategy for expanding their philosophy to a wider audience. But in 1974, these ideas seemed too outlandish for many Conservatives, let alone the wider public. Besides, they were theories, that had never been really put into practice.

The second Wilson government had to face the continued worsening of the economy from the after-effects of the Oil Shock. What was worse, neither Wilson, his peers, or even the civil service, had much of an idea about how to deal with it. Because something like the Oil Shock had never happened before in living memory (at least, not since the Depression), a collective torpor seemed to gather over government in general. Inflation and unemployment soared. This forced the then-chancellor Denis Healey began to take a more pragmatic line with the Keynesian "consensus" by cutting public spending from spring 1975 onwards, so that the economy began to pick up. However, a cut in interest rates in spring 1976 (by the Bank Of England or the Treasury, no-one seems quite sure) started a domino effect on the stock markets, causing a calamitous drop in the value of the pound. It was this crisis that prompted Wilson's resignation and Callaghan to take over.

The drop in the pound continued for months. A loan in the summer of 1976 from other rich countries helped to reverse the damage, but the loan needed to be paid back quickly, and this is where the infamous IMF loan came from. By the end of that horrible year, Britain had been made to look a laughing stock on the money markets, and great damage had been done to the economy. What was worse, this was all entirely avoidable if the Bank Of England and the Treasury had got its act together; worse, when explaining the scale of the problem to the IMF, they had exaggerated the damage. In the end, barely half of the IMF loan money was needed by the government, so a crisis had been created almost out of nothing, and Britain's reputation destroyed needlessly.
This, and the "three-day week" were the low points for Britain in The Seventies. Callaghan as PM turned out to much more like Heath than many in the Labour party would have liked to admit at the time. His approach to dealing with the state of the economy was very pragmatic. After the IMF loan debacle, Britain's economy began to improve once more, and union action had reduced significantly compared to the first half of the decade, and at a time when union membership was growing ever more.
It was Callaghan's approach to the unions that was his signature piece, and also, counter-intuitively, his downfall. Callaghan had wanted to make the British economy and working life much more like Germany, as he believed it was Britain's best approach to a more progressive society and sustainable economy. And in many ways, posterity has proven him right. His approach with the unions involved a compromise called the "social contract", whereby unions accepted pay rises lower than than inflation.

By the summer of 1978, with the economy still on the right track, there was gossip of an autumn election. The polls were close, indicating another hung parliament like in early 1974 (another election later on in '74 gave Labour a small majority, but this has been eroded to a minority by losing successive by-elections, so that Callaghan was in government by an informal pact in parliament with the Liberals). Like Gordon Brown in 2007, Callaghan weighed up the options and thought, with the economy on track to improve further, he should wait till the spring of 1979. This decision proved to be fatal.
The longstanding union leader, Jack Jones, was a virtual power-broker with the government. As a fellow supporter of Callaghan's compromise and "social contract", his retirement in 1978 coincided with Callaghan's bold (or arrogant) decision to restrict union pay increases even further than what had been previously agreed, which was also around the same time as the gossip surrounding an autumn election. The result was that Jones' successor took a much stronger line with the government. Once Callaghan had made the decision to opt for a spring '79 election, the dice had been rolled and it didn't take long for the opportunistic element of the unions to strike. The result was the "Winter Of Discontent", which saw the widest organised strike action seen since the 1920s.

The "Winter Of Discontent" was not really as fully organised as the General Strike in the 1920s; it was much more about mass opportunism by workers tired of a decade of wages kept below inflation, and those workers in unions around the country simply began following suit with everyone else. The "Winter Of Discontent" was less a strike than a spontaneous social uprising, unprecedented in modern British history. Since the crisis of the "three day week" of early 1974, unions had been relatively disciplined. But Callaghan's step to restrain wage increases further was the straw that broke the camel's back. In one sense it was as though the spirit of '74 had returned, but the crucial difference was the spontaneous and almost hysterical nature of the events of the winter of '78-'79. Although there were many who did not strike, the sheer random nature of how previously quiet unions (such as those representing grave-diggers, refuse collectors, traffic wardens and lorry drivers) suddenly became militant, was a shock to the establishment, the Labour government included. There was a period during that winter when Hull had become effectively a union-ran city, where employers had to queue like supplicants at the local union office to ask for permission to transport goods. For a number of weeks, it was like the "Paris Commune" had taken over Hull; Leningrad-on-the-Humber.

Such a "social revolution" was bound to terrify some parts of the establishment, and in such an emotive atmosphere, the reckoning was not long in coming. When the election finally came after the government lost a vote of confidence, Callaghan was punished and lost the election.
Thanks to a series of fortuitous events, Thatcher and "The Monetarists" had finally won their place in government.

It is one of politics' "what ifs". If Callaghan had gone for an autumn 1978 election, a hung parliament or small Labour majority was the most likely result. Thatcher would likely have been forced out by her party, and the more moderate "Heathite" side of the party would have likely been able to select a new leader. So "Thatcherism" and "Monetarism" may well have never had the chance to see the light of day at all. And a second term Callaghan, with the backing of the growing revenues from North Sea Oil, may have been able to make Britain's economy more sustainable like Germany's.

