Leftwards with John Corzine

Urban Future tells us:

When the Right attains power, it is by becoming something other than itself, betraying its partisans not only incidentally and peripherally, through timidity or incompetence, but centrally and fundamentally, by practically advancing an agenda that almost perfectly negates its supposed ideological commitments. It builds that which it had promised to destroy, and further enthralls that which it had promised to liberate. Its victories mean ever less, its defeats ever more. To win is at most a lesser evil, whilst to lose opens new, unprecedented horizons of calamity, initiating previously unimagined adventures in horror.

The left theoretically wants equality, but, predictably, its unending victories cause ever more extreme and brutal inequality, as socialism somehow strangely manifests as crony capitalism. Soak the rich – except, of course, for friends of Obama. The ensuing social injustice results in louder cries to soak the rich.

No one could exemplify the evils of Wall Street plutocracy better than Democrat Senator and Democrat Governor John Corzine of MF Global who rotated between looting as a politician, and looting as a financial Chief Executive Officer. He started in finance, went into politics and regulation under Clinton, from regulation back into finance, from finance at Goldman Sach back into politics as a senator and financial regulator, from politics and financial regulation back into finance, from finance back into politics as a Governor, then back again into finance as CEO of MF Global, eventually committing theft of over a billion dollars, for which there is no prospect that he will ever be seriously punished, or even forced to disgorge any substantial part of his ill gotten gains. And, similarly, the Obama cabinet and federal bureaucracy is full of people who rotate between being regulators, and being the regulated, with the result that regulation works the way that rightists expect it to, and never the way that leftists piously expect it to.

John Corzine, as well as campaigning for financial regulation and vigorously implementing it, campaigned for universal health care, universal gun registration, mandatory public preschool, more taxpayer funding for college education, affirmative action and same-sex marriage. He is not the one percent, he is the 0.0005%. There are about a thousand similar beneficiaries of far left economics, many of them vastly richer than he, though he is one of the most outstandingly criminal of them, and one of the most prominent in financial regulatory activities.

Human nature means that regulation in practice is John Corzine. For this reason, we should never regulate anything. If some arguably undesirable act is not straightforwardly criminal, then any attempt to regulate that act will result in straightforwardly and uncomplicatedly honest and legitimate activities such as Intrade being forbidden, and straightforwardly and uncomplicatedly criminal activities, such as John Corzine looting MF Global, being deemed legal.

The only sane solution is unthinkably radical: to end all regulation, and shut down all regulatory activities. We don’t have a political apparatus capable of wisely and justly regulating, and no society ever has had such an apparatus.  Regulation in practice is always anarcho tyranny:  That which is criminal is permitted, which is the anarchy, and that which is honest is forbidden, which is the tyranny.

Even if you imposed a hundred percent tax on incomes over a certain level, or a thousand percent tax on incomes over a certain level, it is not going to affect the likes of John Corzine, who seldom pay much taxes, since they get to write the loopholes.

Which result leftists piously pronounce to be deregulation, thus needs to be cured by even more regulation. Regulation, in practice, equals regulators getting very rich indeed.

The theory of Basel II was that wise financial regulators would decide what investments were safe, so financial institutions would only invest in safe things. Predictably, financial institutions only invested in politically correct things, such as million dollar mortgage loans to winos and wetbacks. Financial disaster ensued, for which we got Basel III, which was even more of everything that was horribly wrong with Basel II

As society moves ever leftwards, ever faster, leftists get ever more discontented with the outcome, but of course, the only cure for their discontent that it is permissible to think, is faster and further movement left.

When we were all forced to use the word “gay” in place of “queer”, on pain of being fired from our place of employment, or the employer being destroyed by sexual discrimination suits if he did not enforce correct word usage, we all promptly proceeded to use the word “gay” in the same contemptuous and dismissive manner we had previously used “queer”. Suddenly the second verse of “Deck the halls” disappeared from the Christmas Carol rotation, and the Flintstones no longer invited their viewers to “Have a gay old time”.

This was not at all the intent of the social engineers. Since homosexuality was supposedly a nice fun thing, and supposedly not at all dirty, disgusting, and homosexuals supposedly not in the slightest apt to spread dangerous diseases, we were supposed to keep on singing the second verse of “Deck the halls”

The left did not conclude that efforts to socially engineer the language were counterproductive, but instead escalated the social engineering. In an ever leftwards movement, what else could it do? If people are using “gay” as a slur, the left response was to be twice as determined to make them use the word “gay”.