“3/21/2008, 1:44pm EST”
"Free Market" Investors: NOW They Want a Socialized Bailout →
Touting the “free market” in our modern political landscape immunizes corporate activity from the limits of proper regulation, thereby shifting all negative costs — environmental, social, etc. — onto the public. (And let’s not forget the incredible burdens routinely placed on members of other species and ecological systems in the name of human whim.) Finally, when the head honchos themselves can’t escape negative personal financial consequences, they accept a government bailout.
A casual observer might call this two-faced. It is, however, quite consistent: they will say whatever it takes, under the auspices of whatever ideology, to increase personal profit. All concern for others or the whole is feigned; it is self-interest relentlessly disguised as altruism.
This is actually the central lie of our modern exclusionary economy altogether, which is geared towards satisfying the material thirsts of an imagined human “whole”, as if we are the only beings that matter. The endeavor is so myopic that its language implies human animals to be the only ones who exist.
Despite the tendency of its usual purveyors to be arrogant humanists, the only real free market economy is one in which human animals bear the complete consequences and costs of their actions. This can only take place in a context in which human animals assume their rightful place as one species among many.
Never leave home without it.
