CHANGE - February 26, 2009

Einstein is credited with noting that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome is a sign of mental incompetence. When will we learn the folly of giving over the control of our national economies to people chartered to fill their own pockets results in flights of opportunistic greed that cause near-infinite calamity every so often, with the exact length of the periods between collapses being a random event dependent on the exact stability of a house of cards? And why do the maniacs repeat each time the line about its being different this time? Yet every mention of any plan to put the control of the indispensible factors of the economy in the control of public officials who have no personal financial interest in the volatility is met with screams of “Communism”. So even Barack Obama, who is reputed to be very smart, repeats the line about needing to have the banks in the private hands whose own incomes are dependent on taking chances for which the public must pay in case of failure. Some take comfort from the illusion of increased regulation, yet we have learned that every pirate subject to regulation eventually comes to control the regulators, as we see so clearly in supposed federal regulation of the pharmaceutical racket. The only way to have public control is by having all the day-to-day business in the hands of civil servants. That must bear the possibility of corruption, but nothing is as corrupt as the mismanagement of people who are raised on the maxim that their private enrichment is the legitimate first goal of any manager. And whose second goal is the enrichment of their stockholders. They call it “incentives” but the people in the street here in UK have invented the word bankster to indicate what they think of it, and there is no telling what will follow when their tired patience is exhausted.