The Future of Capitalism

March 11, 2009 8:57 AM

"For me, capitalism has never been an abstract concept. It is a real, concrete part of everyday life." President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on the future of capitalism.
posted by geoff. (43 comments total)

Misread as "cannibalism", and was duly disappointed by article.
posted by rokusan at 9:10 AM on March 11, 2009 [5 favorites]

Thanks for this. For some background info, here's an short piece from The Economist with a slightly less rosy forecast of Brazil's near economic future.


posted by googly at 9:25 AM on March 11, 2009

I do not give much importance to abstract concepts.

He brings up a good point here: Why do we waste so much time arguing over abstract ideals in politics? Nothing ever works out in reality the way it was supposed to when it was being proposed. We should engineer solutions that fail well so that they are prepared to function adequately when they settle into the dysfunction that seems to seep into every system after a while. And then combine that with periodically changing the systems so that some of the ingrained dysfunction can be cleared out. Maybe we already do this to some degree, but the approach should be proactive instead of reactive. And we should spend far less time worshiping ideals and way more time making pragmatic and realistic compromises.
posted by no_moniker at 9:29 AM on March 11, 2009 [2 favorites]

He brings up a good point here: Why do we waste so much time arguing over abstract ideals in politics?

Because without abstract principles, how are you supposed to figure out what the goal is? Is it growth? Is it a more just society? is it to reduce the suffering of the poor? There are lots of things that can be done that work toward goals shared by everyone, like fixing the economic crisis.

But what about something like abortion? What's "practical" for a person who thinks abortion is murder can never be the same thing as what's "practical" for someone who thinks it's a fundamental right.

The desire for "ideology free politics" is something driven by people who have confused their own biases for absolute truth.
posted by delmoi at 9:46 AM on March 11, 2009 [7 favorites]

Oh, and also I think politicians are actually pretty stupid, and will argue ideology even when their goals are nominally the same, because they actually don't understand all the nuances about what they're proposing.
posted by delmoi at 9:48 AM on March 11, 2009

Why do we waste so much time arguing over abstract ideals in politics?

Because people are too lazy to collect data and people have irrational atachment to abstract concepts, c.f. deities.
posted by GuyZero at 9:50 AM on March 11, 2009

Textalyser Results from http://textalyser.net

Total word count : 475
Number of different words : 371
Complexity factor (Lexical Density) : 78.1%
Readability (Gunning-Fog Index) : (6-easy 20-hard) 10.8

Word frequencies

"economic" 6 times 1.3%
"our" 5 times 1.1%
"society" 5 times 1.1%
"union" 4 times 0.8%
"life" 4 times 0.8%
"brazilian" 4 times 0.8%

"rainforest" 0 times 0.0%

Hm. I get the feeling there's a double entendre when he says capitalism is a concrete part of his life.
posted by tapesonthefloor at 9:53 AM on March 11, 2009 [2 favorites]

huh, looks like the ft.com/capitalismblog is just republishing the series so far from www.ft.com/capitalism...

i'd recommend their two editorials and the recent piece by amartya sen :P

oh and btw hitchens takes a look back on marx!
posted by kliuless at 9:54 AM on March 11, 2009

oh and speaking of "the future of capitalism" james fallows has a nice piece up on china's way forward in which he also links to a nice profile of michael pettis, viz.
posted by kliuless at 10:10 AM on March 11, 2009

Right now, capitalism vs. socialism is not an abstract discussion, at least in the U.S. We are faced with a reality in which the means of production are not owned privately, but are at least in part owned by the government (see banks, GM, etc.).

The problem in the U.S. is that the notion of free enterprise has been construed to be synonymous with capitalism. But it isn't. In a true free enterprise system, the better product, the smarter marketing, wins. The free enterprise system in the U.S. has been subordinated by corporate influence of government regulations, which exist in nearly every industry. Large corporations have no interest in abolishing capitalism -- it would mean they lose the source of their wealth -- but they have every interest in thwarting free market competition through the process of lobbying to influence, but not eliminate, regulations.

In a true free market, competition is only limited by economic, market-related barriers to entry. In the current, quasi-corporatist system, established players change the rules of the market to make entry more difficult and make it more difficult for smaller players to compete.