Instead, Thatcher was given the chance to implement her theories on the giant laboratory of Britain. But it did not happen right away; in fact Thatcher's first term in many ways resembled a sort of "Heath II": it was unsure of what to do, and her government gave in to a miners strike in early 1981 just like Heath in 1972. Often forgotten now, Thatcher's first term presided over a far worse economy and unemployment levels far worse than even in the 1970s; the economy stagnated for three years, not showing real signs of improvement until after the 1983 election. The Conservatives in the 1983 election didn't even do very well; what saved them was the civil war on the left that split the opposition vote three ways. That, and the "Falklands effect".
It was only after the '83 election that Thatcher felt confident enough to implement her "Monetarist" agenda.
The opening-up of the banking sector led to the free-for-all in the stock market and the practices that led to the financial crisis in the UK. What remained of British manufacturing and heavy industry (i.e. the key industries outside of the South Of England) was allowed to stagnate. Union power was crushed, at the expense of employees' rights. The "right to buy" council houses led to a massive shortfall in the number of affordable houses in the UK in the long term, and was a key factor that led to the dysfunctional housing market we now face. Public sector industries were sold off to the private sector; now we know the result of that in the ever-rising cost of our bills.

And all this because Margaret Thatcher and "The Monetarists" thought that The Seventies was a horrible time for Britain. In reality, the peak of British egalitarianism, where the gap between the rich and the poor was at its smallest, was in the later seventies, during Callaghan's government. The poor generally did well in the 1970s, in spite of inflation. So clearly there is something wrong with the "consensus" formed since that it was a time of economic hardship and poverty. It was not, for the vast majority. The people who "suffered" (in the technical sense) the most in the 1970s were the rich; in particular, the mega-rich, as they were forced to contribute more to the state in taxes, and saw the loss in value of their savings in real terms.

But do we want a more egalitarian and meritocratic society, or one that is designed to benefit those who are already rich?

The state of the British economy and its post-Imperial future

As I wrote in an earlier post here, "The Future Of Britain" is written by its past. Any national economy has to have a valid and sustainable model to grow.

Britain had been struggling to adapt its economy in relation to the world and its own population since the end of the Second World War; by the end of the seventies, the new Conservative government followed the economic thinking of the Monetarist school. An inefficient manufacturing and public sector was seen to blame for many of the problems that existed; the private sector was seen as the most efficient sector, therefore this was promoted by the Thatcher government, while at the same time killing the power of the unions to control employees pay rights.
The Conservatives, due to their background, were naturally more minded to trust the opinion of The City, which up to this point had played a minor role in the British economy. Influenced by the Monetarist, laissez-faire approach, the complacent arrogance and ignorance of the Conservative government led them to believe that the British economy did not need a strongly-supported manufacturing base to the economy. In fact, many of them associated factories and manufacturing with backwardness, union militancy and inefficiency. It was the government's belief that an expansion of a booming financial sector was Britain's way forward in the post-modern age: with a strong financial sector, everything else would fall into place and grow along with it. It would be a sign of progress, therefore, that Britain would no longer need a real manufacturing base.

Up to the end of the seventies, Britain had a large manufacturing base that produced exports. Although it had its inefficiencies, the modest income of these industries was allowed to wither by the government and an ignorant private sector; rather than invest to regain their competitive edge, they were cut down, slice by slice, to maximise profits through minimising costs (i.e. laying-off the workforce and relocating premises). The manufacturing base became an early casualty to "globalisation", as companies moved their factories abroad. As was already said, the government turned a blind eye to this as it saw the financial sector as the future of Britain. The incoming Labour government in 1997 continued with this willful ignorance and complacency, continuing to massage the ego of the financial sector further. By the start of the 21st century, resting the hopes on the financial sector was the only hope to keep Britain's economy going, as there was very little else left to support it. Manufacturing was minimal, as "service industries" had replaced manufacturing. Even the agricultural sector had become unprofitable due to the lop-sided effect on the price of imports from the strong pound (courtesy of The City). All was good, as long as the economy kept booming.

The results of this thinking are clear to see now. Believing themselves to be infallible, the financial sector quickly began to forget the most basic rules of economics (let alone ethics) in order to make the most profit possible. The City and the government encouraged an expansion in credit lending, as well as making people see their own homes as an investment rather than a roof over their heads. By 2007, the whole system in Britain that was creating the financial-backed boom was shown to be the complete fraud that it had been all along. Ireland used an almost identical model, to the same sorry result.

This explains why Britain in 2013 has a completely dysfunctional and lop-sided economy, unsustainable in any real sense of the word. The best way to explain this, apart from in layman's terms, is to compare the British model to other economies and their models around the world.
In order for a nation to grow, it needs growth supported by exports. A few countries can get around this by being financial centres, such as Singapore, Hong Kong (although not technically an independent state) and Switzerland. This is the model that the British Conservatives aimed (and still aim) to imitate. But, by nature, such countries have a generally small, highly-skilled and educated workforce, which fits in well with the financial sector. Britain has none of these, except for London and the South-east (I'll come back to this point later in a moment).
For a country to have exports, there are generally two paths to success: either produce demanded products (such as Germany, the Far East and the USA); or have a demanded resource, such as oil (The Gulf States, Central Asia, the USA, Russia, etc.), precious metals (Africa, Mongolia etc.), coffee beans, whatever. Without either of these paths, the chances of economic growth are limited.

The Conservatives still believe that Britain can be ran like Singapore, but this thinking merely displays their blinkered London-centric mentality and economic ignorance of the rest of the country, never mind their complete ignorance of economics.

