After the last couple of decades I offer the intellectuals (is plural justified LOL) who I know and who bravely embrace a new future with little more than promise I offer this not so recent but prescient observation:
The Greek tradition found virtue in the pursuit of rational self interest, a tradition that later found expression in Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" in which is posited "rational self-interest" as an "invisible hand" upon "free markets". Recent bank failures, recession, accounting crimes and corporate scandals, however, amount to enormous empirical evidence that "laissez faire" capitalism is a myth, and if not a myth, an impractical ideology. The "invisible hand" --as modern conservatives have defined and appropriated it --is mere "wishful thinking".
If there is an "invisible hand" it does not militate against crooks, charlatans, and fast buck artists who have now firmly ensconced themselves as much in board rooms as among sleazy fly-by-nighters. The Reagan administration alone, like that of Warren Harding before it, is proof that, left to its own devices, an elite, robber-baron class will act to enrich itself and, in the process, imperil the nation. Business is not the business of America or, indeed, any nation which wishes to remain solvent or, in other ways, ensure the defense and futures of its people. A 'robber baron' era, a 'Gilded Age' did not merely precede the Great Depression, it caused it by impoverishing every other class but the upper crust. While there has never been a bust without the 'bubble' that precedes it, the 'bubble' itself is the result of the deliberate transfer of wealth to an increasingly small elite. Today, in America, that elite is but one percent of the total population. It owns more than some 95 percent of the rest of us combined.
Markets left to their own devices trend toward oligopoly in which oligarchs effect political plutocracy through the exercise of sheer political muscle, intimidation, fraud, and outright bribery. The "invisible hand" does not moderate the rich and powerful. If a ruling cabal is to be moderated it must be done by political action and the power of cooperative or, perhaps, 'socialist' interventions.
Len Hart
They don't seem to understand you can be 100% anti-fascists and also be against a group of masked, far left, fascist thugs who ironically call themselves antifa. Calling themselves antifa doesn't absolve them from their love for communism and fascistic actions.
![[laughing]](http://l.yimg.com/j/assets/img/emoticons/classic/laugh.r191677.gif "Laughing [laughing]")
