I was thinking about it and realized that the sin of the free market economists is too much faith in human nature--too much optimism in the moral and ethical judgements people make. An abundantly positive view of human nature isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in this case the delusions of perfection lead to bad situations. On the surface, pure free markets are seductive with their promises of turning humankind's most inwardly directed impulses of greed and selfishness into an incredibly powerful engine of progress and efficiency. The problem, though, is that when not contained within some structure of rules, those selfish impulses eventually nullify all the theoretical constructs of the imagined, "perfect free market" and give in to a situation where a slight few can make life miserable for the vast majority when people cheat. Enforcing rules can slow down progress, for sure, but people don't play by the rules unless you make them play by the rules. Even Alan Greenspan was forced to admit to that.

I also think it's kind of funny how oblivious a lot of these guys were about what was about to happen. You hire a stuffy academic to be in charge and chances are he will be a little out of touch with the times, know what I'm saying? It's like Alan Greenspan had a bunch of parrots that learned to mimic him from listening to him so much, and all they could say was, "Brawwwk, the Fed should use monetary policy to control inflation and unemployment, brawwk," even when people were suggesting that shit was going down. It seems like a good example not to believe something just because your boss says that it's true.

Now I am, in fact, going somewhere with this even if it doesn't seem like it. Between reading the financial page of The New Yorker and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities with self proclaimed "Master of the Universe" Sherman McCoy I've gotten exposed to a small bit of the financial world and had a revelation: you don't always have to bet on success, you can bet on failure, too. It really hit me when I was reading the description of Sherman (Shuhmun, Shuhmun!) scheming about buying and selling gold-backed French bonds, where he was also short-selling Francs in case French currency dropped. You can hedge by betting on failure!

My whole life I've had a complex about failure because it seems like I can never get anything to work out. It seems like whenever I want something to happen really bad then it doesn't happen. But this new...revelation...means that all I have to do is bet money against things I want to happen! If I really want to succeed at something, then I should wager a large sum of money that I won't succeed, so I'll still go through life failing but I'll make a bunch of money doing it! Now all I need to do is find a way to place large bets that I won't find a good job or a girlfriend. ZING! BAM! HI-OH!