yesterday”s epolitix bulletin had this lovely snippet:
“The chancellor Alistair Darling uses an interview with the Financial Times newspaper to say sudden changes on taxing private equity could impact negatively on the “absolutely critical” role of the City in the economy”
oh yes of course alistair. whilst i may not be disagreeing with you on this particular point ( well i shan”t say what i think, apart from to laugh hollowly), i do find it amusing given how the usual diatribe from “market fundamentalists” is “oh we don”t want any government interference”.
what they really mean of course is
“oh we don”t want any govt. interference unless it is the kind that specifically allows us to do what we want - i.e. the kind that gives us special license, the kind of thing we don”t call “regulation”, the kind of thing we don”t want you to think of when we talk about not wanting “regulation”. We only want you to think of “regulation” in a specific way - i.e. in the context when the rules are not in favour of us. Otherwise, we love rules, how else would we have the monopoly, the special privileges, the institutional barriers we like to erect around our so-called “free “market”. So yes we don”t want government interference..of course not, why would we want any such thing, we got to where we are today without any such “help” or any institutions, don”t you know, we didn”t have to join all the right clubs, didn”t need to be a member of all the right groups, didn”t need to be able to create money as debt, didn”t need any help to get the financial monopoly we do have, course not.”
very clever i must admit as well - the best deception around. give something a name, keep referring to it, and after a while, people might just assume everytime you say “regulation” it means a particular kind of regulation, rather than the broad sense of the word.
who falls for it? economics students it seems.
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