The Invisible Hand Just Slapped Us All. Are We Awake Yet?

paul_sarkozy.jpgOh yeah. It’s cool. My government owns a great big company, an unimaginably huge company called AIG. All over the world the socialist governments that we have scorned (France, Venezuela, heck – Cuba!) are laughing. Hard. Because this is the kind of socialism the US offers: socialism for investors. We don’t bother using our grand wealth to pay for things like six weeks of vacation. That would be such a waste!! We’d rather work ourselves to the bone and give the money away to people who made bad investments: on houses, on hedge funds, on way-swapped out bad credit not worth the paper. We’d rather sweat and toil in factories for rotten “minimum-wage” jobs and then die slow deaths from diseases that are not covered by insurance. We know how to live the life! The great Puritan ethic of hard-work will never die!

Unless, of course, you are an investment banker still collecting your massive bonus from last year. The one you get even though your company went down in flames. Because everyone knows, ever American at least, people with money deserve more money, much more than people who’ve never had any. Yay!

Is it unpatriotic of me to question these actions? We could’ve paid for so many productive helpful programs and improved the quality of life for so many with $700 billion.

This country has been divided for too long between intransigent, ideology-driven parties that aig_logo.gifdon’t ever even look at our country’s fundamental flaws. Isn’t anyone ready to have a real conversation about better models? Or are we still going to perpetuate the lie that pure capitalism trumps all.

There’s no name for a party I’d love, but it would enjoy all the freedoms of Libertarians and all the peace-inducing, care-taking of Socialists.

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September 23, 2008 | Filed Under Great Recession 

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