I said that only London and the South-east compare economically to places like Singapore; the rest of Britain in 2013 feels more like a neglected colonial appendage to a London city-state - the "Kaliningrad" of London, to use a Russian metaphor. Economically, there is London and the South-east; and then there is everywhere else. Greater London's economy is still flourishing based on the financial sector and related services. Meanwhile, the other regions of the UK are an a different economic country, dependent on the success of London somehow trickling through to them. If nothing changes, the future of Britain will be this: to be the "Empire Of London" in all but name; a wealthy London supporting its neglected and dysfunctional regional "colonies", made economic dependencies of the Imperial Capital.
Fifty years ago, the economy of the UK was far more balanced, as the manufacturing sectors of the North and the Midlands actually contributed much more to the economy. But no longer. Sold a lie by the government thirty years ago, it is Britain as a country overall that is suffering the results of that complacent idiocy.

Germany thrives still because its economy is balanced; its manufacturing sector was continually nurtured by government. Turkey is an up-and-coming power due to the investment thrown into its manufacturing; with a similar-sized population and dynamic approach like Germany, Turkey has a great opportunity to match Germany as a regional power in the medium and long-term.

Britain, sadly, has little future under the economic orthodoxy of its establishment. If you imagine rich Singapore controlling a economically run-down South-East Asia, you might be close to the truth to what future "Britain" as an economic power holds, as a wealthy and ignorant London establishment neglects the unfashionable and depressed corners of its "British Islands Empire".
And some of the establishment have the gall to question why rich London should support its poor regions.
Because you made them poor, that's why!

Individualism, Narcissism, and psychopathy in modern society

The rise of the culture of individualism has been blamed for the breakdown of the family unit in the Western world over the last forty years. This is nothing new, and there have been many studies done over the years on the subject. I don't want to go over the same ground; instead, I am more interested in the psychological grounding of this trend, and the psychological implications it has had on society, that we can see all around us, under the surface.

I said that individualism has caused the breakdown of the family, but Western society's change began in the "baby boom" generation after the Second World War. That came about at the same time as unprecedented levels of rising prosperity in Western society, allowing children in the West to experience previously-unknown levels of parental attention. By the sixties, this prosperity created a greater emphasis on "self-improvement" and "individual achievement" in children, resulting in a greater degree of people's self-awareness generally. This culture of self-expression and exploration, and a greater tolerance of diversity of thought therefore created an unprecedented level of narcissism in children growing up in this social environment.
As long as this occurred at the same time as a healthy economy, this was not overtly harmful to society. The social culture of the West was radically different by the end of the sixties than what existed ten years previously, and was a direct result of both rising prosperity and rising self-awareness in Western society.
But by the seventies, the economy had become unstable, and one half of the equation (improving social conditions and rising self-awareness) had been destroyed. The effect on society was almost immediate: a culture of rising self-awareness had now grown to one of increasing narcissism, but in an unstable socio-economic climate. The collective psychology of Western society now became more dysfunctional, as an increasingly narcissistic society was unable to properly deal with a change in economic circumstances. The result was more family breakdown, and more crime. Thus children born of narcissistic parents (such as those in the social conditions of the "baby boom" generation) are even more likely to be narcissistic, if not outright psychopathic, when you combine narcissistic parenting with an unstable social environment.

When I talk about "narcissism", we mean Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), which, with Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD), is one half of the psychological conditions required to create Psychopathy. I wrote here about what the medical definition of psychopathy is, as an (until recently) under-examined and virulent psychological plague on society, and how it can be seen as the cause of much of the problems in human society.
Narcissism (NPD) is largely a result of environmental factors: a combination of parental dominance/indifference/excessive adoration and/or abuse in the child's formative years. Instability in the family unit, such as separation and parental conflict also contribute to the problem. Narcissism results from the child's inability to see healthy and suitable psychological support from the parents and elders, as mentioned: the child then begins to see itself as the only reliable place to receive support, becomes self-absorbed and misanthropic. A narcissistic personality sees itself as grandiose, entitled to superior treatment, and abusive towards others it sees as inferior to itself (i.e. everyone), who it sees more as objects to be used rather than real people. A narcissist cannot take criticism easily, and refuses to take responsibility for his own actions; he finds it difficult to focus on one task (be it a job or a relationship) for a long time, as his grandiose nature makes it difficult to "waste" time on what he sees as fruitless pursuits. Cynical towards humankind in general, he finds it hard to trust people, and thus have many real friendships; superficial, his emotions are shallow and not to be taken at face value. In personal relationships, the narcissist uses partners as objects of his own amusement, causing emotional distress and potentially long-last psychological damage.
The above characteristics, when combined with ASPD (Anti-Social Personality Disorder) create the dysfunctional and amoral personality of a psychopath.

The increase in economic instability in the seventies therefore created the knock-on effect of familial instability, exacerbating the conditions suitable for incubating NPD in children. This effect is then multiplied over the generations; parents born of the "baby boom" generation, potentially narcissistic and dysfunctional in their own right, made the likelihood of causing NPD in their children all the more possible. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence to link the rise in consumerism as part of the modern Capitalist economy over the last forty years with the concurrent reported steep rise in narcissism in society.

The unstable economic climate of the seventies also destroyed the "Post-war Consensus" in the West; Western economies, such at the USA and UK in particular, saw the former Keynesian economic model as discredited. Monetarism, which emphasized the downsizing of government and social bonds, and the emphasis on individualist pursuit, became the new model to follow. While the economy improved over the next twenty-five years in both the USA and UK, the levels of inequality increased to unprecedented levels - the gap between the salary of the average CEO and his workers had increased tenfold in thirty years, while the salary of the average worker had only slightly improved, if at all, in real terms. For those at the bottom ten per cent, their earnings have fallen.

