historycircus

As I have sat and watched the crash of the global markets over the last few days, I have come to a couple conlusions that I would love to get some responses to.

First, the market system will not survive this global collapse. The only way to preserve any semblence of the system is extreme government intervention, on a global scale. The global economic system that will emerge from the crisis will not be market capitalism. Make no mistake, the PTB will claim, eventually, that they have preserved it, but the intervention that is now taking place will render Adam Smith's "invisible hand" intangible as well. I think, barring global cataclysm, we are well on our way to a global socialism - a circumstance that immediately puts China and Russia definatively at the top of the global economic food chain. My question to you all: are we watching the vindication of Karl Marx in the Western world?

Secondly, I do not believe that the current global economic crisis is engineered - a thought which I know is anathema to many on this forum.

Hear me out.

The market system - Capitalism - has been the most effective tool that the PTB have had. We are exploited, but we call it freedom. As mentioned earlier in this thread, we are taught, from very early on, that participating in the market system is an act of freedom. But your participatory freedom is directly proportional to your income in this society. For instance, a poor man and a rich man are both cited for driving drunk - for both it is the second offense, and the incidents are six months apart. The man who can afford to retain a private-practice lawyer will ultimately not see the inside of a cell, while the poor man, in almost all states in the union will. No one making less than fifty thousand a year could even entertain running for the Congress or the Presidency. One's income determines where you live, what you eat, what or if you drive, how you spend your leisure time, where you get educated and if you get to go to college, and it determines your access to quality health care. Yet, we are told we are free. And when someone turns their back on the system, for spiritual or ideological reasons, they become outcasts - percieved as wierd at best, seditionists and treasonous at worst.

The point of the paragraph above is to point out that the PTB already has the greatest system of control ever devised - a system of control we celebrate. The current financial crisis IS a crisis for them - for the people are beginning to wake up and get grumpy. The rumblings of discontent with the Western system grow louder with every ring of the closing bell on Wall Street, and with every trip to the grocery store. Direct control is expensive and messy - you have to herd everyone into central locations, moniter, chip, discipline, etc. It is difficult to run a prison when the prisoners know they are in prison - there is the endless task of discipline and preventing escape, and nothing is foolproof; sometimes prison riots and escapes happen. It is easier to run a prison in which nobody identifies their experiences as that of an inmate. That is why I don't believe that the current financial crisis has been engineered - What do you all think?