Daniel Hannan writes in the UK The Telegraph with Memo to the Occupy Protesters: here are ten things we evil capitalists really think.

Point 1:

Free-marketers resent the bank bailouts. This might seem obvious: we are, after all, opposed to state subsidies and nationalizations. Yet it often surprises commentators, who mistake our support for open competition and free trade for a belief in plutocracy. There is a world of difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. Sometimes, the two positions happen to coincide; often they don’t.

Point 2:

What has happened since 2008 is not capitalism. In a capitalist system, bad banks would have been allowed to fail, their profitable operations bought by more efficient competitors. Shareholders, bondholders and some depositors would have lost money, but taxpayers would not have contributed a penny (see here).

HKO comment:

The government is able to transfer the pain of market corrections, but not eliminate it.  The well connected get saved at tax payer expense.  Even if the intervention was necessitated by the credit collapse, what is being done to avert a repeat?  Dodd Frank intervened in the setting of debit card fees which had nothing to do with this disaster,  but left the chief causes such as Fannie Mae untouched.

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