Monetarism, and the moral philosophy of Ayn Rand that inspired it, may even be compared with the economics and ideology of psychopathy put into practice. Psychopaths, because they are amoral, cunning, ambitious and promiscuous, act like a psychological plague on human society; literally spreading their psychopathic seed, and the unstable family conditions required for it to gestate in their offspring, they create more psychopaths in their unloved and misanthropic children.
Psychopaths cause chaos, and want to cause chaos because they gain pleasure and power from it, in equal measure. The Monetarist economic model, and its contemporary successors in the USA and the UK (The Tea Party, formed by the billionaire Koch brothers; and the Conservative government, intent on transforming and shrinking the public sector), is an ideological justification for the destruction of the social unit, and for destroying belief in government overall. 
Like Ayn Rand's ideology, Monetarism justifies itself by saying it advances individual aspiration, innovation  and achievement, like the Capitalist economies of medieval states like the Venetian Republic did, for example. This is a misnomer, and a smokescreen. For a start, the Venetian Republic was much more state-controlled than contemporary capitalists like to admit, as well as creating some progressive social measures to improve society (such as a rudimentary form of "NHS"). Secondly, by focusing on individualism as the primary method of improving the economy and society, it becomes an inherently misanthropic ideology; as all motives are seen through pure self-interest, cynicism in human nature becomes the norm. If people exist to simply get what they can more themselves, the motivation for co-operation decreases.
Ayn Rand argued that co-operation in society only exists through mutual self-interest: companies caring for the wider environment, for example, because they see the long-term benefits. But there is little evidence for this in reality. Companies are far more likely to do the bare minimum to benefit society, and will only behave in an altruistic way when compelled by government instruction; the same is true for individuals when there is no altruist motive. Rand's book, "The Virtue Of Selfishness" makes such counter-intuitive logic (that self-interest benefits society, while altruism destroys it), and turns the moral compass of society on its head. Thus people are poor simply through their own actions, people are made rich through purely their own actions, and charity becomes a counter-productive indulgence (as Ayn Rand thought herself).
Thus caring selflessly for others is akin to stupidity (if not outright evil), and human motive is reduced to pure self-interest: "he's helping me because he wants something, not because he cares about me", for example.

This is why Conservatives always emphasize self-improvement as the best method out of poverty, while conveniently ignoring the natural advantage of the wealth which they were born into. It is no coincidence that Conservatives are more likely to be rich; those that were not already born into comfort and wealth, most likely made their wealth through moral flexibility, if not outright ruthlessness and inhumanity. In other words, they are likely to be Narcissists, if not outright Psychopaths.

An economy based on these principles is most likely to create social inequality and sporadic bouts of  economic chaos, which inevitably benefits those already at the top. The West, especially the USA and UK (where Monetarist policies are at their most virulent), has therefore created an individualist (and more psychopathic) society that is predisposed to perpetuate itself; greater individualism in society, greater family dysfunction, and greater economic instability are all conditions that will create a greater frequency of NPD and Psychopathy in society as a whole, which will create further chaos, and so on.

There is also much that links the psychopathic factors in Capitalism with that of the earlier human hunter-gatherer instinct; and in this sense, Capitalism is simply an adaptation of the hunter-gatherer mentality applied to a higher stage of evolution.

In other words, using this projection, narcissism and psychopathy will continue to grow like a virus throughout Capitalist society as long as the social and economic conditions allow it to.

The UK's five-year prison sentence

These days I'm thinking a lot about "The Decline Fall Of The Roman Empire", the famous weighty tome by Gibbon that chronicled the last thousand years or so of the Roman Empire.
In the UK today, it feels as though we're living through a British version of that, only the "reality TV" version, where the government plots the decline for everyone else to deal with.
"The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire", if such a book were ever written, would probably start at the beginning of the First World War, and (supposing this happens) end with the secession from the Union of Scotland from England after the general election of 2015; a period of roughly a hundred years. Even if the Scots choose to remain in the Union, it is clear they want control of their own economy, rendering London's real power over Scotland to be marginal, and little more than symbolic. From controlling roughly a quarter of the world's population, a hundred years later the British government would no longer be in control of even its own island, let alone anything else of importance.

This is the geo-political reality. The strategic, economic and social decline of the former British Empire's situation is even more marked and desperate.
The real decline of British governance started in the 1970s with a variety of factors: economic stagflation, a decline in real living standards, and the unions' increasing hold over the government. This led the Thatcher government to make an abrupt change - a virtual non-violent economic revolution - to severely restrict the power of the unions, while at the same time selling-off various government assets to companies, and handing over handling of the economy to the banking sector, trusting them with the job of re-building the British economy.
This philosophy worked well, at least for twenty-five years. Successive governments of both parties agreed with this new ethos - gradual privatisation of government assets and a ripping up of the regulations that controlled the actions of the banking sector. And, overall, this seemed to work, as the British economy, without an empire any more, thrived up to the first decade of the 21st century.
But the whole concept was an illusion, and a catastrophic one at that. Without rules to rein them in, banks became to think they were infallible, and the more the economy grew on profit built from non-existent, inflated assets, the more the government thought the banks should be indulged. In as much as there was a system explaining where Britain's financial sector was getting its money from, anarchy reigned.

