Found an absolutely brilliant interview over at Jesse's Café Américain under the same title (which I 'borrowed') which you may find here. I've been following http://www.naomiklein.org/main after reading most of her shock doctrine book in which she goes on to explain much of the last 40 years' economics nastiness caused by Milton Friedman and his 'Chicago School' of economists. When I say nastiness I'm referring to situations like Chile under Pinochet, Russia when it 'privatized', New Orleans after Katrina - massive deregulation, crony capitalism, public assets pretty much given away to the connected and the general public stuck with the bill after the dust settled.
Jesse quotes an article by Mike Whitney over at counterpunch in which Mike interviews Michael Hudson, a respected & highly accomplished former Wall Street economist, a distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and an author of many books on economics. I will not quote the entire article but here's what for me are the money graphs:
MW: The housing market is freefalling, setting new records every day for foreclosures, inventory, and declining prices. The banking system is in even worse shape; undercapitalized and buried under a mountain of downgraded assets. There seems to be growing consensus that these problems are not just part of a normal economic downturn, but the direct result of the Fed's monetary policies. Are we seeing the collapse of the Central banking model as a way of regulating the markets? Do you think the present crisis will strengthen the existing system or make it easier for the American people to assert greater control over monetary policy?If this catches your interest I highly recommend you read the whole thing!
Michael Hudson: What do you mean “failure”? Your perspective is from the bottom looking up. But the financial model has been a great success from the vantage point of the top of the economic pyramid looking down? The economy has polarized to the point where the wealthiest 10% now own 85% of the nation’s wealth. Never before have the bottom 90% been so highly indebted, so dependent on the wealthy. From their point of view, their power has exceeded that of any time in which economic statistics have been kept.
You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards; it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite.
