"MARKET DISCIPLINE IS GOOD FOR YOU BUT NOT FOR ME"

That is, as Noam Chomsky says, "you" is the consumer or worker, and "me" is big business.

From Money via CNN courtesy of This Modern World:

"The chance of government intervention in the marketplace in response to current events has increased significantly," said Andy Chow, portfolio manager at SCM Advisors LLC, a $14 billion San Francisco-based investment firm specializing in fixed-income and structured-finance markets.

Mike Perry, chief executive of mortgage lender IndyMac Bancorp (IMB) said on Thursday that he got a phone call this week from U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D- Conn., who asked whether Congress can help the U.S. mortgage industry in any way.

At a hearing in Washington D.C. on Thursday, Dodd said that he'd spoken this week with several mortgage bankers "to solicit their opinions as to what they thought was happening and what solutions may lay out there to try to deal with this seizing up of credit that is really getting rather dramatic."

Indymac's Perry said he'd also talked to the chairman of Fannie Mae on Thursday and had traded calls with the chairman of Freddie Mac.

"Fannie Mae's Chairman (is) telling me that they are 'prepared to step up and help the industry'," Perry wrote on the company's blog.

Click here for the rest.

Well at least I'm able to get a laugh out of this. The "free market" got the mortgage industry into this subprime mess, but it's starting to look like the nanny state may very well swoop in to save the day, just as it did with the savings and loan crisis in the 80s.

Here's the lesson.

The right-wing notion that government interference in the market always leads to bad consequences is bullshit. Certainly, some regulations are stupid, but just as certainly, some regulations are the only thing keeping the entire market from collapse. Further, it is impossible to remove the government from the market; indeed, the government is that which allows the market to exist by creating the circumstances under which it can flourish. Capitalists, real capitalists, the people with the money, not the ideological cheerleaders on TV and in the papers, know this, which is why they're always going to the government with lobbyists and gifts in order to work this system to their advantage.

Most everybody's heard about the laws of supply and demand. Here's a new economic law: government and business are so intertwined that there is no way of separating them. We might as well get used to that fact and adjust our political conversation accordingly. Hopefully, this will end up with nanny state help for regular people like you and me not being demonized all the time.

You know, just like the way it is with nanny state help for big business.

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