The problem became obvious at the onset of the financial crisis. All of the huffing and puffing about our glorious Free Market system was a big lie. Once the credit bubble had burst, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson went into panic mode – his eyes bulging outward even more than normal. During that fateful week of September 15 2008, Paulson had 24 telephone conversations with Lloyd Blankfein, his successor CEO at Goldman Sachs. AIG had to get bailed out at taxpayer expense. From across the pond, the reaction was immediate. On September 18 2008, Philip Broughton wrote an article for the Daily Mail entitled, “Free-market capitalism lies shredded … while America’s confidence is badly shaken”. Near the outset of the piece, Broughton chronicled the ugly truth:
For years now, we have had to listen to bankers attacking Washington for imposing regulations that inhibit the free markets from making even more money.
And all the while, they took exorbitant salaries, justifying them on the grounds of their huge contribution to capitalism.
How bitterly ironic it is, then, to see these one-time freemarketeers becoming socialists overnight.
The schoolyard bullies of Wall Street have gone running to the state for help, pleading to be saved from destruction.
They deserve neither our sympathy nor the billions in taxpayer support they are now receiving.
That theme has been reverberating through commentaries ever since.
A year later, Paul Farrell of MarketWatch provided an overview of writings by Jack Bogle, Marc Faber and Thomas Moore to support his contention that “America’s Soul of Capitalism” has been lost:
You know something’s very wrong: A year ago, too-greedy-to-fail banks were insolvent, in a near-death experience. Now, magically, they’re back to business as usual, arrogant, pocketing outrageous bonuses while Main Street sacrifices, and unemployment and foreclosures continue rising as tight credit, inflation and skyrocketing federal debt are killing taxpayers.
Down in Australia, The Propitious Manager wrote an essay on April 4 2010, expressing his amazement that America was having so much trouble trying to stomach the idea of government-backed healthcare:
When you read President O’bama’s healthcare plan the most striking message is the failure of a free market to provide for the community. The healthcare market in the US, left unfettered to run free, just crashes into a heap of mismanagement, inefficiency and opportunism (hold on – isn’t this a familiar story). I’ll leave you to read the script – but it isn’t a pretty picture.
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What I like to call post free market economies, are about identifying the markets which are essential to maintaining thriving people and communities and develop the frameworks which optimize their performance. Some require complete freedom while others require varying degrees of framework from elected governments. Developing an increasingly sophisticated community and social framework is really the challenge of the century. One where it doesn’t matter whether your a rubbish collector or a billionaire – if you get sick, someone will care for you and if you invest your money it will be there when you wake up in the morning.
The idea that we are now living in a post-free-market economy presents itself in a recent commentary by Veronique de Rugy for Bloomberg News, entitled “Why Businesses Can’t Stand Free Markets”. Ms. De Rugy discussed how businesses exploit regulatory capture and use lobbyists to obtain favorable laws and regulations in order to stifle competition at the expense of consumers. She concluded with this thought:
Let’s hope that any court ruling deals a blow to the practice of entrenched businesses using government to impose higher costs on consumers while also thwarting upstart entrepreneurs. No one said loving free markets was easy.
On the other hand, there are many “upstart entrepreneurs” seeking government assistance to circumvent obstacles existing in the free-market system. This has become especially apparent in the burgeoning solar power industry, where American upstarts are attempting to compete with entities which obtain government financing – not only in China but in the eurozone as well. Martin LaMonica recently discussed this problem in an article for CNET:
Before the financial crisis, solar challengers were able to build manufacturing facilities using private money–venture capital, private equity, and hedge funds. These sources still exist, but private investors are being pickier about how they place their bets, said Ted Sullivan, solar analyst at Lux Research.
Raising money on the public markets with an initial public offering was possible a few years ago, too, but is very difficult now, said Ethan Zindler, head of policy analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Banks, meanwhile, are unlikely to finance the first factory for a solar company if the technology is relatively new and untested.
That leaves government programs, such as low-cost loans, and state incentives for economic development to help fill the financing gap in many cases.
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In an effort to stimulate exports, the China Development Bank has made $40 billion in credit available to six solar companies in the past six months, said Zindler from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The U.S. stimulus program made billions of dollars available to stimulate clean-energy technologies, but the U.S. can’t match the amount of money China has made available through these low-cost loans, he said.
“Chinese solar companies are grinding down the cost by building plants the size the world has never seen before and deploying unbelievable amounts of capital to do it,” Zindler said.
In the U.S., the solar industry scored a victory with the passage of the tax bill last week because it included a one-year extension to a grant that replaces a tax credit subsidy. But it’s unclear what the long-term direction on renewable energy policy is in the U.S., which creates questions over how strong demand will be for solar, Zindler said.
In our post-free-market milieu, there are many exceptions to the general rule that government assistance to business is a bad thing. Now that people are finally facing up to the reality that many companies (some of which are Cayman Islands-based corporations) have been receiving U.S. government subsidies (of some sort) for decades, difficult decisions must be made to determine when this is appropriate and when it’s not. American voters need to face up to the fact that many of those poseurs claiming to be champions of “American free enterprise” are nothing more than hypocritical tools for whoever is lining their pockets. “American free enterprise” died at Maiden Lane. Deal with it.