Now we Darwinian types do prefer our coffee black and we’ll take our capitalism as wild and predatory as nature itself. Social stabilizers, rules to the road, well regulated markets are for softies.
The era of abundance is over. I never got a crack at enjoying the thing while it was around.
So what we are left with after a really good party is clean up. Lights up, janitors enter, brooms sweep floor, windows cleaned, put everything out in the trash. If you were at the party hope you met someone and got their number.
I love fundamentals. I do like a good big overarching construct. I want a bucket I can put the whole thing into. I enjoy whiling away the afternoon at an outdoor café in animated discussions with friends while we whittle away at the coming next best system.
For circus stunts by bloated corporations that are too big for their own britches there is the failure of the marketplace to put them out of their misery. They can’t change. They pay their management too much. They’re service is second rate. I thought they were talking about me for a second. I do love a good thriller.
And then there is this nasty thing called governance. Those Northern European’s have the nerve to tax high, regulate with zeal, and produce heaps of what Stiglitz refers to as Gross Domestic Happiness! It is enough to make a free market ideologue puke. What a bunch of babies.
The Soviet Union collapses, Germany reunites and that is awesome! Capitalism takes steroids. The world levers up and synthetic derivatives are the worlds new playboy party dolls.
The Chinese look at this minestrone soup of freewheeling market driven chaos and see opportunity. “You want imports? We can do that.”
The world is in a deer in the headlights moment. To get anything done we have to thank globalization for requiring that we now have to do it all together. After watching Washington try to make sausage one can only begin to imagine what a really big world wide banquet might look like.
I love a good musical. I love it when there is that magical scene when some character at the top of their lungs yells STOP! And right on cue everybody freezes right where they are. It’s amazing, and it’s make believe, it’s a theatrical device, but it isn’t reality. The reality is that we have to keep going, whether it works out or not.
All I know is that food stamps are a paradoxical concession to the Darwinian capitalists search for perfect economic liberty.
And then for the closing scene this little guy grabs a mirror and holds it up to the face of the big shot.
The big shot running his fingers through his hair says, “I can’t afford to take a haircut.”
