"The harsh Discipline of the Market" has always been for little people. In fact, if you study economics you'll find it built into the assumptions. Labor is greedy, lazy and stupid. It must be kept at or near the "natural wage" for "efficiency". The Natural Wage according to classical theory is the amount of money that barely keeps body and soul together enough to work. Anything else just causes inflation. And it causes workers to slack off. Left to itself labor is also immoral. It must be corrected with laws and other moral improvementsso that we don't enter into Hobbesian damnation.
Capital, on the other hand is good, wise, and imbued with The Ju-Ju which makes its decisions rational and Efficient. Capital must be rewarded with tax breaks and largess and freed from the cruel hand of Collectivism so that it can be bribed to shower its blessings on the world. By the bye, it's also a matter of Faith that no firm ever makes a profit above the bare minimum it would make buying T-bills.
So you start off with an assumption that Labor is foolish and corrupt while Capital is wise and good.
Add to it the fact that we have the best government that money can buy.
Toss on several decades of the regulations being written by those who are regulated.
Recall that the people who run the system tend to come from the Boardroom, Wall Street or Econ departments that preach the neo-Liberal synthesis. If you don't know what that means in technical terms please look it up so that we can avoid misunderstanding. Or they may actually be out of the Austrian or Chicago schools which take away the sugar coating of "sometimes the Invisible Hand might possibly fumble, you know once in a great while". All these sorts have a natural sympathy for the big players.
That's where you get "too big to fail" and "natural monopoly" and the rest of the words that excuse the big players and drop the weight onto the proles. That's why corporate bankruptcy protection is still strong while the new US bankruptcy laws for individuals more closely resembles a FEMA trailer than the storm cellar that it formerly represented.
You and I ride the pipe. The Big Boys are taken care of in true Gilded Age style.
Old-style small-c conservatives and most Progressives have been watching the wheels come off since the mid 1980s. The Cassandras started a decade earlier. Back in the 1960s the URPE - Union or Radical Political Economists - did a comprehensive and exceedingly rigorous critique of the mathematical foundations of the neo-Liberal Synthesis that underlies conventional economics. Not one of them ever got a job in academia again. The community of economists said "Yep. Their math is correct. They're probably right" and kept right on using the same corrupt models because that's what gave the people with the money and power warm fuzzies.
To put it in somewhat less technical terms, it looks like the bill for thirty years of untrammeled greed and rapaciousness is coming due. We are screwed. And it looks like we won't even get the common courtesy of a reach-around.
The last time this happened we had the good fortune of one of the best Presidents and the flexibility to do things like massive public works, changes in tariffs, regulation where needed, and a strong if unemployed industrial base. The out-and-out literal fascists like Prescott Bush played their hand and lost when they chose Smedley Butler to lead the coup; Roosevelt was able to do what needed to be done with a relatively free hand.
None of that applies today. McCain is running for Bush's third term and swears to continue the disastrous policies that got us here. The rest of the GOP thinks he's too far to the Left. Clinton is running as the moderate Republican she has always been. The DLC's position is to copy the Republicans in all things but with their own people in power. Obama is hard to read on the serious structural issues, but his talk about reaching out to the Republican Party and meeting them halfway seems to show that he doesn't have the cojones to do what is needful. Kucinich had some excellent plans but was railroaded and not even allowed to appear in the debates. Edwards was sandbagged. When Lyndon LaRouche's industrial policies start to look rational you know we're in deep trouble.
We need FDR, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. or William Jennings Bryan. We could get by with fer Crissake Huey Long. If we get Taft or Hoover we're dead, and I would start taking odds against the survival of the United States of America as an entity.
