Brilliant article. It's hard to choose, but here are some of the choicest bits.
Gore Vidal, the recently demised American writer, once famously quipped that the US economic system is "free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich".
Since the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008, not only has the US lived up to Vidal's caricature but the whole of the rich capitalist world has become more "American". The poor are increasingly exposed to market forces, with tougher conditions on the diminishing state protection they get, while the rich have unprecedented levels of protection from the state, with virtually no strings attached.
The poor are told that their states are bankrupt because their previous governments splashed out on welfare payments for them.
They ? especially if they happen to be from the "lazy" eurozone periphery countries ? are lectured that they have to pay for the "good times" they had with "other people's money" by working harder at lower wages and by accepting lower levels of welfare provision, with more stringent conditions.
Of course, this narrative is completely misleading. The current budget deficits are mainly the outcomes of the fall in tax revenues caused by the financial crisis, rather than excessive social spending.
In fact, in the runup to the crisis, countries like Spain and Ireland had run budget surpluses (for a decade, in the case of Ireland), while the deficit levels in other countries, except in Greece, were at manageable levels.
The "laziness" argument also does not wash, as most poor people work much harder than the rich in any given country, while the Greeks, the Spaniards and the Portuguese work much longer (by at least a few hundred hours per year) than the Germans or the Dutch. In contrast, the rich are enjoying unprecedented levels of protection from market forces.
Many financial and industrial companies have been bailed out with the public's money, but very few of those who had run those companies have been punished for their failures.
...
The British government has taken over (with shares with voting rights) two of the world's biggest banks ? the RBS and HBOS ? but refuses to order them to do its bidding, as any decent capitalist would have done to a company that he/she had taken over.
While being helped by government protection to make money, the rich have also been given special allowances to keep as much of it as possible.
And while they spend significant resources tracking down and punishing welfare cheats, the governments of the rich countries do nothing to close down tax havens, which have allowed many large companies and super-rich individuals to get away with paying less than their fair shares of tax.
The spread of Vidal's "American" system, fortunately, may be meeting resistance. The recent news about the French government's injection of public money into the struggling car maker Peugeot-Citroen in return for tough conditions on the company's dividend payouts and re-investment, is a case in point.
The very fact that the French government proposal is considered unusual eloquently speaks to the absurdity of the current situation in which the rich get more and more government protection with fewer conditions, while the poor get less and less protection with increasingly demanding conditions. It is time to redress the imbalance.'
And there's more ...