The implosion of that system and the financial chaos that followed has been documented before, and don't need to go into further detail about that. Suffice to say, when the banks succeeded in extorting from the government the bailout that the government then felt obliged to pass on to the public sector and the British taxpayers, the decline of Britain's status as a sovereign power was set in stone. From the 1980s onwards, Britain had gone from being at the beck and call of the unions, to being a servant to the mercenary and amoral banks; a nation-state in the pockets of companies that knew nothing of honour or patriotism. And if the government tried to complain, the banks' threat to flee the country, threatening to leave the country economically in the lurch, was always effective in keeping British government voices quiet. Britain was hostage to the banks' protection racket.

By 2010, when the Conservatives came to power with the LibDems, the decline was accelerated. The public sector cuts (the government's price of the banks' bailout) that had tentatively been discussed under the Labour government, were now marked as the new government's main economic strategy to improve the economy - largely because this was what the banks told them to do. Worse, this strategy had the opposite effect as intended; worsening the economy, expanding the government's debt, increasing unemployment and deprivation, while the government refused to accept any responsibility for creating it.
That, along with "reforming" government institutions such as education, health and welfare - slashing their budgets, terrorising staff, and selling off government services to companies - as well as firing thousands of police, and reducing Britain's military to a bare minimum, the government had succeeded within two years in alienating almost every major sector of society. Only the rich were the ones unaffected, as they knew how to milk the system - or lack of - for themselves. For those at the top, as with the banks, wonderful anarchy reigned; for the rest, it was misery, a situation of financial poverty, or something close to it. In either case, the majority of the British population were living in times where collective morale at its lowest in living memory.

When not alienating various sections of society - either with perverse intent or ignorance - the Conservative government was demonstrating almost unbelievable levels of incompetence, adding to the British public's sense of disbelief piled upon helplessness. Because those of the Conservatives now in government were mostly chosen through their connections to the Prime Minister's circle rather than their merit, it led to people being chosen far above their station.
People like the Home Secretary Theresa May, and the Culture Minister, Jeremy Hunt, are the prime examples, though there are others. These two in their first two years in their respective positions in government, presided over various chaotic blunders, scandals and generally bringing the position of minister into disrepute through their own glaring incompetence. But these two remained in their positions even after all this, refusing to accept any responsibility for anything, with the Prime Minister still gamely supporting them. His seeming refusal to take many things very seriously, Prime Minister David Cameron presided over a situation where government contracts were passed out to companies that were ran (or part-owned) by ministers or the friends of ministers. This is more commonly called corruption, but the government would still refuse to accept that anyone had ever done anything wrong. As the Conservatives saw it, as no one had ever intentionally done wrong, then no-one could ever be blamed for wrong-doing: there were only "mistakes" or "omissions".

This is the mentality you expect in a banana republic. And this is what Britain had been reduced to after two years of Conservative government.
The government has stated the intention of staying in power for a full five-year term. The LibDems, in their cowardice of the British electorate, are maintaining this government-by-banana-republic. In other words, because Britain is a democracy, that's why the government doesn't want to have elections.
The rest of the British people, the ones not rich anyway, have to wait another three years before they have the right to use their "Get Out Of Jail Card".

It's a five-year prison sentence that the government has enforced on us - five years of austerity; destruction of the public services and selling off of government assets; government indifference towards unemployment and investment; and five years of the UK being ran by corrupt, mindless buffoons allowing their friends to run amok with what was once called the homeland of British Empire, while blaming it on everyone else.

A market without regulations is like a legal system without laws

The free market liberals, of both the Tea Party-types in the USA, and the Conservative ideologues in the UK, love the idea of markets ruling everything.

They see markets as being the best way of dealing with goods and services. They see government as getting in the way of the private sector, who should be best to be left alone (where the phrase "laissez-faire" comes from).
Their rationale is very simple: markets are the best way of dealing with goods and services because markets are "self-regulating": in other words, prices are controlled by demand (i.e. customers) and supply (i.e. how much of something there is). so a high supply product (like bread) would be cheap, whereas a low supply product (like caviar) would be expensive. Also, there is naturally more demand for bread than caviar.

The same logic works for salaries: commonplace jobs with a large pool of labour offer lower wages than those with a high skills requirement and this have a far small potential employee pool.

Enough of the economics primer. What happens when you put this into practise?

There are plenty of real-life examples of how this unregulated "free-market" works in real life. In the main, though, it doesn't. Here's why.

Look at the property market in the UK. There are those properties that people can mortgage or rent. This all depends on supply and demand. According to the theory, if  customers alter their behaviour (by wanting more of a product), a supplier should naturally react to customer desire: that's how the market works, by suppliers naturally reacting to customers' demand. Does this happen in the UK property market? No.

The housing stock in the UK has remained far below consumer demand for years, decades. It didn't help when the last Conservative government, under Thatcher, sold off thousands of council houses to the private market, without building any sufficient replacement government housing. But that's a separate matter. The question is WHY does the private sector (the market), fail to react to consumers' demands for a large increase in the housing stock? The answer is because of one of the fundamental flaws in the principle of the "free market": short-termism.

The private sector is often terrible at strategic, long-term thinking and looking at wider economic concerns. As businesses are driven by profit, they find it difficult to set aside money for "investments" which take a long time to set up, can be risky, and the financial benefits cannot be seen until some time in the future. Simply, the incentive for businesses to think long-term is too small. As a result, industries that have been privatised see a gradual decline in things like infrastructure and trying to look ahead to future trends.