The markets didn't fail because capitalism failed or the free markets failed. they failed because the markets were not free but rather were under the influence of inefficient, entrenched market participants who correctly perceived new, more efficient competitors as a threat to their inflated profits.
posted by Pastabagel at 10:27 AM on March 11, 2009 [7 favorites]

If only the markets were more free! If only that invisible hand was a little bit more invisible!
posted by chunking express at 10:41 AM on March 11, 2009

Because without abstract principles, how are you supposed to figure out what the goal is?

Why does there have to be a goal?

Read more Zhuangzi. Striving is part of the problem: human being need to train themselves to be less compelled to produce, and more compelled to enjoy what the already have. Life is not a race.
posted by ornate insect at 10:50 AM on March 11, 2009 [1 favorite]

When it comes to economics, all we really have are abstractions. Economic theory is basically indivisible from ideology, and that seems unavoidable. It may be dismal but it sure aint science.
posted by Edgewise at 11:03 AM on March 11, 2009

Because without abstract principles, how are you supposed to figure out what the goal is?

I think I understand your point Delmoi. But I don't think that goals always have to be abstract ideals. For instance, people on both sides of the abortion debate could agree that reducing the frequency of abortions is a positive outcome and find ways which conflict with neither of their ideologies to do so, if any. Instead of screaming at each other over whether abortion is murder or not they could realize they disagree and try to find some constructive ways to move forward. I suppose the difference between an abstract ideal and more concrete goals is largely semantic. However, I think it is a fair argument that 'reducing the number of abortions' is much more concrete than the abstract ideals 'life begins at conception' or 'every woman has a right over her own body'. Reductions in the frequency can be practical for both sides.

The desire for "ideology free politics" is something driven by people who have confused their own biases for absolute truth.

The solution to that is not to believe in absolute truth ;-) Or at least admit it is unknowable.
posted by no_moniker at 11:12 AM on March 11, 2009 [1 favorite]

But, above all, I hope for a world free of the economic dogmas that invaded the thinking of many and were presented as absolute truths.

Quite a dreamer, that Lula.
posted by blucevalo at 11:16 AM on March 11, 2009

The shadow financial system – as illustrated in three new papers that cut through the London fog
posted by ornate insect at 11:18 AM on March 11, 2009

"The markets didn't fail because capitalism failed or the free markets failed. they failed because the markets were not free but rather were under the influence of inefficient, entrenched market participants who correctly perceived new, more efficient competitors as a threat to their inflated profits."

Where is this mythical "free market?" Sounds like an unreachable ideal, not a realistic goal.
posted by krinklyfig at 11:22 AM on March 11, 2009

The markets didn't fail because capitalism failed or the free markets failed. they failed because the markets were not free but rather were under the influence of inefficient, entrenched market participants who correctly perceived new, more efficient competitors as a threat to their inflated profits.

Pastabagel brings up a point I see a lot these days. So let's consider a totally free market, unfettered by regulation. What happens when an unregulated corporation attains monopoly status? Does it allow other companies to enter the market? We struggled with that earlier this century. What happens when derivatives markets are unregulated and allowed to greatly amplify the risk to the system as a whole? We are stuggling with that now. I don't think a totally free market is intrinsically stable. Far from it. Absent of government regulation, sufficiently powerful market players can still distort the market as a whole.

When it comes to economics, all we really have are abstractions. Economic theory is basically indivisible from ideology, and that seems unavoidable. It may be dismal but it sure aint science.

I agree, Edgewise, and this bring me to my next point: When we are confronted with a problem that can't be solved, the worst thing we can do is act based on ideology. It's a shot in the dark and almost guaranteed to be wrong. If you think of it in statistical terms, ideology is like over fitting the data.

What we should do with difficult problems is back away from ideology, avoid the inclination to knee-jerk a solution. But it seems the human norm is to cling to the ideology when the information is sparse. This seems worse than admitting you don't know exactly how the system works and attempting to formulate a solution based only on what little information you have or can gather.
posted by no_moniker at 11:30 AM on March 11, 2009 [1 favorite]

Pastabagel: In a true free market, competition is only limited by economic, market-related barriers to entry. In the current, quasi-corporatist system, established players change the rules of the market to make entry more difficult and make it more difficult for smaller players to compete.

