The (Anti-) Capitalism of Fools

An editorial in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten displays an undercurrent common to Europeans who are just as nominally supportive of authoritarianism inducing central planning economics, more likely in a form of nicey-nicey seeming government management of enterprise, and are also nominally supportive of free markets.

Oddly enough, the odd reasoning behind the quivering lips are visible even behind the centrist positions typically held by Jyllands-Posten:

The gap between rich and poor increased. The global financial crisis has shown that we have to rethink a capitalist model, which meant that financial institutions without the necessary checks could throw first USA and then Europe into a deep crisis that it can take decades to fix the economy up.

We’re all familiar with what this bemoans, and how it can never be salved outside of assigning every working person with the same income and benefits, something even Marxist-Leninism couldn’t achieve – so why even bother saying it if it wasn’t part of the usual atmospherics – no different than saying hello when you picking up a telephone?

It gets worse.

It is an economic crisis that has also become a political crisis because it is about lack of leadership. It is now so deep that it has started to weaken democracy.

No, being skeptical about or dissatisfied with your elected officials doesn’t weaken democracy, it gives you a reason to not vote for them again and embolden democracy by using it and letting it operate.

The crisis of capitalism in the West certainly raises many issues in Asia, whose interventionist economic model so often been criticized by the West but whose economies are nevertheless going ahead. The western model has taught them that the economic downturn has gruesome consequences and that one should be cautious in liberalizing the economy too much. So it's safer to have the state on track with the adjustments, such as the banking sector, as the U.S. and Europe lacked.

Sure, you say that now, but could you live in that kind of ‘company store’ society? Not likely.

Worse still is a total forgetting of who Nick Leeson was, and under whose laws he operated under, and .

The crisis of capitalism in the West certainly raises many issues in Asia, whose interventionist economic model so often been criticized by the West but whose economies are nevertheless going ahead. The western model has taught them that the economic downturn has gruesome consequences and that one should be cautious in liberalizing the economy too much. So it's safer to have the state on track with the adjustments, such as the banking sector, as the U.S. and Europe lacked.

Which oddly enough is that same ‘pirate capitalism’ that made Hong Kong’s economy grow and robustly resist a state of aggression that Havana can only dream of whining about.

Worried about democracy? Then stop alluding to the value of the Asia’s crypto-authoritarian factory states. The pointless bedwetting must stop.