Missed the Memo

Even after the ruling class itself has rejected the Paulson scheme as just too ridiculous and too flagrant and risky a predatory intraclass competitive scam, the loyal servant of neolib extremism is still selling it (Orwellian feints removed for the sake of clarity):

The real dilemma is not ‘state intervention or not?’ but ‘what kind of state intervention?’ And this is true politics: the struggle to define the conditions that govern our lives. The debate about the bailout deals with decisions about the fundamental features of our social and economic life, even mobilising the ghost of class struggle. As with many truly political issues, this one is non-partisan. There is no ‘objective’ expert position that should simply be applied: one has to take a political decision...

[T]here is no way to separate the welfare of Main Street from that of Wall Street....What is good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily good for Main Street, but Main Street can’t thrive if Wall Street isn’t doing well ....

The...argument against redistribution (through progressive taxation etc) is that instead of making the poor richer, it makes the rich poorer....
Although we all want the poor to get better, it is counter-productive to help them directly, since they are not the dynamic and productive element: the only intervention needed is to help the rich get richer, and then the profits will automatically spread down to the poor. If you want people to have money to build, don’t give it to them directly, help those who are lending it to them. This is the only way to create genuine prosperity – otherwise, the state is merely distributing money to the needy at the expense of those who create wealth.

It is all too easy to dismiss this line of reasoning as a hypocritical defence of the rich. The problem is that as long as we... [have] capitalism, there is a truth in it.... That is why the Democrats who supported the bailout were not being inconsistent with their leftist leanings. They would fairly be called inconsistent only if we accept the premise of Republican populists that...state interventions are an upper-class strategy to exploit hard-working ordinary people.