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the idea of free markets hasn't been credible since the 1870s, except in some sectors of the jurrasic park of reactionary ideologies that is the united states. most of the 20th century can be parsed as a series of attempts to figure out ways out from under the social chaos generated by markets in create instead something approaching a livable form of capitalism, one not controlled by a self-serving type of social darwinist ideology. failure after failure to rig up some adequate regulatory framework, initially at the nation-state level (once these were jammed into place, a process still underway in the lovely afterglow of world war 1) mostly at the trans-national level (via economic interdependencies and political structures like the league of nations)...it was only after world war 2 that something approaching such a structure took shape, but it only managed to produce a veneer of functionality in the metropole for a little over a decade. since the late 70s, the dominant ideological framework "rediscovered" the middle 19th century and deployed through an authoritarian media apparatus to convince some segments of the american jurrasic park of rightwing ideologies that what failed over a century before is now somehow the next step in some fiction of progress.
it's so ludicrous a position that it's hard to imagine how it could possibly have taken hold without reliance on an authoritarian ideological delivery system.
at this point, such debate as there is left about the (delusional) chicken-egg argument of markets/regulation which is primary comes down to a simple proposition:
regulation enables markets to function. so the state has to approach regulation in that manner, from that viewpoint. the american financial regulatory system is as outmoded as it is because the ideological framework that was dominant under neoliberalism presupposed that it was ancillary to the functioning of markets and so was allowed to deteriorate, grow increasingly out of phase.
simple fact of the matter is that while this was happening, the class fractions that stood to benefit from neoliberalism simply pillaged the store. and now you have a wholly dysfunctional system. way to go.
i don't see why american conservative-style market metaphysics are relevant any more.
look around and you see what they've done.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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