Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy Do Their Part for Global Government
I don’t know why even some libertarians (and no I’m not even referring to the recent spat) find it so taboo to occasionally remind people that an elite group is quite literally trying to take over the world. At Copenhagen we’ve got world leaders working on a global agreement to harmonize the intense regulation of energy markets, and today we’ve got an op ed in the WSJ from Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy calling for a global financial regulatory framework:
In regard to regulation, the EU has adopted a comprehensive set of new rules for the financial sector to avoid the repetition of the crisis: control over credit rating agencies, stronger capital requirements on complex products such as securitization, and strengthened deposit guarantee schemes. We have set up strict rules to make sure that compensation systems avoid excessive risk taking. We will also implement stricter capital rules for banks.
We also have agreed on a more efficient system for supervision of the financial sector within Europe to better monitor systemic risks…Banks must now hold sufficient capital, ensure liquidity, and reward only genuine value creation and not short-term risk-taking.
This crisis has made us recognize that we are now in an economy which is no longer national but global, so financial standards must also be global. We must ensure that through proper regulation, the financial sector operates on a level playing field globally.
There is an urgent need for a new compact between global banks and the society they serve:
…
A compact that ensures financial institutions cannot use offshore tax havens to negate the contribution they justly owe to the citizens of the country in which they operate—and so builds on the progress already made in ending tax and regulatory havens.Therefore, we propose a long-term global compact that will encapsulate both the responsibilities of the banking system and the risk they pose to the economy as a whole. Various proposals have been put forward and deserve examination. They include resolution funds, insurance premiums, financial transaction levies and a tax on bonuses.
The fulcrum for their entire case is the ostensible fact that taxpayers have to bail out big financial institutions when they get into trouble. Well how do we know that is true? Let’s see what Brown and Sarkozy have to say about it:
We have found that a huge and opaque global trading network involving complex products, short-termism and too-often excessive rewards created risks that few people understood. We have also learned that when crises happen, taxpayers have to cover the costs.
That’s a rather odd way of putting it, isn’t it? Sort of like the guy returning home and telling his wife, “I have learned that when I stop at the convenience store, our checking account has to pay for numerous lotto tickets.”
I know, I know, none of this is conclusive. It’s entirely possible that all these political leaders really have the best of intentions, and they are just misinformed with faulty economic models. I mean, the only way we could ever really know for sure that there is a global elite who are truly plotting for one world government, is if one of them, oh I don’t know, published a book and literally admitted it. But that would never happen. I mean, you can’t expect, say, David Rockefeller to write the following in his memoirs:
For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.
But if he were to do something like that, then you could stop calling me nuts for thinking there’s something to this one-world-government thing, right?
