Jon Stewart, the anti-capitalist Austrian?
Jon Stewart recently had Alan Greenspan on The Daily Show and the result was Mr. Stewart directing pointed questions at the former Randian and former money-monopolist-in-chief. These are questions right out of the radical free-market Austrian school of economics playbook, ideas commonly considered “capitalist” yet stunning in their anti-capitalist implications when pursued to rigorous consistency. As Carson noted in The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand:
The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called “market” economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called “laissez-faire” was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.
Stewart artfully manages to work into his questions the points that the purported “free market” capitalist economic order isn’t a free market at all, that the Federal Reserve wouldn’t even exist in a free market, that Federal Reserve manipulation of the money supply artificially favors stock investing over personal savings and that this, in turn, has implications for class analysis!
Hat tip: Lew Rockwell
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It is always refreshing to see such a widely viewed program and well-perceived figure like Jon Stewart haunting the same philosophical tent.
Or it could be his Jewish ancestry that makes him know so much about money and the economy….nah. :)
(Sorry for the poor taste in jokes.)