Sirota: Too Big To Fail

If It's "Too Big to Fail," Then It's Too Big to Be Private

By David Sirota
Campaign for America's Future, 3/3/09

I appeared yesterday at the top of Neil Cavuto's Fox News show to discuss the potential for financial industry nationalization. You can watch the clip here:



I tried to use the opportunity to float a fairly simple - and old-fashioned - concept that has been almost entirely missing from the media/political debate: If something is "too big to fail," then it's too big to be in private hands.

The term "too big to fail" is a euphemism for any institution that is so important to the entire nation's most basic well being, that society cannot let that institution fail. This is why one of the foundational principles of civilized society has always been nationalization - ie. government control - of the institutions that are "too big to fail": institutions like the military, whose failure would mean a basic loss of national security; law enforcement, whose failure would mean a basic loss of civil order; and infrastructure construction, whose failure would mean the crumbling of commerce. The government, as the most powerful representative of society as a whole, runs these institutions/services because they are too important to be allowed to fail.

Unfortunately, as of hard-right and center-right ideologues have ran our government for three decades, they gutted the basic laws and enforcement mechanisms (financial regulations, anti-trust prosecutions, etc.) that prevented a myriad of financial institutions from becoming "too big to fail."

The American Insurance Group is the best example of this - a company that, as the New York Times notes, essentially based its business on a risky scheme to sell insurance to other corporations against colossal housing market failure.

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