here's a pretty interesting piece from the campaign for liberty site. anthony gregory argues, as you might expect from a, like, freee market libertarian, that the combination of "state socialism and corporate or free market capitalism" is inherently "unstable," as demonstrated in the current crisis. but i propose to you that it's perfectly coherent, and is in fact the form of government toward which the world, more or less, is moving, a model being china. as i say, the corporate and state sectors are merging or have merged into a single gargantuan cash machine: processing all the consumption and distribution. no doubt there are still crises and cycles etc. but there's no stopping the leviathan. we could call this state capitalism or squishy totalitarianism etc, and no doubt it appears incoherent by the standards of classical economics. but it is our future and our, um, doom. the political and economic powers are naturally allied and the distinction has never been as dramatic in practice as it is in theory. but it's in its process of perfection, and the crisis is only showing this and accelerating the complete merger. all of us will be little nodes in the state/corporate machine for generations.

where gregory is right, however, is that the answer is not regulation. that's not because all state interference in the free market is counter-productive, but because in a situation in which the regulators and the regulatees are in fact the same people, the same interests, the whole thing is a silly charade. as i say, there is, more or less demonstrably, no distinction between goldman sachs and the treasury department.