I consistently hear people making this point, but I have to say it rings very hollow for me. It's certainly convenient to blame the present monopolism on government intervention, but intuitively (and I would suspect in practice) the opposite is true — in the absence of the very visible hand of regulation competition is reduced still further, since existing large entities can use their disproportionate resources to 'unfairly' quash opposition.
posted by nfg at 11:34 AM on March 11, 2009

no_moniker: We struggled with that earlier this century

Earlier this century, the Federal government wasn't too frightened of and/or too funded by these corporations to essentially annihilate them if they started getting too big for everyone's good.
posted by tapesonthefloor at 11:34 AM on March 11, 2009

they failed because the markets were not free but rather were under the influence of inefficient, entrenched market participants who correctly perceived new, more efficient competitors as a threat to their inflated profits.

So ... you're saying ... free markets need regulation to stay free?
posted by asusu at 11:45 AM on March 11, 2009

The desire for "ideology free politics" is something driven by people who have confused their own biases for absolute truth.

I half agree with this. But I think there are people who desire "ideology free politics" that aren't ideologues.

Aren't ideologies basically just peoples worldviews ("how things are and how they got to be this way") coupled with strongly held beliefs about how things should be, and maybe also the methods which should be used to get to where we should be?

Is it so wrong to not want people to believe a single static explanation of how things are and how they got to be this way? Or how things should be? Or how to get there?

We are faced with a reality in which the means of production are not owned privately, but are at least in part owned by the government (see banks, GM, etc.).

Seriously, this is where I get to rag on my leftist friends using one of their favorite shticks: car culture. Take GM, and let's not even talk about car companies directly receiving taxpayer money, let's talk about the indirect subsidies they receive: Public streets, the interstate system, etc. Would car culture exist today without those government interventions? Not a chance. If people who wanted to buy cars had to pay their share of the infrastructure up front, their share of the environmental damage, etc. etc. I just can't even imagine anyone being able to afford a car, and that's an awesome thing.

existing large entities can use their disproportionate resources to 'unfairly' quash opposition.

If this was true blue whales would rule the world, right? Or maybe that's not the best example, but it's a good metaphor: even in the market there is some amount of "gravity" that makes these large entities extremely inefficient. But when you introduce regulation, smaller entities get pushed out of the market simply out of not being able to afford the (often enormous) bureaucratic overhead that regulation requires.
posted by symbollocks at 11:45 AM on March 11, 2009

The Looting of America’s Coffers
posted by ornate insect at 12:01 PM on March 11, 2009 [1 favorite]

the ft sez: "This was not a failure of markets; it was a failure to create proper markets." leonhardt today goes further, ascribing the financial/economic/credit crisis not to failure in markets or capitalism per se, but to looting:

Sixteen years ago, two economists published a research paper with a delightfully simple title: “Looting.”

The economists were George Akerlof, who would later win a Nobel Prize, and Paul Romer, the renowned expert on economic growth. In the paper, they argued that several financial crises in the 1980s, like the Texas real estate bust, had been the result of private investors taking advantage of the government. The investors had borrowed huge amounts of money, made big profits when times were good and then left the government holding the bag for their eventual (and predictable) losses.

In a word, the investors looted. Someone trying to make an honest profit, Professors Akerlof and Romer said, would have operated in a completely different manner. The investors displayed a “total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending,” failing to verify standard information about their borrowers or, in some cases, even to ask for that information.

The investors “acted as if future losses were somebody else’s problem,” the economists wrote. “They were right.”

On Tuesday morning in Washington, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave a speech that read like a sad coda to the “Looting” paper. Because the government is unwilling to let big, interconnected financial firms fail — and because people at those firms knew it — they engaged in what Mr. Bernanke called “excessive risk-taking.” To prevent such problems in the future, he called for tougher regulation.

Now, it would have been nice if the Fed had shown some of this regulatory zeal before the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But that day has passed. So people are rightly starting to think about building a new, less vulnerable financial system.

And “Looting” provides a really useful framework. The paper’s message is that the promise of government bailouts isn’t merely one aspect of the problem. It is the core problem.

[...]

Do you remember the mea culpa that Alan Greenspan, Mr. Bernanke’s predecessor, delivered on Capitol Hill last fall? He said that he was “in a state of shocked disbelief” that “the self-interest” of Wall Street bankers hadn’t prevented this mess.

He shouldn’t have been. The looting theory explains why his laissez-faire theory didn’t hold up. The bankers were acting in their self-interest, after all.