This is why housing and construction in the UK has shrunk significantly, especially since the onset of the recession: businesses see too much risk and too little potential gain. Even though it's obvious that consumers need more housing, the "free market" is too fearful of risking money on long-term projects. The same thinking is true of the banking sector where it comes to giving out loans to help small businesses and individual entrepreneurs. Even though it can be rationally explained that any risk would be worth it considering the potential wider gain to the economy for encouraging business and wealth generation, banks, like the "free market" in general, are weighed-down by short termism.
George Osborne, the Conservative government's supposed economic heavyweight, has set his reputation on believing that the private sector will create the recovery. But everything tells us the opposite.

Continuing with the housing market, the rise in the cost of rents can be easily explained. Banks are reluctant to give out mortgages, forcing customers onto the rental market. As a result, although the cost of mortgages overall has gone down slightly, the cost of rent has rocketed. This may well result, for the first time in decades, with many younger people being unable to buy a mortgage and stuck in a high rent property. Again, because the private sector is unable plan strategically, this has meant the rental housing stock has remained static while demand has increased. So here is where the market doesn't work: landlords simply see an opportunity to make more money, and with the customer held hostage by the limited number of rental properties (and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future), everyday people are getting shafted. And will continue to do so for years if things stay as they are.


If the private sector is meant to be so risk-averse, why was there a construction boom in Spain? Because they saw no risk. There was a housing boom in the UK too, but not a construction boom on the same scale. What the housing booms in Spain and the UK had in common was the over-valued inflation of prices; but the reasons behind were slightly different.
 In the UK, the boom was fuelled by mortgage lenders losing their previous aversion to risk and giving mortgages to people who were not financially reliable. They forgot one of the basic rules of the market: not to invest in high-risk ventures.
In Spain, the boom was fuelled by construction firms losing their previous understanding of the demand for housing, and creating a huge over-supply. They forgot another basic rule of the market: that as supply increases, price goes down (and will, eventually).


The property market is just one example that quickly comes to my mind. Another one is education.

The introduction of competition was meant to improve secondary educational standards. But how are those educational "standards" measured? By exam results, because that's the easiest way for the "free market" to measure education. The government therefore supported this method when competition was introduced into secondary education.

The result? Schools have turned into exam-preparation centres, concentrating on the exam results the students get at the end of their education, rather than actually how useful or effective that "education" will be in the real world. Students know a great deal about how to pass exams, but not a lot about how to transfer their education into real-world skills useful to the economy.
Another side-effect of this "results" obsession is that schools focus on encouraging subjects that are easier for  students to excel in, in order to improve the schools ranking (and thus attract further revenue). This is a further reason why you have students leaving school with qualifications that may well be of little use. The "free market" has the opposite effect of that intended, because everything becomes a race to reach the lowest common denominator: to maximise results in order to minimise risk.
One last point is the government's introduction of a free market even in examination boards: schools can choose which "testing centre" they think is the best. That was the theory, anyway. The reality has been the opposite: schools, in order to maximise results and minimise risk, have often chosen the exam board that offers the "easiest" set of exams, to give students the best chance of getting a good result, therefore boosting the school's published results.

So what happens when the "free market" is let loose? You usually get a maximisation of profit at the minimisation of risk. If the government wants the private sector to act in a rational, strategic, open-minded way, then they need to read basic economics again.

To trust that the "free market" is the best way of dealing with economy, is to hand over running your economy to people with the mental age of five-year-olds. Unregulated markets, by definition, are, as a general rule, incapable of thinking long-term or strategically. Yes, the market has an important role to play, but it can only be a sane instrument if it is regulated by government.

The "free market", by definition, is an example of anarchy, because no-one is in control of it; it "controls" itself.  It's like having a legal system without anybody to enforce the laws. The "free market" is a system based on blind optimism.

Any government that supports the "free market" is also blind.

Is Capitalism In League With Lucifer?

If the Devil himself had thought up a vision of hell on earth, then Capitalism may well be one version of it. Capitalists may well reply that Communism is a version of hell as well, and that may well be true. But what these two ideologies represent are merely two opposing visions of hell.
The Devil, from looking at the pronouncements made in his name in Holy Scripture, was not a Communist. In fact, if anyone in Holy Scripture were Communists, it was the early Christians and ancient Jews. Early Christianity was mainly about selflessness and charity; the very things that Capitalists are philosophically opposed to.

The main purpose of the Devil, paraphrasing from Holy Scripture, was to test man and prove his irrationality and lack of virtue. Lucifer, in the Old Testament, refused to kneel before the image of man, as, being one of the archangels, he knew he was better than him. He was cast out of Heaven for his pride and disdain towards man. The story of Lucifer in the Holy Scripture is a history of repeated attempts to demonstrate man’s inherent psychological weaknesses.
If the Devil was against the Christian virtues of selflessness and charity we can logically assume that his principal drives were selfishness and indifference to human suffering. As we have seen, these two attributes are also shared with psychopaths and Capitalists.
Another strategy of the Devil in the Holy Scripture was to deceive and trick the pious into doing evil deeds, in order to prove man’s unworthiness and “irrationality”.
If we look at the principles of Capitalism, they are formulated to give the appearance of promoting freedom, rationalism and human progress. As we have seen, the reality easily creates something entirely opposite. When Capitalists’ behaviour is put under the microscope, we see the behaviour of a psychopath. Capitalism creates a state in nature close to chaos, albeit with the sham of human “civilisation” due to a minimal jurisdiction of law and order. It is this chaotic sham of human “civilisation” that Capitalists claim is the height of human rationalism.

