This post has brewing for a while. I found it impossible to write both a dissertation and a blog together, as I had hoped, and have now finished the piece. Elements of it will now (hopefully) make their way onto this blog!
OK, that's the preliminaries out of the way. Today's discussion is prompted by the fascinating, if somewhat terrifying, events surrounding the worldwide economy. This has fabulously revealed the fundamental fatuousness of those who claim faith in the 'free market'. Such dogmatic belief, similar to that employed by right-wing Christianist brethren, was in pursuit of an idealistic goal that has finally been revealed as the mythical creature it truly is, like the Loch Ness Monster, or Tinkerbell.
There is no such thing as the free market - only activities allowed (or disallowed) by governments. Similar behaviours are identified, and then allocated collective responses that come to be known as 'Capitalism'. Those behaviours cannot be divorced from the other behaviours commonly thought of as government (or indeed, anything else humans do).