[...]

In effect, the bankers had siphoned off this bailout money in advance, years before the government had spent it... given an incentive to loot, Wall Street did so. “If you think of the financial system as a whole,” Mr. Romer said, “it actually has an incentive to trigger the rare occasions in which tens or hundreds of billions of dollars come flowing out of the Treasury.”

[...]

If we don’t get rid of the incentive to loot, the only question is what form the next round of looting will take.

Mr. Akerlof and Mr. Romer finished writing their paper in the early 1990s, when the economy was still suffering a hangover from the excesses of the 1980s. But Mr. Akerlof told Mr. Romer — a skeptical Mr. Romer, as he acknowledged with a laugh on Tuesday — that the next candidate for looting already seemed to be taking shape.

It was an obscure little market called credit derivatives.

reducing the problem to looting i think helps put things in perspective...
posted by kliuless at 12:13 PM on March 11, 2009 [2 favorites]

It rings hollow to me too, nfg, because our current problems started at the end of an administration that was very pro-deregulation and succeeded in deregulating many areas. They repealed the Glass-Steagall act that was implemented after the great depression in an attempt to control speculation. They even explicitly prohibited the regulation of the derivatives markets that were behind the subprime meltdown. I don't understand how regulation could have caused our current problems. I'd like to see some explanation of the mechanism by which excess regulation caused the current problems.

But I don't think the solution is either regulate or deregulate. Its more complex than that. Like symbollocks example, regulation can have bad effects. I think it can also have positive effects. More likely it has a mixture of both.

So can the looters be identified and prosecuted? Was what they did even illegal in most cases? Either way the system needs to change or this will happen repeatedly, like it already has. It almost seems like there are many players trying to make this sort of thing happen so they can profit from it.
posted by no_moniker at 12:18 PM on March 11, 2009

gah! but then, when you hire the fox...

William Dudley, new president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, on Friday accused bankers of exacerbating the financial crisis, saying some failed to raise capital quickly enough because they did not want to dilute their shareholdings.

Mr Dudley, in his first speech as head of the New York Fed, said executives at banks and government-sponsored enterprises told regulators “repeatedly over the past 18 months” that “now is not a good time to raise capital”.

“This desire to postpone capital raising stems in part to the fact that bank executives often do not want to dilute existing shareholders, which of course include themselves,” said Mr Dudley. “The self-interested thing to do is avoid the dilution and hope for a good state of the world.”

Mr Dudley, an economist at Goldman Sachs before he joined the New York Fed as executive vice-president of the markets group, was also fairly downbeat about the economy in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations... He also cautioned that the president of the New York Fed should be independent of Wall Street and its pursuit of profit. “Self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance,” he said.

[...]

Mr Dudley was more upbeat about the prospects for the government’s Term Asset-Backed Security Loan Facility, which is designed to help boost the markets for securities backed by consumer and business loans. Mr Dudley said that by offering up to $9 of borrowed money for every dollar invested by potential buyers, “returns become very attractive”.

gimme the loot :P
posted by kliuless at 12:25 PM on March 11, 2009

I think you meant Gimmie the Loot.
posted by chunking express at 12:30 PM on March 11, 2009

Kottke quotes the Wire, and it is good.
posted by chunking express at 12:31 PM on March 11, 2009

Bye-bye Amazon Rainforest, it's been nice knowing you.
posted by jamjam at 12:36 PM on March 11, 2009

But when you introduce regulation, smaller entities get pushed out of the market simply out of not being able to afford the (often enormous) bureaucratic overhead that regulation requires.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I think it really varies depending on the market and the regulations in question. Some regulations don't require much in terms of up-front expenditures. Some do. Likewise, some industries are more geared towards monopolization, especially due to standards. The best example of this might be Microsoft; they have achieved a certain critical mass that reinforces itself over time. That could change along with market and technological conditions, but the gravity of standards in the computing world is fairly self-evident for the time being.

Thus, if you don't like monopolies as a general rule, the best way to prevent them is to simply make them illegal, much as we currently do.
posted by Edgewise at 12:45 PM on March 11, 2009

Pastabagel: In a true free market, competition is only limited by economic, market-related barriers to entry. In the current, quasi-corporatist system, established players change the rules of the market to make entry more difficult and make it more difficult for smaller players to compete.

