Matthew Yglesias thinks the titans of finance are ducking responsibility for the mess they’ve made of…well…the entire friggin’ world…

Robert Rubin speaks up for himself:

“Nobody was prepared for this,” Mr. Rubin said in an interview. He cited former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as another example of someone whose reputation has been unfairly damaged by the crisis.

This seems like a pretty serious dodge here…

Yes, but not the one you think it is.  Rubin, like a lot of the Bush-Reagan big money cronies, drank the deregulation kool-aid some time ago.  He really thinks that unregulated capitalism is self correcting and self sustaining.  He’s Still looking at what happened to the world economies through those ideological rose colored glasses. What’s happening now just wasn’t supposed to happen.  They still can’t believe that it’s happening.  And if the government they’ve been calling part of the problem not part of the solution for so long hadn’t started bailing their asses out, they’d be jumping out of windows now, just like they were during the Great Depression.

For generations now, ever since FDR, the country club class has been dispensing crap about how the Great Depression wasn’t really caused by their greed and excesses, but by the very government regulation that has kept us from having more of those massive boom and bust cycles ever since.  The great middle class created in this country by the New Deal is something they sincerely regard as having been carved out of their hides and they hate it.  They think we’re taking money from their pockets and they don’t see and don’t care that it was making the nation stable and the economy solid and strong for generations…strong enough for them to keep getting all the rich they want to get…just not as much or as fast.  But this idea that taxes are theft, and regulation is socialism, not the cost of having a stable democracy and a stable economy, is like a religion to them. 

So for generations now, the uber rich have been drenching the middle class with this fairy tale that the Great Depression was actually caused by…get this…Too Much government regulation, as opposed to the nearly none that allowed them to create worthless paper wealth on top of worthless paper wealth…just like…oh…what they did during the Bush years.  They told the middle class that if the rich were only allowed to dismantle the New Deal, why, Everyone would prosper.  But that crap was supposed to be just for the rubes to eat, while the rich ate the standard of living and the life savings of the middle class because they’ve thought all along that all that was rightfully theirs to begin with. 

But some of the uber rich actually started believing they could have their middle class and eat it too. Sorta like the way they told us they could take the Social Security trust fund money and put it into the stock market and then there would be money in both the trust fund to pay for current benefits and money in the stock market too!  See how one dollar magically becomes two?  That thinking is how they got us into the current mess, and not coincidentally how they got us into the Great Depression once upon a time.  Back then, the government regulated the banks to prevent that magic money from getting into the finance system again, and the uber rich have been trying to roll back those regulations ever since, because that prevented them from sucking money out of the banks…money that theoretically belonged to working class depositors.  Oh sorry depositor…we loaned your life savings out to somebody…who loaned it out to somebody…who loaned it out to somebody…who bought stocks with it… 

They began thinking they really could suck the money out of the middle class, and still have a middle class left to sell things to and keep the economy running.  But…There is no free lunch.  Really.  There isn’t.  Why…the Free Market will self correct…and the rising tide will lift all boats…  No.  It doesn’t.  It sure didn’t during the Great Depression…that grand daddy of all boom and busts.  And now that they’ve managed to gut most of the New Deal brakes that kept those huge boom and bust cycles from seriously crashing the economy…surprise, surprise….it’s all crashing around their heads again.  And only that evil wicked federal government is standing between them and absolute ruin.  And they’re begging it to step in and save them from…well…themselves.  Schadenfreude.

And they won’t learn.  Trust me…they won’t learn.  At the end of some future day, when things are back to normal, or as near to normal as possible, they’ll still look resentfully out from their rarefied heights down upon the middle class, all the ticky-tacky homes with their ticky-tacky furniture and their ticky-tacky clothes and their ticky-tacky lawn ornaments, believing all that only exists because it was carved out of, and not there to save their sorry hides.