Fighting the Imperial Californian Ideology

Quoting (near the end): "The Free Market f...d us in the last year..."

At this point, I stopped listening.

The Market that f...d anyone in the last year is anything but Free. It is becoming difficult to be generous to those who claim some level of insight in this space, who then mistake rampant Mercantilism (the incestuous relationship between the all-powerful State, and the businesses that they choose to allow to own various industries), and the Free Market. Such an oversight implies either ignorance, or willful rejection of fact.

In a truly Free Market, the concept "Too Big To Fail" (for example), is impossible -- there is a natural exponential limit to the economies of scale, related to the introduction of multiple layers of management, which must introduce incompetency into the management structure of such large corporate entities. Anyone who has worked in a truly large enterprise understands this. Thus, their size is limited, and smaller, more agile and efficient competitors come into the Free Market and "eat their lunch".

Of course, when Government creates laws that allow only a specific Cabal (eg. the Federal Reserve Act), or Scale of enterprise (eg. Sarbanes Oxley) to exist, you get Too Big To Fail, the Federal Reserve inflating wealth away toward the Banksters, Government Motors (vs. Tesla, et. al), etc.

That some Truly Enlightened group needs to "clean up" the neighbourhood is somewhat frightening; what happens should I resist being "cleaned up" to their satisfaction? What if I wish to invent and sell something that undermines the influence of the Truly Enlighted cleaner-uppers? How far are they willing to go to ensure I stay "cleaned up"?

As always, maximum socialism (or fascism) requires maximum force.

The deformed child of these failed ideologies being birthed today in America; fascialism?, where the all powerful state both grants Mercantilist writs to select businesses (eg. via the various Czars), AND decrees who lives and dies, and who else pays for it (Obamacare, and massive taxation and wealth-destruction via Inflation) will ultimately require this maximum force, in order to enforce the levels of loss of freedom required to implement and fund these disgusting policies.

This was an awesome presentation, it really was, and it ended up causing some good post-presentation debate in person and on the 'tubes. If you search for #futureruby in google and/or twitter you'll find some lively discussions of Jesse's talk.