Matthew Stoller — When You Say “It’s the Economy” You Are Buying Into Deregulation

Liberals don’t remotely understand their own history, they are intentionally misled by their leaders so they misplace blame for bad governing decisions. Take financial deregulation, a central tenet of modern governance. The main point of financial deregulation, which happened from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, wasn’t to shift wealth upwards, though that was a consequence that later became central. It was to get the public to stop believing that the government could do anything about the economy....

That line of thinking among the natural opponents of deregulation is basically the victory of the bad guys right there. The people who run our financialized state want you to think the economy is a thing with agency, a thing beyond human or political control. They want you to believe that in the face of this God, the President is essentially powerless. But that’s false. It’s all a choice. The government is intimately involved in all aspects of markets and economics, it is inherent. Who to prosecute, who to subsidize, who to meet with, which rules to pursue, what to sell, etc. It’s all statecraft. Deregulatory statecraft is just about making the natural constituencies of social justice believe that there’s nothing to be done, except on the margins.

Which is crazy....

Observations on Credit and Surveillance
When You Say “It’s the Economy” You Are Buying Into Deregulation
Matthew Stoller