Taibbi: Will Goldman Sachs Prove Greed Is God?
Courtesy of John Lounsbury
Matt Taibbi has a feature article in The Guardian which parodies the Gordon Gecko "Greed is good" statement from the film "Wall Street". He carries the subject forward to develop a picture of Ayn Rand Objectivism taking over the world.
This is an article that will make some readers scream in disgust at the position Matt espouses and others scream in disgust at the Randian world he rants against. He concludes the article:
This debate is going to be crystallised in the Goldman case. Much of America is going to reflexively insist that Goldman’s only crime was being smarter and better at making money than IKB and ABN-Amro, and that the intrusive, meddling government (in the American narrative, always the bad guy!) should get off Goldman’s Armani-clad back. Another side is going to argue that Goldman winning this case would be a rebuke to the whole idea of civilisation – which, after all, is really just a collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even when we can. It’s an important moment in the history of modern global capitalism: whether or not to move forward into a world of greed without limits.
Taibbi’s conclusion is similar to my repeated belief that it is important for the SEC vs. Goldman Sachs case to go to trial so the convoluted financial processes involved can be presented and reviewed by both plaintiff and defendant. The nature of the machinations must be understood by the masses and the limits of current law must be defined in order to have a rational debate. We need a complete expose so we can make logical decisions about where the financial system should go from here.
Absent the trial or some other process of discovery we risk being doomed to divide into three camps:
- The Randians’ anything goes credo.
- Those who want to regulate everything to death.
- The vast majority who abandon hope of ever understanding enough to have an opinion.
We need a citizenry that understands what has happened to a sufficient extent to support some rational middle ground between the law of the jungle and all animals in zoo cages.
Photo: Via Dangerous Minds