If the Devil wished to create the conditions on Earth in order to bring about the downfall of human “civilisation” he could perhaps not go far wrong in implementing the philosophy of Objectivism and the economic ideology of Capitalism.
For the beauty of Capitalism is its mass appeal to the human desire, by intellectually turning all human conventions on their head. It is a philosophy that says that we can all have our cake and eat it. It is able to intellectualise psychopathic behaviour as virtue. The socially liberal and conscientious intellectual is demonised for his selfless behaviour, while encouraged to see those less fortunate than him as less worthy than him and to be ignored for the sake of his, and their, best interests. The hard-working middle-class craftsman is encouraged to discard any pretence of social niceties to his peers and see them as commodities to be used and exploited where possible in order to advance his career further, while at the same time encouraged to work his subordinates harder to further his own purse and, through his underlings’ hardships, encourage their motivation for self-advancement. While the impoverished outcast is encouraged by his own misfortune and the successes of others to do as much as he can to find a place for himself in the world, in whatever way he can.

What may well be the most appealing aspect of Objectivism to the Devil, therefore, is its plausible intellectual argument for encouraging evil behaviour. There is perhaps nothing more dangerously persuasive than a person being told what appears a clearly evil act is perfectly rational in the circumstances. The Nazis used similar thinking in carrying out the Holocaust; Stalin did the same when justifying the deaths of millions of his own people.
As said before, while a Capitalist is not directly or openly violent in the way that the Nazis were or Stalin was, millions may still die under a Capitalist’s watch. The only difference is that they would die through omission rather than commission. They would die because of indifference rather than intent.
But, if the Devil had learnt anything over the ensuing millennia, it may be than humanity is not as easily tricked as in the ancient or medieval past. Lucifer would have to get smarter in order to bring out the end of human civilisation, and finally prove man’s barbarity to man. He would not be able to be evil openly; it would have to subtly, indirectly. Cloaking evil in an intellectual veil of virtue would be the way Lucifer would have to do it these days, in the days of such human cynicism. Becoming a Capitalist would be an excellent way to go about it.

Putting the Capitalist Experiment into Practice

If Capitalism as a thought experiment sounds like a society populated by psychopaths, you shouldn’t be surprised.
Thus far, such a society does not exist, but Monetarists (inspired by the philosophy of Objectivism, founded by Ayn Rand), who became highly influential after the 1970s, in particular in the Anglo-Saxon world, had a chance to get closer to it.
After implementing these principles into the financial and industrial sectors of the Anglo-Saxon civilisations (as much as they dared), and exporting them to other developing nations (as much as they could get away with), the end result, after almost thirty years, was a near-total collapse of the financial and industrial sectors of the Anglo-Saxon civilisations and their dependent economies in the developing world. The only thing that prevented a total, catastrophic collapse was that the Monetarists convinced governments around the world to pay for their irresponsibility. They could convince them because the governments knew the alternative was likely to be the eventual collapse of human (or, at least, Anglo-Saxon) civilisation.
There is another word for this: extortion. This is the “do-what-I-say-or-else” line of thinking. It is also how criminal gangs cultivate protection rackets; by fear. By Capitalist standards, even a protection racket can be called a legitimate business as it offers a service in exchange for money: the service of safety. The difference is that a security company offers a consensual form of security (payment against the risk of crime), whereas a racket is a coerced form of security (payment against crime).
When the governments bailed-out the banks, this was, in effect, the largest example of coercion in financial history. They were rewarding criminal behaviour because the alternative was the death of Anglo-Saxon civilisation. In this way, the actions of the Monetarists during the Financial Crisis display all the hallmarks of psychopathology: Financial Irresponsibility; Impulsive behaviour and failing to plan for the future; recklessness; lack of guilt for the harm caused to others; deceiving and conning others.

The bailout was a typical example of Capitalist passive-aggressive behaviour; there was no direct use of force involved in the bailout on the part of the Monetarists, but it was clear to the government that in this “transaction”, there was no option on the government side.
The government agreement with the Monetarists just over thirty years ago was, in effect, like a Faustian pact. Like Mephistopheles, who sold his soul to the Devil, the governments of the Anglo-Saxon world surrendered financial responsibility to the Objectivist psychopaths.
Put another way, when put into practice, Capitalism is like nuclear energy: it creates enormous amounts of energy (profit), but is highly unstable if left unregulated and has potentially unimaginable destructive power. So why would “rational” governments, and people, take the risk? The reason is because, like Mephistopheles, they can become seduced by greed.

Because the Monetarists/Objectivists/Capitalists knew that all governments are, by nature, “irrational”, they also knew that they would be able to convince governments that “greed is good”: because this precisely coincided with the Capitalist world view. What is more intellectually puzzling is how Capitalists view government’s greed as “irrational”, but Capitalist greed as “rational”. The Capitalists exploited governments’ greed for their own ends: the Monetarists, who routinely accuse “government” as acting as a parasite on the individual, acted like a parasite on the government itself.
At the risk of tiring the metaphors, the philosophy of Objectivism is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Under the cloak of promoting freedom and individual rights, society is destroyed and the individual wakes up discovering that, in fact, he has NO rights. The only “right” he has (in terms of being guaranteed from birth) is the right to breathe and the minimum of law and order. Everything else in the world is up to his own efforts. Everyone is competing to survive. Everything is up for grabs. Everyone is out for what they can get from everyone else. True, you are free to speak your mind, but what is the point of having an opinion if you can do nothing with it? What is the point of “freedom” if you have no money?

