The street they should be occupying (CT Post)

[struggle4progress]

Published 03:05 p.m., Friday, October 14, 2011

As "Occupy Wall Street" sweeps up attention, a smaller group is running something called Occupy K Street. If the goal is to loosen the financiers' grip over the American economy, the folks protesting on K Street are getting closer to bingo. K Street is Washington's famous boulevard of lobbyist influence, the place where money buys politicians to do money's bidding ...

The tea party believes that free markets will punish the wicked. It sees regulation as a weight on the capitalists' animal spirits, off whose trickle we mortals slake our thirst. It's like the tea party doesn't want the cattle trampling the flowers, but at the same time, opposes fences ...

Free markets do work, alas. They worked in 1929, when a decade of speculation, frenzied borrowing and other financial excess ended in the Great Depression ...

And regulation is how you keep the game orderly and nice. If one investment house is making a pile doing wild and wooly things, its competitors may feel compelled to do the same, lest their shareholders complain. So regulations also help prudent bankers avoid pressure to make unappetizing investments ...

http://www.ctpost.com/opinion/article/The-street-they-should-be-occupying-2219016.php

[SteveM]

1. I agree...

I remember the authors of "The Right Country," in paraphrasing how the Far Right has come to dominate the terms of debate in the U.S., even when they are numerically out of power: We looked down K Street and saw more PhDs. in those think tanks than in all the conservative political parties in all of Europe.

And here I thought liberals were the pointy-headed "intellectuals."