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The ongoing financial meltdown is just the latest example of a disturbing trend that, to this adoptive American, threatens to put the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave on a par with Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Equatorial Guinea.
In a statement on the
huge state-sponsored salvage of private bankruptcy that was first proposed last September, a group of Republican lawmakers, employing one of the very rudest words in their party’s thesaurus, described the proposed rescue of the busted finance and discredited credit sectors as
“socialistic.” There was a sort of half-truth to what they said.
But they would have been very much nearer the mark—and rather more ironic and revealing at their own expense—
if they had completed the sentence and described the actual situation as what it is: “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest.”
I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this apt summary of
a collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns, whereby
the profits can be privatized and the debts conveniently socialized, but another term for the same system would be
“banana republic.”
What are the
main principles of a banana republic? A very salient one might be that
it has a paper currency which is an international laughingstock: a definition that would immediately qualify today’s United States of America."