The Inside Job

Recently watched the documentary "The Inside Job", a chillingly effective and analytical look at the causes of the Financial Crisis. It is narrated by Matt Damon, who also acts as interviewer to those people of influence who were happy enough (or foolish enough) to want to be interviewed.

"The Inside Job" sets out in clear details the root causes for the Financial Crisis, and lays out in no uncertain terms essentially how amoral, all-powerful and corrupt the financial sector that controls the world's money truly is.
For those who think that to say "the banks and money men run everything" is a statement of a conspiracy-theorist, watching this film will show you how sadly correct much of that paranoia really is based on fact.

The Financial Crisis was not an accident. It was not inevitable.

It happened because thirty years ago the governments of the Anglo-Saxon world (Ronald Reagan in particular), threw away the rules that had protected the banking industry from carrying out the same amoral and reckless behaviour that had caused the Great Depression.
It happened because Ronald Reagan was a willing disciple to the views the the banking sector, who felt they had been constrained for too long by those same rules that had protected the economy from the irresponsibility of the banks.
In 1979, for example, the big banks of the USA (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs etc.) had a modest number of staff, on a modest wage. There was the example of one broker who actually had two jobs in order to make a suitable income for his wife and children. Due to the throwing out of the rules restricted the banks, ten years later that same broker would be a millionaire. Those banks now have a staff many times higher than they had thirty years ago.

But even that deregulation did not mean that banks could not be regulated in other ways. In the financial industry, there are what are called Ratings Agencies: these give values to the assets that banks have when trading. Attempts to regulate the banks in other ways during the Clinton administration fell on deaf ears, and by that point the banks had long had sufficient clout to arm-wrestle the Department of the Treasury to make it effectively a huge lobby for the banking sector.
The Ratings Agencies are a valuable tool to let other banks know how healthy the assets of other banks are. But by the start of the 21st century, banks were already paying bonuses to those employees in the Ratings Agencies who would give those banks the highest ratings. In other words, corruption and bribery.

These "bonuses" would soon come back to haunt the Ratings Agencies. Because by this point the ever expanding economy was being fuelled by speculation and a property bubble creating by those same all-powerful, un-regulated banks. Furthermore, due to the Ratings Agencies and deregulation, those banks could, by 2007, take out loans that were tens of times higher than the entire bank's actual value - in some cases, loans worth up to 30 times the bank's actual assets.

This massive overlending (called "leverage" in banker's jargon) was made possible by offering, for example, mortgages to those who weren't actually able to afford them. Because of the inherent risk of offering loans to such clients, the interest rates were higher. But the banks, blindly ignoring the obvious risks, saw only the high interest rates, so these types of "risky" but highly profitable loans because the norm in many cases.

The final thing to remember, piling risk upon risk, was that the banks were able to divide all these "risky" loans into one big bundle with other, safer, loans. This bundle was then divided into many segments, and each segment swapped with other investment banks for financial gain. The "reasoning" was that dividing up the "risky" loans with the safe loans, it would make it safer for everyone concerned. But if it came to a time when anyone wanted to know who held the "risky" loans, no-one would have any idea where they were. Perfect, eh?

So when the whole house of cards finally came crashing down in the autumn of 2008, all the major banks became effectively bankrupt due to their own recklessness and stupidity, as well as the immorality of the corrupt system of Ratings Agencies.

The goverments balied them out; they had to in order to prevent another Great Depression. The fact that the leading banks of the financial world, who were so all-powerful, could be so financially idiotic as to not understand that they had created a huge confidence trick on each other and the rest of the world, is breathtaking.

So you would think that the governments would see that deregulation doesn't work.

Some governments thought that; fewer of them actually did anything that would remotely prevent it from happening again.

The reason was simple: the leading governments of the world were getting their advice from the leading financial experts of the world. The leading financial experts were trained in the same theories that had created the mess; furthermore, many of them were bring paid by the same banks that had created the mess, to give their "advice" to the governments of the world.

The result is that the leading banks of the world, except for the brief period when they thought they would go bankrupt in September 2008, were not in favour of deregulation. And the problem wasn't just that the governments' advice was coming from academics who were already financially tied to those same banks.

The other problem was that, in the past thirty years since deregulation, the banks had not only become much bigger; they had also become far fewer in number. In other words, the banking sector was a kind of financial oligarchy. In the USA, there were effectively only four major banks in the country; others had either gone bankrupt or been bought out by others since 2008.
That was what created the term "Too Big To Fail". This helped the banks play on governments' fear of causing another, even deeper, crisis, and left the governments' mute in the face of the banks' demands for financial protection.

So what should have been a golden opportunity for goverment to right the wrongs of deregulation thirty years ago, turned into the banks' golden opportunity to cement their financial power over government. The banks did the crime; the government paid for the time. And now all government taxpayers are funding that "bail-out", through cuts to government services and tax rises. A bail-out, indeed: the biggest in history.

And what lesson have the banks learned from this disaster of their own making? That we can do no wrong. We are Gods.

I wonder what Ayn Rand would have thought of this.