update -- trotsky, 10:31:44 04/06/11 Wed
IMF Chief Strauss-Kahn Thinks Our Market Is Too Free
The head of one of the bureaucracies we love to hate, French socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF, opines in a speech that 'free market ideas are antiquated' and that 'the pendulum needs to swing from the market to the State'. As far as we're concerned, the pendulum has been swinging that way for the entire past century. The last time society enjoyed a truly free market dispensation is now so long past that there are no living witnesses left. Strauss-Kahn informs us that we need 'more equitebable income distribution' (read: the coercive powers of the State need to be harnessed to render the world more Marxian) and of course we 'need new taxes' as well. His argument, which is mirroring the arguments of his economically illiterate fellow countryman Nicolas Sarkozy, is that the financial sector must be made to 'share the burdens' it has inflicted on society by means of such a tax. This is hopelessly naive, as governments would just spend the money and so add to the burdens the economy must bear. If the IMF chief were really concerned about the banking sector taking responsiblity, he would have come out in favor of the free market, not in opposition to it. In a free market setting, the losses of the banks would have been borne by their shareholders and bondholders - there would be no question about adequate 'burden sharing'. As it were, the assumption implicit in Strauss-Kahn's remarks, namely that the economic crisis somehow represents a failure of free market capitalism, is entirely wrong. This is nothing but shabby statist propaganda, as anyone who examines the facts can easily ascertain.
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