Paul Smith

For weeks now  the global economic crisis has been the talking point.   It's  rare to find stories about the  impact this long predicted  crash has had on  ordinary people.  Even harder  to  find in the welter of words about this latest Market meltdown,  an exploration of  the major driver: greed. Or the impact this latest fiscal  dive might have on democracy. 

But last week Huffpost.com,  an influential  American website, provided insights other than those relating to institutional self-interest.   Benjamin R. Barber wrote of the US situation:

So although it was bad loans and greedy bankers and stupid hedge fund managers and ignorant investors who made the mess, it has been four decades of de-democratization that has done the real damage. A haemorrhaging of social capital that nobody noticed because government was supposed to be the problem and markets the solution. Runaway Thatcherism and exuberant Reaganism railed against government until citizens were literally talked out of their democracy.

In New Zealand other voices have raised concerns about the same erosion. Yet  every day the financial  narratives are generally about institutional  self-interest.  Perhaps that's  because when  the dollar becomes the centre of every transaction as it  did  in New Zealand in 1984, people become commodities,  impersonal numbers in a balance sheet prepared by the same New Right influences mentioned by Barber. 

Some day historians might look back over the past 30 years and ask how it was that we could  blind ourselves to the flaming obvious: that markets - especially when they failed  and became parasitic -   stood for our worst qualities.

They  might rue the fact that just when we needed to  embrace other more enduring values like compassion for each other and the Planet, we clung to beliefs which history had long ago told us  were fake.  We  consumed more, made less and  in the end got, well, what we deserved, the price of  endorsing a  freedom fantasy.   Trouble is those people writing  those histories about that barren legacy  might be our grandchildren.