Revenge of the Beta Males

There’s only a few places in the real world where Beta Males get to whoop it up and extract their revenge on the Alphas that shoved them around during their model-building, star wars loving, well-spent but unhappy youths. Those places would be on Wall Street, what passes for journalism these days, and Washington D.C.. It’s occurred to me that these places contain Beta Males that are natural allies. Since none of these folks ever got to sit at the kewl kids lunch tables in high school, they’ve built their special lunchrooms where no one else can venture without getting hall monitor passes from the former high school hall monitors. It’s also probably why we’ve now built an economy that no longer builds anything useful but gets increasing amounts of money from mathematical gambles and laws that favor insiders. It’s the only area where the Beta Males can dominate. If you can’t play football, at least you can bet on the game, win big, and eventually buy yourself a former cheerleader.

I went out in search of some evidence that we might rein in the market malpractice on Wall Street, and instead found that we’re just as likely to be setting up another financial crisis as not. Maybe I should throw up my hands and follow the lead of George Soros. I should start a hedge fund that bets on the stupidity of Wall Street aligned with the duplicity and complicity of politicians and journalistic misinformants. That way I could buy my own island and avoid the next financial crisis.

It seems bringing translucency to the market (a goal in a true market economy) would only benefit those on the outside looking in and we can’t have that. It might bring the rest of the world back to the lunchroom tables. We continue to have Republicans blocking everything because of their incessant worship of the idols of false capitalism. How can so few understand so little and gum up the works for so many? This quote appalled me.

“The president has offered a reform proposal that would grant broad new authorities to government bureaucrats while intruding in private markets and restricting personal choice,” said Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the senior Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. “The obvious lesson of the events of September 2008 is that we need smarter regulation, not more regulation, not more government bureaucracy, and not more incentives to engage in harmful business practices.”

This is a man truly devoid of intellect and any sense of how a competitive market functions. Removing frictions like information asymmetry, huge single powerful players, or moral hazards makes markets work beautifully. Civilization has regulated its financial markets since Hammurabi for very obvious reasons. How can you come up with real political discourse when the opposition is so obviously factually handicapped?

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