“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” So said Frederic Bastiat (1801-50), the French economist statesman and author, anticipating what a number of commentators seem to be saying about the way the world is currently organized. According to Alessio Rastani in a recent BBC interview “Governments don’t rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world.”
What is the ordinary citizen, unschooled in the complexities and duplicities of CDOs CDSs, and the rest of the economic alphabet soup to make of the apparent insolvency of banks throughout the Western world, and of the sovereign debt crisis? If the authorities and the experts appear to be frozen in the headlights of the oncoming train, what can he do to protect himself and his family? Stock up on pasta and tinned goods? Is that it?
Disagreeable though it may be, he surely has a duty to try and figure out for himself what has gone wrong, which, from the outside, would appear to be simple greed (or plundering in Bastiat’s terms) exacerbated by a failure of regulation on the one hand and on the other by the speed and complexity of electronic transactions in the market place. That some of this stuff is not exactly new will be familiar to students of history and literature. Those who are familiar with W.H. Auden’s poetry will know about his modern take on the fall of Rome:
Fantastic grow the evening gown
Agents of the fisc pursue
Absconding tax defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
One wonders if that is where one is headed. Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now is (among other things) a cautionary tale about the hubris and self-destructiveness of a city of London financier. Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution traces with grim relish the path of greed, folly and financial mismanagement which led to the bonfire of vanities that was the Ancien Regime; he quotes Marquis Mirabeau – “Ah Madame, such Government by Blindman’s-buff, stumbling along too far, will end in the General Overturn (culbute generale).”
Whether there is to be another such “culbute generale” before the year is out remains to be seen. Exciteable commentators such as Max Keiser appear to think so – and for good measure Max thinks that the punishment for crimes against capital should be capital punishment. Mind you, he was in Paris when he said that, and perhaps got carried away…
These are certainly turbulent times for the market place, but, important though the market undoubtedly is, it does not, and never did, constitute the whole of human life and experience. That is why it is such a relief to get outside in the open air or stroll along a beach. Burying the head in the sand this may be. As may be burying your head in a book that reminds you in its low-key way of the attractions of the humdrum and the uneventful, of the world you remember – or think you remember – when you were younger. A book like William Trevor’s novel Love and Summer will do the trick, or even reading the opening lines of chapter 18:
