The Beast That Can't Be Killed

Capitalism survives another attempt to save it

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The universal wolf, devoid of prey, at last eats up itself.
—Your truly, with apologies to you-know-who

I know plenty of people who think the Sanders campaigns and Warren’s single try are synonyms for each other — enough people that they’re not worth counting. One prefers Warren, one Sanders, a third picks them both. So what? It's from the same menu, right? Birds of a flock.

But maybe they aren’t the same. Sanders thought billionaires simply shouldn't exist. Warren thought they could be tamed. “I’m a capitalist. Come on,” she told CNBC. She just wanted “rules” to make sure capitalism worked for the rest of us, we with no capital, we who are burdened with debt (a capitalist's “income stream”).

So Warren, in her wisdom, convinced another pro-capitalist, Barack Obama, to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a watchdog on capitalist activity, a way to make capitalists safe to be around.

How’d that work out? The capitalists and the Bureau fought a few rounds. Then the capitalists won easily, and the Bureau was summarily closed. Warren was wrong; billionaires couldn’t be tamed. The wolf made a meal of its guards and went back its work: the business of eating us all.

Why did the wolf consume this particular meal? It got in the way.

Musk Targets His Companies’ Regulators

…Late last month, Elon Musk’s company X announced a deal with Visa to create a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payment system through the social media platform. Days later, Musk is signaling that he and his DOGE team are working to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which polices peer-to-peer payment apps and had been planning tougher oversight of such systems to make sure they don’t steal your money.

Capitalism. The universal wolf. It dies or it eats.

(It doesn’t help Warren’s case, or her final account, that she helped install Biden after Sanders took the lead in the 2020 campaign. But that wasn’t her first mistake; just her most telling.)

Saving the Beast

Carl Beijer, whom I've come to appreciate, remarked on this lately in a subscriber post:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which stood for a decade and a half as the culmination of liberal attempts to regulate capitalism, has been shut down by capitalists.

CFPB director Russel Vought effectively shuttered the agency last night in an email directing all employees to halt their work. The move is just the latest episode of billionaire Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign to dismantle the federal government.

The CFPB was launched in 2010 with the explicit purpose of saving capitalism from itself. “In the end, our financial system only works — the market is only free — when there are clear rules and basic safeguards in place,” [Barack] Obama said as he signed into law the bill that would launch the agency. “And that’s what these reforms are designed to achieve.”

Speaking at a 2018 Consumer Empowerment Conference, deputy director Brian Johnson affirmed the CBPB’s crucial role in maintaining capitalism.

“The role of these regulators is not to replace the market economy, but to reinforce it,” he said.

Making capitalism strong was the goal of the agency. In that it succeeded.

Beijer’s right: the beast can’t be killed, not by sane measures, not by being polite. A stake through the heart, perhaps. A bullet. An exorcism with prejudice. But not with sweetcakes and an invitation to talk.

‘A conspiracy against the public’

I’ll leave with this thought. Even Adam Smith, a capitalist saint today, understood the inherent evil of what he saw. In The Wealth of Nations, he wrote:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. [p 54]

This won’t end well, but it will end predictably enough. The billionaires go or we all do, lit in a blaze of hubris-fueled climate glory, they with their winnings clutched in withering hands, we with politeness intact and hope in our hearts. Them or us all. What’s the over-under on “when it’s too late”?