Should Government Be Your Stockbroker? Maybe So, Says Bloomberg
The government and its supporting lackeys would like us to believe they are our knights in shining armor protecting us against the unexpected evils of the world. We supposedly can trust that they’ll show up and keep us safe.
If the food we eat doesn’t qualify for the well-intended and carefully balanced (i.e., politically infested and poorly researched) “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” put out by the US Department of Agriculture, they gladly tax and subsidize our food until it does. We have popular magazines publishing obnoxious and error-prone information about how meat hurts us and how saturated fat causes heart disease. There are schools instigating corrupting campaigns to strip away even the little nutritious food they may once have served—and then the chattering classes celebrate it. All while we pave the way for, in Saifedean Ammous’s words from The Fiat Standard, the “high-margin, nutrient-light industrial sludge” that is vegetable oil, corn, and refined sugar.
If the fuels we use to drive our cars around, heat our homes, or power our devices don’t live up to the newest climate-obsessed fads, our kind Don Quixotes mandate that you replace them with fuels that don’t work, overload and underpower our electricity grids, and, of course, place heavy taxes and regulatory obstacles on things which they don’t like. They are, you see, here to look after our best interests—a task we are wholly incapable of doing on our own.
The latest thing (not at all unrelated to the GameStop debacle, cryptocurrencies, and meme stocks movements of 2021) is to clamp down on individual stock ownership. Retail investors, “apes” and “degenerates” of WallStreetBets, are wreaking havoc upon—destabilizing!—financial markets and taking financial risks that aren’t good for them.
Undereducated plebs apparently don’t know what’s in their own financial interest. They lack the knowledge to pick a stock, to accurately assess the value of a company, and to plan their own savings and retirement funds. Our beloved knights, who always know better, should quickly ride in and take that power out of our hands before we hurt ourselves and destroy our economy and our democracy.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Allison Schrager recently asked in Bloomberg the natural foll
Article from Mises Wire
