Many leftie commentators have been rather enjoying the recent travails of the city. The banks have been partially nationalised and might be completely publicly owned within a few months, something people like Darling and Mendelssohn thought they would only ever dream about as student Communist Party members. The failure of capitalism, they say, has to be put right.
Thing is, it's not a failure of capitalism: it's a failure or democratic control. Governments in the West have been in a corrupt alliance with big business, a conspiracy against the people. Politicians have benefited by staying in power. Bankers have benefited from getting rich. Bureaucrats have benefited with expanded empires and higher pay. The only people not to have benefited are ordinary workers. Who, in the last 20 years, has been representing tax payers?
The children have taken over the sweet shop and there is now no effective control over the executive exercised by Parliament or the people it is supposed to represent.
Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, wrote, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living." That is, no generation has the right to impose unreasonable debts on the next. He correctly saw that it was theoretically possible for one generation to vote its obligations to the next. Alas, his point was not taken and now it has become a reality for children across the Western world.
We don't need just a financial response the credit crunch: we need a constitutional one too. It's isn't a failure to regulate big companies that is at the root of our problems: it's our failure to regulate our politicians, to regulate the regulators.
We now stand at the brink of the worst social unrest across Europe since the 1930s. Let us hope that the new constitutional theory that arises as a result is a good one and not yet more evil. The Anarchist riots in Greece and elsewhere before Christmas are not an encouraging omen.
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