"People are in jail so that prices can be free."
posted by Vindaloo at 1:07 PM on March 11, 2009

But when you introduce regulation, smaller entities get pushed out of the market simply out of not being able to afford the (often enormous) bureaucratic overhead that regulation requires.


You know what else pushes smaller entities out of the market? The absence of regulations to protect small business from the predatory and non-competitive practices of larger entities.

Functioning, healthy free markets are not about regulated vs. de-regulated markets. It's all about the quality of the specific regulations and their enforcement mechanisms, and having regulatory incentive structures in place to encourage and reward the kinds of economic behaviors that make a market "healthier" (depending on what you consider the desired outcomes of market activity to be).

It's my view (as I've often said before) that markets as we know them cannot exist in the absence of at least minimal regulatory frameworks. Markets literally emerge from regulatory systems. Governments are established to protect property rights and establish ground rules for trade. As the kinds of goods and services trades become more varied and complex, these rules of trade--which are all essentially guided by common sense principles of basic property rights and fair trade in their intent--have to become more complex (and yes, sometimes onerous) as well.

In history, prior to the emergence of city states and empires, there really wasn't anything like what we call "trade on the free market" to speak of. Tribal leaders distributed the resources of the tribe as they saw fit; nomadic raiders stole from the tribes and fought amongst themselves to distribute their bounty. As the forerunners of modern governments began to appear, bustling marketplaces appeared as well. And I don't think it's merely coincidence that they began to appear around the same time.

Even feudalism, as imperfect a system as it is, provides basic rules of marketplace conduct and various enforcement mechanisms.

Markets depend on regulations. Without regulations to protect property rights, prosecute fraud, and minimize fraud and exploitative labor practices, all markets would dissolve into thin air, leaving behind only unfettered opportunism, exploitation and brutality.

/my three and a half cents
posted by saulgoodman at 1:22 PM on March 11, 2009 [1 favorite]

this america...

If Drum is right that...

when it's over, guess what? Pretty much all the same people will be in charge. A few senior executives will be out of jobs, but that's about it. And the ones who replace them won't be much different.

...then God help us. There is no amount of money we can throw at a banking system that can't be "tunneled" or "looted" away. If we end up with similiar people, with a similar worldview and culture running broadly similar institutions, it won't be long before the nightmare on Wall Street is back. No wonder Citi never sleeps.

We can pay off the creditors of these behemoths, because, by design, we really have no choice. But there's no reason not to cut 'em up and shut 'em down after we do so. Let's bury 'em, Senator Shelby.

also re: getting paid...
posted by kliuless at 1:23 PM on March 11, 2009

"But when you introduce regulation, smaller entities get pushed out of the market simply out of not being able to afford the (often enormous) bureaucratic overhead that regulation requires."

Did you know that in the 1920s, it was difficult to get accurate information about any company listed on the NYSE? You'd buy the stock based on a sales pitch and some cooked up numbers. They weren't really required to tell you anything, much less the truth about their financial situation. This was the unregulated stock market. Is that the sort of thing you want to return to?

This is always where the hot money goes, into unregulated market sectors, which in turn creates bubbles. Our current unregulated market is the CDO/CDS market tied into mortgage securitization.
posted by krinklyfig at 3:48 PM on March 11, 2009

If the free market needs to be completely free of government regulation to work correctly, does it follow that dissolving the FDIC would be a boon to the banking industry?
posted by boo_radley at 8:40 PM on March 11, 2009

But when you introduce regulation, smaller entities get pushed out of the market simply out of not being able to afford the (often enormous) bureaucratic overhead that regulation requires.

Standard Oil. Your extremist economic theory was debunked even before Communism, back in the ninteenth century!
posted by dirigibleman at 10:03 PM on March 11, 2009

Did you know that in the 1920s, it was difficult to get accurate information about any company listed on the NYSE? You'd buy the stock based on a sales pitch and some cooked up numbers. They weren't really required to tell you anything, much less the truth about their financial situation. This was the unregulated stock market. Is that the sort of thing you want to return to?

Yes, actually. Playing the stock market is like playing in vegas, so why try to make it appear safer than it actually is? It's plain old misleading. Don't buy stock based on a sales pitch and (um, obviously) cooked numbers... ?

Standard Oil.

