30 Jul 2014 2:21 am
Cannonpointer » 29 Jul 2014 5:25 am » wrote:A gaggle of impressionable progressives recently went on a Grateful Dead style fan-girl tour of the web, singling praise and glory to Singapore's "economic freedom" - "It's the second freest on EARTH," they jubilated.
Cursory investigation -their undone due diligence - revealed Singapore to practice "economic freedom" exclusively for corporations and the elite, not for regular people. The regular people have no rights, are kept in check by police state brutality, cannot purchase homes, and are influenced in their views by media that is almost exclusively state owned and that is entirely state-regulated with no pretense of respect for freedom of the press.
One of the cheer leaders, button-holed to explain Singapore's complete LACK of economic freedom for the bottom 88% of its citizens, spontaneously launched into a completely off-top defense of Chile's Pinochet, casting the man as a capitalist hero. Ironically, he was precisely right: Pinochet WAS a capitalist hero: a murdering psychopath who forced Singapore style "economic freedom" on his people. The only motive one can imagine for this Freudian non sequitur is that the apologist believes brutality on behalf of capital is justified.
Capitalism did not invent the free market. Indeed, it is the sworn enemy of it. Free markets existed long before Adam Smith was born. Capitalism is an economic model run by employees, on the capital of absentee owners - capital that could not be agglomerated except by exchanges licensed and regulated by government. FREE ENTERPRISE is an economic model run by owner-investors who risk their OWN capital with no assistance from government. Free Enterprise serves the market and requires a free market to exist. Capitalism attacks the free market to eliminate risks and competition. Our government's favoritism toward capitalism is why Wall Street's least hiccup makes Main Street catch a cold, but Main Street's greatest misery has no effect on Wall Street.
Authoritarian capitalism (the less regulation upon it, the more authoritarian it becomes) relies on the government gun to foist itself on populations. Left to their own devices, South and Central Americans vote for a free market, rather than capitalism. But the capitalists pretend that free markets are "socialism," and they get their servants in our government to topple elected governments and force authoritarian capitalism on their populations. A recent example of capitalist over-reach occurred in Bolivia, where Bechtel cornered the market on WATER by way of the government gun. Bechtel's wholly owned puppet government simply made a law declaring Bechtel owner of every drop of the stuff, making it a crime for a peasant to put out a rain barrel or drink from a creek. The result was a popular tide in favor of a Coca farmer named Evo Morales, whom election riggers failed to keep from office, and who has implemented free markets - or, "instituted a brutal socialist regime with no respect for private property," in neocon parlance.Our country would not have let this go unpunished, but for two land wars in Asia occupying its attention.
The folks singing Singapore's praises present themselves as "conservatives." But they did not even LOOK at capitalism's effect on their latest, greatest Shangri La's human population before festooning a brutal slave pit with the mantle of freedom. Conservatives look before they leap; reactionaries and progressives leap before they look.
The reactionary neocons on this board wil hee haw and gee gaw and slap their knees and shout hosanna for the stupidest, least-vetted **** ideas imaginable, and still pretend to be conservatives. REAL conservatives - a rare bird these days - are against rashly signing off on ANY new idea, no matter how pleasantly-wrapped and spun by professional ad-men hired to serve the interests of capital and subvert the interests of ordinary workers. Thoughtful and methodical examination of ANY policy change is in the conservative wheel house - pretty much IS the conservative wheel house. Hoo-rahing for any proposition Heritage packages for the Sunday chats is the province of neocon stooges, not conservatives. Genuine Conservatism is ANY nation's necessary steadying hand, without which the ship of state is likely to run aground.
Few believe the nation is going in a good direction - and none but retards deny the course is being set by those who control the media and the congress and the president and the economy. Ergo, the bad road we are on is unarguably the fault of Wall Street capitalism, and it leads to a lovely tropical island in the South China Sea by the name of Singapore.
Singapore - that great reveal which uncloaked the true nature of several pretend conservative perverts in our midst - also lays bare the goal and intention and natural, inevitable end of capitalism: to elevate capital above human beings in the realm of rights and power. That's why the founders picked the British East India Company's vessel as their target in the Boston Tea Party: Because they understood that their fight was against that corrosive capitalist engine as much as it was against the British Crown, and that their historical imperative was to free their nation's market from that anti-human machine.
Capitalism was allowed to sneak back in with the railroads. Its history since has been uniformly scandalous and has kept this nation down - always requiring access to the public treasury and the public credit for its continued existence, fattening itself on the nation's catastrophes right up to this very moment. We are under the boot of capital more than ever - but less than Singapore (for now). Capital moved our jobs to China for cheap labor and to pollute without consequence to its bottom line. It crashed our economy and demanded (and got) reparations from the society it had injured.
The debunked pretense that capitalism desires or even tolerates free markets is given the lie by the Singapores and the Chiles of this world. The "freer" capital, the more the PEOPLE are enslaved.