Free market Environmentalism with Terry Anderson, part 2

[dantean]

What did I miss here? Are we being asked to pin our hopes to HOPEFULLY the best offer made on the landowner's property comes from Nature Conservancy, whose intentions are made explicit by the very name "Nature Conservancy," but that the trees supplying us all with oxygen are, one way or another, going 2 be sold to the highest bidder for whatever purpose to which said bid-winner cares 2 put them? I'd like better guarantee than that when discussing my future breathing (ditto the water supply, etc)

[archipelagan]

"Free Market" as Greenspan, Terry Anderson et al., use it, I completely agree with you is a lie. In reality there is no such thing as as markets being free -- they're totally rigged and manipulated. "Free Market" on its face is an inherently illusory and oxymoronic term, which exists only in the abstract. Regardless, as long as there exists 1) market failure, and 2) ethical failure of marketeers (Greenspan's failed central pillar) , governmental protections from greedy marketeers is essential.

[CharlesNSteele]

@ Archipelagan: Greenspan only paid lip service to free markets. He was a central planner, and used government to design an "optimal" monetary system. Instead he designed the housing bubble via artificially low interest rates, plus Fed backing for subprime lending, mortgage backed securities, and FDIC insurance to protect banks. Greenspan's govt manipulations created the crisis -- there was no free market.

The free market works extremely well. It's govt interference that's unsustainable.

[archipelagan]

As Alan Greenspan recently admitted in a congressional inquiry around the present national economic collapse directly attributable to free market fundamentalism, "...a central pillar" of free market theory has collapsed. He said he was "shocked" and had made a "mistake" trusting its unassailability as an economic model.

It follows then, turning public resources over to the free marketeers like Terry Anderson, environmental integrity would (and already has) resulted in environmental collapse.