I read an interesting bit on Standard Oil a while ago:

As for monopoly abuse, even if one firm gets 100% market share, it cannot charge monopoly prices because anyone can enter the industry. If a firm finds itself a monopoly and starts reaping killer profits, well then someone will contact a lending institution, perhaps another company like a restaurant chain, and propose to get into the electricity business, and will do so to the extent that the free market monopoly is doing so. And so in this way, a free market monopoly cannot charge monopoly prices for any extended period of time. If it does so, it will be broken. However, a single company can gain 100% market share and maintain it forever if it maintains competitive prices. This is what the so-called robber baron standard oil did, though he never got up to 100%.

The antitrust regulation was enacted on the grounds that standard oil was big, despite the fact that standard oil was consistently cheaper than it's competitors and was losing market share at the time the legislation was enacted.

Oh, also, an acquaintance of mine recently did an excellent radio interview about government regulation and the financial crisis for Portland's KBOO Community Radio.
posted by symbollocks at 6:53 AM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

I'm not actually taking about securities regulation, I'm talking about industry regulation. In other words, telecom regulation is influenced by large established telecom companies, copyright laws and regulations are written by large media media companies, pharma companies influence patent laws and the regs surrounding FDA approval, etc. It doesn't mean that the regulations always guarantee success for the established industry players, but it does suggest that the regulations are usually biased in favor of entrenched players, and that bias can included the massive compliance filing requirements that large companies can afford that startup companies cannot.

In fact, the public's voice on regulation is only heard when established companies are at odds: e.g. net neutrality (Verizon vs. google) or cable TV (Verizon vs. Comcast).
posted by Pastabagel at 8:40 AM on March 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

So, Pastabagel, I'm to take from your comments that, since regulation sometimes favors industry players, we should scrap it altogether? Baby/bathwater, maybe?
posted by krinklyfig at 9:42 AM on March 12, 2009

"Playing the stock market is like playing in vegas, so why try to make it appear safer than it actually is?"

Investing in a company through common stock or other equities is not playing Vegas. Investing without accurate information is much more like gambling, however. If our current regulations aren't working very well, it's not a good reason to scrap them and go with the opaque system we had before, because that makes the problem much worse.
posted by krinklyfig at 9:52 AM on March 12, 2009

Investing in a company through common stock or other equities is not playing Vegas.

I think what you're trying to say is this:

Investing in a company through common stock or other equities is not should not be like playing Vegas.

I'm describing (what I think is) the reality of the situation, that investing is always gamble for one reason or another. You're describing a right you think you have, the right to have the government back up any financial transaction you make, should the other party fail to fulfill their side of the bargain.

You can pass a million laws against lying about financials, or breaking deals, but it will still happen again and again and again (I can't emphasize this enough). It is in a company's best interest to lie if they think they can get away with it. How do we solve this though? Not through more and more litigation and legislation if we've learned anything at all...

We need to build trust (the actual, real, extralegal variety) with the companies we invest in. If a company won't be completely transparent with you, don't invest, because that is shady behavior and we need to make that clear. Market transparency will only come if we start insisting on it as investors.

Which, for me, means I'm not investing a single cent.
posted by symbollocks at 10:37 AM on March 12, 2009

"I'm describing (what I think is) the reality of the situation, that investing is always gamble for one reason or another. You're describing a right you think you have, the right to have the government back up any financial transaction you make, should the other party fail to fulfill their side of the bargain."

No, what I'm saying is, regulations are put in place to ensure transparency in the market. This is not a bad thing. Relying on the goodwill of the company in question to do so is a losing proposition, or at least a much larger gamble.

"You can pass a million laws against lying about financials, or breaking deals, but it will still happen again and again and again (I can't emphasize this enough). "

You can be fatalistic, too, but I'm not such a pessimist to believe that no matter what we do, we're screwed.
posted by krinklyfig at 12:23 PM on March 12, 2009

You can be fatalistic, too, but I'm not such a pessimist to believe that no matter what we do, we're screwed.

It's like a kid who wants to play with the bullies so much that he keeps going back to them time after time. You don't need the teacher to save you, nor will the teacher always be there to save you. Insisting that the teacher save you is a ridiculous request because you don't need to play with the bullies... so just stop playing with them! All they want to do is beat you up and take your lunch money, at least when they know they can get away with it.
posted by symbollocks at 1:43 PM on March 12, 2009