Sometime in the early nineties, a friend of mine showed me his PacBell (a California telecom company) credit card. It featured a “Green” financial instrument which alotted a percentage of his purchases to a fund that professed to mitigate Greenhouse Gas effects.
My friend was excited about the card. He was among the first people to sport the fashionable, emerald plastic, and he really believed his participation in its funding scheme would make a difference. I thought otherwise.
As my buddy’s enthusiasm bloomed on his face, I felt a contradictory sinking feeling in my stomach. “This will not end well,” my gut told me. Now, after the liberals’ investments in subprime mortgages has blown up in our faces, the negative return on taxpayers’ investments in places like Egypt and Nigeria has come to the fore, the billions wasted on crony ‘green’ projects in places like Spain, Greece, and Scotland (and soon to be, Arizona) made the frontpages, and last, after the furious efforts expended to prop up artificial currencies and their supposed regional blocs in Europe and Asia have all but failed – it is painfully evident that wherever governmentalists interface with high finance, underwritten by taxpayer guarantees, farce ensues.
Could the simple emetic that will expell the parasite be the abolition of the FDIC? Taking banks back to a system where their deposit volume underwrites their lending, not taxpayers states away, then some rationality may return to the banking system. Maybe a general legislative assault on GSE’s of all kinds will do the trick.
In the movie Doctor Doolittle, we are introduced to the mythical “Push-me-pull-you” creature. Government sponsored enterprises, such as California’s quasi-private civil service agencies, are Push-me-pull-yous. Perpetually tugged in opposed directions – towards statist goals on the one hand, and towards private, for-profit goals on the other, the governors of these organizations are unable to achieve linear progress of any form. They only serve to curdle markets, and, really, they should not exist outside of a zoo.
