Free Market Rhetoric

You hear a lot of talk about the free market these days, but I can’t find a vestige of it left when I look at the big players on the scene today, and the recent bailout of the U.S. banks is the best example there is. What they call “free market” is synonymous with privatizing the profits while socializing the losses of the major banks and corporations. In a truly free market these players would sink or swim according to their bottom lines, not some taxpayer bailout. If these companies cannot make it in the real world they should fail, and we should be glad of it. We want the world to be populated with healthy companies and banks, not virally infected ones. I do not consider this deal to be a bailout at all, it is a parting gift from George Bush to the people who helped him to get and maintain power. The looting of the treasury and the attacks on the trade centers will go down in history as the greatest acts of piracy in the history of the world.