> As they say in the butcher shop: "Be patient, the wurst is still
> coming!"
Right off the top, I confess to not understanding finance, despite
having browsed the Globe & Mail business pages for 30 years, followed
Paul Krugman for a few years and having accumulated other fragmentary
bits of putative learning.
However: A lot of the current rhetoric, breast beating and doom-saying
suggests to me a kind of religious eschatology. The end-of-history
buffs, all those economists, bankers, financiers and financial
executives of corporate houses have been riding the crest of a wave
which they believed, often without the slightest reservation, to be
the new, permanent and final state of affairs in the world, so long as
the world should last.
Doctrinaire communism was teleological. It believed in the
predestined "withering away of the state", that progress of history
was governed by its pre-ordained end, that the inevitable, perfect
communist world was final cause for all that should come before it.
Now that the fatuous, even smug, self-congratulation of those
capitalist wave-riders has foundered, they cannot believe, even yet,
that their dream is just as illusory as that of the communist
theologians.
So they're stuck. Either the perfect dream-world of corporatist,
free-market capitalism was not the inevitable final cause of the rest
of history -- but that, of course, is just not possible, for the
theology just doesn't permit it -- or else it's Götterdämmerung. The
Fimbulwinter begins, the Aesir ride forth against the Giants, Hell is
opened, the Great Dog Garm is loosed to devour the moon and nobody
knows what's happening with the Dow. TEOTWAWKI. Chaos and old night.
Après marché libre, le déluge.
They all thought that the glorious regime of free markets was The
Lord's Eternal Kingdom on Earth. In fact, it was more like Burning
Man. (q.v.)
Interesting to hear that many Chinese workers are abandoning their
big-city sweatshop and taxi-driver venues to return to their villages
where they will have at least a chance, however small, to raise a pig
and harvest some rice.
Or am I just grouchy this week?
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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