As someone who had been saying for the past few years that things like Nixonian wage and price controls would be considered beyond the pale in a world that, I thought, understood and appreciated some basics of free markets more than it did 35 years ago, well, it’s a good thing my jaw has dropped so much on the past week’s news that I have room to fit a lot of crow.

Is there anything more sad than a disillusioned libertarian once he discovers his beloved mistress capitalism isn’t as pure as he thought she was, but is quite willing to undergo intervention if that suits her interests? Well, yes. Brian Doherty’s discomfort is after all safely theoretical, a vague unease that the economic laws to which he dedicated his political life are being overturned now capitalism has failed again and the people responsible need the help of the state to bail them out, again. Unlike like many of the people who’ve lost their jobs, their houses or both in the process, Brian’s safe. Capitalism always needs its useful idiots.

One such useful idiot is the near-mythical taxpayer, who is going to pay the costs of all those emergency nationalisations and bailouts their governments have committed themselves to, from Northern Rock to AIG. Because it’s never the strong, succesful companies that are taken over, but the wrecks left behind once the shareholders and executives have sucked them dry. Not that there’s anything new to this pattern. Remember Railtrack?

Or, further back, look at which industries were nationalised by the great social democratic governments of Europe in that great wave of nationalisations after World War II, especially in Britain. The railways, coal mines, British Leyland, all industries that were in trouble, losing their profitability anyway, to the point were state interference is welcomed as much as resented. And it then fell to the state to dismantle these industries and deal with the fallout of this, like a eneration of unemployed miners after the 1984 Miner Strike. Even those industries that were re-privatised by succesive Tory and Labour governments still leaned heavily on government support, directly or indirectly.

Which is whay nationalism this way isn’t a victory for socialism or even social democracy, but just another way in which profits are privatised but risk nationalised. What we need is not the propping up of empty husks, but the nationalisation and put into the public trust of all key industries, a reworking of society in such a way that cooperation, not competition is its central
organising feature, where “to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities” is its motto. To do anything else is just keeping capitalism alive to cause more disaster.