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It must be said that one of the most pernicious trends in government has been the resolute path toward libertarian ideology with the desire for a laissez faire utopia trumping all pragmatism and good sense. We’ve tried this deregulation experiment a few times now with mostly disastrous results: 1. California energy deregulation and 2. US banking deregulation. One would think that libertarian ideologues would at some point need to present actual evidence that their deregulation fantasies can come to fruition. As yet, none exists. Can we now agree that the natural result of market deregulation is almost necessarily graft, corruption and crony capitalism? As with peace activists and pacifists, libertarianism is too naive and dependent on the goodness of other humans.

Take a survey of the world’s industrialized economies, both now and since the beginning of industrialization. One would be hard pressed to find just one that fit the model of a libertarian’s ideal state. That’s because such a state doesn’t occur in nature. Just as the middle class does not naturally occur without the assistance of a strong central government (and progressive taxes, natch), so too is a well-oiled, corruption-free, strong capitalist economy accompanied by a government that intervenes on behalf of its constituents, balancing the needs of all parties such that one cannot completely dominate all the others. This is not the same as mandating income equality, which is a pointless exercise, but rather a system of checks and balances to ensure that hard work does not go unrewarded.

Let us now enjoy our new foray into Socialist Democracy.