 Imagine the kind of person that could be expected to say a phrase along the lines of, the market will regulate itself, or the free of the market, the free of the people. Even if you didn't picture the following caricature, the general belief is that a person likely to say that is typically a wealthy trust fund baby called Barfollowmew, works at Daddy's firm, drives an Audi R8 and wears boat shoes, pastel coloured shorts and Patagonia vests. In other words, a young banker. Indeed, this is a typical stereotype of libertarians overall. Finally, we can put that to rest with the events that unfolded recently as The Little Guy did more to cripple Wall Street in a few weeks by using their own methods than a bunch of loitering socialists could have ever dreamed of for the entire Occupy Wall Street event. Now, the GameStop stock fiasco has been documented absolutely everywhere and has brought about some genuine compass unity as just about everyone involved with modern grassroots politics has been overjoyed with watching a single subreddit destroying hedge funds and sending the entire financial service industry into panic mode and the only people offended by it are boomers and the mainstream media that they watch. So I'll keep my explanation brief as it's been done to death by now, but it goes as follows. Buying a stock is simple. You expect the price to go up, so you buy it and you hold it. If you are right, you make a profit and if you are wrong, you make a loss. But what do you do if you expect a stock to go down and want to make money from it? Well, that process is called shorting and what you essentially do is borrow a stock from a broker at the market price, wait for the price to fall, then give the stock back at its new price and keep the money left over. So if a stock falls from $100 to $50, you give it back and keep the $50 left. But what happens if you're wrong? Well, because you are borrowing a stock rather than buying it, if you're wrong and the price instead goes up, the actual owner of the stock can demand that you give it back to them and pay them the difference in price. So if it went up to $150 and the lender wasn't confident that your prediction was right, you now owe them $50 and their stock back. The potential risk is much higher in shorting a stock. If you buy a stock and its price falls to zero, you lose all the money you put in. But if you short a stock, there's no technical end to how high it can go. If you short a stock at $100 and it goes up to $1,000, you haven't just lost all the money you put in, you've lost 10 times that amount. So now we arrive at Wall Street Bets versus Melvin Capital. Gamestop is a huge American company with a very out of date business model. Video games are increasingly purchased online rather than in brick and mortar stores and the fact that it hasn't already been destroyed by the online distribution industry, exactly how Blockbuster was destroyed by Netflix, does honestly seem to me to be a miracle. Gamestop is an obvious short and appears to be a company on borrowed time, so betting that it would go bankrupt should have been a safe one. But the online zoo that is Wall Street Bets found a stroke of genius. They noticed that Gamestop is already one of the most shorted stocks on the market and hedge funds such as Melvin Capital were posed to short it even harder. This presented a unique opportunity to do a little trolling. If they bought Gamestop on mass and sent the price rocketing upwards, the industry short sellers would be absolutely screwed as their brokers recalled their holdings and demanded payment. So of course that's exactly what happened. So let's get back to remembering the stereotype of a free market advocate, a rich banker naive to the way the world works outside of their country mansions and luxury city apartments. So do we think that when these hedge funds took a loss that they shrugged their shoulders and said well that's free market capitalism for you, you win some and you lose some? Did they fuck? They demonstrated to the world who they truly are and have been for all this time, statist cronies who take private profits but public losses. As when they do screw up, they go running to the taxpayers pocket to cover themselves. Absolutely nothing about the banking sector is free market at all and hasn't been for the longest time. Nearly 200 years ago President Andrew Jackson had the following to say to bankers utilising the central bank for their own gain. Gentlemen I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won you divided the profits amongst you and when you lost you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and a knowledge charter I shall ruin 10,000 families. That may be true gentlemen but that is your sin. Should I let you go on you will ruin 50,000 families and that would be my sin. You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out and by the eternal god I will rout you out. The practice of too big to fail is hard coded into a centralised financial sector. Rather than invest wisely an investment bank with this kind of safety net can employ a strategy more similar to throwing lumps of shit at a wall and seeing which ones stick because when they ricochet back in their faces you will be the one cleaning it up for them so they can get right back to it. No amount of regulation can stop this as it is chasing the symptom not the disease. The reddit retail traders are far more the embodiment of the free market individuals of limited means outsmarting the ones at the top at their own game and winning. That is the way it should always be and now that it has happened a single time the entire industry has entered into DEF CON 1. And despite all the irony within this whole debacle let's talk about the most slap in the face irony of all. The trading app called Robinhood stopped retail investors from buying GameStop stocks literally stopping the poor taking money from the rich. What the fuck? We didn't need any more proof right now that tech companies are anti-market oligarchs set on crushing the civil liberties of people who aren't in their club but here we are. Even the Apple and Google app stores removed thousands and thousands of negative reviews for the Robinhood app in the backlash. It's nothing short of an absolute joke. So what did we learn from this event? Well if you've been paying attention to how the financial sector operates for more than just a month you probably didn't actually learn anything. This is the way that they've operated for literally centuries. They hate the free market more than anybody because a free market would mean they could lose as well as win and that just doesn't suit them. Why would you want that when you can rig the game in your favor so that you win 95% of the time and when you occasionally lose you get given a literal get out of jail free card. At the very center of this problem lies government intervention and central banking enabling bad economic behavior and creating unsustainable monopolies. It's absolutely no surprise at all that throughout history economies with no central bank were immensely less corrupt or stable and actually operated like a free market would. Anybody who claims that the banking oligarchies we have now are a result of free market capitalism is nothing short of a tool and should not be taken seriously. Free markets haven't existed in developed western countries for centuries and this dystopia we see now is the direct consequence of that. We must end this entire godforsaken system and take it to its foundations never allowing centralization of finance again. When legislators can decide what is bought and sold the first thing to be bought and sold are legislators. Take it easy.