Institutionalized Failure [Reader Post]

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I just read a most excellent thesis by Daniel Greenfield, who you may know as Sultan Knish.

It starts:

Too big to fail” empowers “too big to fail” systems and “too big to fail” economies. Encouraging debt and the eventual assumption of debt passed on and commodified by increasingly larger political and economic entities creates supraentities built on debt and dedicated to economic regulation.

The assumption of state debts by the Federal government was a major step in the federalization of the United States. The growing assumption of micro and macro debts by the United States government and by international bodies allows for greater macro and micro regulation of economic activities…

…The universalization of debt leads to the universalization of economic authority and eventually planned economies. By indebting everyone from the individual to the government, everyone is forced to maintain a bankrupt and broken system. Debts are obligations. Obligating everyone to the same system forces everyone to comply with the system…

…Financial institutions gain by encouraging consumer irresponsibility. Governments gain by encouraging irresponsible behavior by financial institutions. Global entities gain by encouraging irresponsible behavior by governments. Responsibility is traded for freedom, but individuals, institutions and governments, who give up freedom of action in exchange for being able to pass their responsibilities up the ladder, are participating in a shell game…

…The obligations themselves cannot be escaped; only the direct responsibility for making the difficult decisions can be passed upward along the chain. If the frogs don’t want to make their own decisions then they elect a king who makes all their decisions for them. The assumption of debt elects kings who decide how the debt must be repaid and who is first in line to collect and who is first in line to pay.

Here’s the brilliance:

When failure is institutionalized then the primary task of each failing system is the evasion of responsibility. Institutionalizing failure also universalizes failure so that no one is responsible, but everyone is responsible. … Protecting the sources of failure is a primary goal of those who benefit from institutionalizing and universalizing failure.

Here’s my contribution and observation which piggybacks the cliché of everyone gets a ribbon; the converse to everyone is a winner is universal failure. And for the last twenty years or so we have been conditioned just for this, it just wasn’t advertised as such.

You would think it is a stretch that there’s illegal collusion to undermine the foundations of global finance. But then we have the current LIBOR scandal.

We are witness. World governments are encapsulating crony-capital finance companies from failure, too big to fail when they should.

Robert Scheer:

Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen. Or, indeed, imagined … It reveals that behind the world’s financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption. The modern-day robber barons pillage with a destructive abandon totally unfettered by law or conscience and on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.

Daniel Greenfield:

Growing instability is met with tighter regulation leading to the increased power of oligarchies who regulate the system and the diminishing freedom of individuals. Every action taken to create greater security and stability for the oligarchy has the net effect of subtracting from the economic freedom of all smaller actors.

Drawing a parallel, it was recently agreed by EU nation states that the European Central Bank will have greater oversight over the bloc’s banking systems. I surmise the ones who created and sustain the problem were just given more authority over it.

When failure comes it is never attributed to the ideology or to the entire structure, rather to a failure of comprehensive control. Each attempt at deepening control expands the system that is the cause of the problem and deepens the level of failure in areas affected by the system. The more the ideal is pursued, the more the real declines until the entire system implodes with devastating consequences.

Noted economists John Embry had this to say on Europe.

The problem for the central planners, in the not-too-distant-future, is the can is getting too big to kick down the road. What this means is that the chaos will accelerate.

Daniel Greenfield again:

The distillation of free market economics into the crony capitalist corporation which looks to the government to take care of the messes It makes is tipping the globe closer into the black hole of a planned global economy where universal debt leads to universal power and universal failure.

Interesting that it looks like Obama is going to sign away some of our sovereignty to the UN this summer with those four UN treaties it’s said he’ll be signing. Hopefully he doesn’t and if he does, they die in the Senate. But it goes to support that a planned global union isn’t entirely unsubstantiated.

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