Rough ride
The loonie has dropped, the stock market is in a turmoil and our financial gurus are looking around for someone else to blame. It’s the Asians or the Russians or the Quebec independence movement or declines in commodity prices.
It couldn’t possibly be that allowing free rein to the stock-market economy might have something to do with our current woes, could it? When you have a financial structure that is based solely on individual greed, irrational events are inevitable.
The Reagan-Thatcher era resulted in massive deregulation in the guise of freedom. Governments, in their anxiety to please voters, had painted themselves into such a debt corner one wondered if they could ever extract themselves.
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The reaction was a movement based on the credo that government is a fumble-fingered, self-seeking entity that should be reduced to the minimum.
Vilifying government has unfortunate consequences. How are you going to get competent administrators if their jobs are regarded as havens for glorified pickpockets? How is the rule of law to be respected if government regulations are regarded as restrictions on freedom?
So we opt for free-wheeling open markets. We see the value of our investments drop because some large corporations lost money in Indonesia, because of Russia’s trouble adjusting to capitalism. We may get a good crop, sell lots of houses and cars, build the best new hard drives and software but our loonie drops and investments shrink.
I’m free, you’re free and we’re helping the rest of the world to become as free as we are.
Utopia is at hand.
