Esquire.com
By Charles P. Pierce
at 1:22PM
Let us, for the moment, accept as something at least semi-gospelish the notion that the problem with the current system of international finance, the eight-gozillion-horsepower engine that is pulling the caboose of political democracy toward the cliff at 200 miles an hour, is not that there is corruption in the system. It is that the corruption is the system. The system cannot function without systemic corruption. This puts everyone in a bind. Millions of homeowners find themselves without homes, and millions of free-market conservatives find themselves standing helplessly out in the rain, their ideological umbrellas in tatters. And it leaves the rest of us wondering if we just ought to bury a bunch of gold coins out in the yard and learn to skin squirrels for dinner.
If you want an illustration of the basic conservative conundrum, here's a piece from The Weekly Standard, suggesting that Willard Romney be born-again as a Wall Street reform superhero. (I'll pause here while you retrieve your jaw from the bowl of Wheatena into which it just fell. There you are. We continue.) The author is admirably outraged at the perfidy of the big banks and the inherently catastrophic phenomenon of Too Big To Fail. He even sticks up for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which guarantees that he'll be the pinata at the next Objectivist's Picnic in Galt's Gulch. However, you will note that he also proposes that Romney come out for rigid financial reforms without the benefit of strict government regulation, which is always, and in every case, bad. I don't know how he plans for Romney to enforce those reforms in a deregulated environment. His inherent charisma? His dark powers to shape men's minds?
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/ben-bernanke-house-testimony-10785939#ixzz21XVrRf3p
