Dave's Dubious Davos Dialectic

So, Cameron's been dallying with the rich and powerful from around the globe, giving them lectures on the new Compassionate Conservative's Critique of Corrupted Capitalism. He's obviously not heard of Briggs Armstrong, whom I highlighted earlier in the week, let alone understood the libertarian criticism of corporate welfare, influence through regulators and legislators.

Ironic really, since it seems to me that Davos is itself the supreme example of how when the power of individuals or corporations reaches a critical mass, they can get almost unlimited, and private, access to those who can make even their wildest dreams come true - governments, those territorial monopolies on the granting of privilege to those who can afford to lobby them.

No, wait, perhaps that's unfair. Maybe Dave the Decent was standing there deliberately disclaiming the whole ethos of government past and warning those boondoggling politicians and corporations that he's going to do it differently; that they should not expect to turn to a Conservative government for favourable legislation or government contracts.

The problem is, governments could no more, as DC puts it, "create vibrant, local economies" whilst wielding the very power that destroys them but drives people like him and his political elite ilk and whilst they are in hock to the very interests that want to overpower those local economies. But he makes an even more fundamental mistake, if he really believes, as he says about his travels behind the iron curtain that "democracy delivered people from half a century of despair, and capitalism - its economic agent - offered hope for a better future". Capitalism is not the agent of democracy.

Democracy, at least the vast structured remote democracy we have today is the corruptor of capitalism, the very thing that by its actions creates the problems of "markets without morality...globalisation without competition...and wealth without fairness...[that]... all adds up to capitalism without a conscience" that Dave wants to use his power to "put right".

What Cameron, and so many politicians, call "broken capitalism" is broken because of its symbiotic relationship with state power. Where the "winners have taken it all" which I would not dispute happens in spades, it is because of the barriers to competition erected over centuries by state governments favouring their own, and especially those with the means and incentive to influence them - usually those very winners.

Wherever we look in this economic crisis we see people in power wanting to tweak the prevailing system a little, despite all the evidence that it has continually failed to deliver the real competition that true free markets need to spread wealth more easily and equitably, and that when it does fail, it is those at the bottom of the pile who repeatedly pay the price. But they only want to tweak it so far. So far that they can keep most of their power, yet persuade us poor mugs they have "done something".

Cameron has one thing to say with which I agree...that "People could rise up, grab opportunities with both hands and make a better life for themselves." Okay, it wasn't a suggestion on his part, but it is on mine. Now is the time of which David Hume wrote two and a half centuries ago, the time when "rust may grow to the springs of the most accurate political machine, and disorder its motions."

It's time for change, governments and their corporate welfare pseudo-capitalism have failed us too often, we no longer need to stand up only against those who would profit from their influence, but also from those who grant that influence access to power - the state itself.