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.This, then, must be the starting point of reform nothing morenor less than saying boo to the New Olympians, to breaking theirspell and telling them that we are well within our rights to bring theiractivities back under democratic control.We do not mean them to be brought under the oversight of theNew Olympians technocratic opposite numbers in unelected na-tional and transnational bodies, whether Britain s Financial ServicesAuthority or the International Monetary Fund.These Olympian of-ficials exist precisely to promote the financial Olympians agendas;their answer to every systemic problem is more  competition, freertrade, a smoother functioning of the very machine that caused theafter the gold rush 253trouble in the first place.On the contrary, we would argue that theNew Olympians have hollowed out the democratic process preciselyby removing more and more powers from political control and hand-ing them over to this cadre of technocrats.The result in the firstdecade of the twenty-first century was, at best, the view among vot-ers that it was not worth voting because their views were never lis-tened to and, at worst, the rise of extreme parties eager to exploitgrievances about job insecurity and stagnant real incomes.Action toredress the democratic deficit would have been necessary even wereit the case that rule by the New Olympians had ensured a permanenteconomic nirvana.As it is, we are all in the happy position that theentirely benign project of bringing the Olympians to account fortheir economic misdemeanors will have the wholly desirable effect ofreviving democracy.But having asserted our right to control the private sector NewOlympians and to give instructions to the public sector Olympians,rather than take instructions from them, what sort of control ought tobe asserted and what sort of instructions ought to be issued?Not the sort that have proved so ineffectual in the past.As we saidabove, the last thing we need is another monitoring forum, anothercode of conduct, another  information exchange and transparencyinitiative or another  benchmark of best practice. These and simi-lar proposals are rooted in the assumption that there is nothing muchwrong with the New Olympian system that cannot be put right bymild admonition and oversight or by removing obstacles to the betterfunctioning of the Olympian system itself.This is the worldview ofthe Institute of Economic Affairs, of the Adam Smith Institute, of thebusiness schools, and of the financial section of many newspapers.The asset be it a landholding, a shareholding, or a business enter-prise exists in some state of nature.Then politicians or state em-ployees come along with their laws and their taxes and  distort it.All true enough, in the sense of personal private property: a car, ahome, a piece of jewelry.Property brought into being and guaranteedby the state and by law, however, cannot, as Theodore Roosevelt ex-plained, be seen in the same light or treated in the same way.It ispartly because we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that the two254 the gods that failedtypes of property are identical that we are in the current position.Itwill be objected that we, society, already ask a great deal from the fi-nancial and big business interest in return for privileges such as lim-ited liability and credit creation.Do we not insist that they treat theiremployees fairly, that they comply with reams of business principles,and that that they disburse assorted state benefits through pay pack-ets? True enough.Moneybags Bank is regulated as an employer, as apotential polluter, as a potential discriminator, as a subject ofanti money laundering regulations and as a possessor of largeamounts of personal data.It is regulated as almost everything, but itis not regulated as a bank.Its actual business is entirely deregulated.Irresponsible lending, dangerous speculation, investment in toxic se-curities there is practically no limit to the use the bank is allowedto make of the government-guaranteed product in which it is al-lowed to traffic: money.Much the same goes for the large limited li-ability public company, required to show what passes for virtue in themodern world in every aspect of its activities except its business.Takeovers, layoffs, outsourcing.the pursuit of  shareholder valueis overriding [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]