Meltdown At The G20

Protesters turned violent yesterday in demonstrations coinciding with the start of the G20 Summit.

British police suspect many of the rabble to be professional protesters – anarchists from Italy and France, mixing with the disenchanted crowds. The report mentions the protesters included environmentalists, anarchists, anti-war folks and workers demanding action from world leaders. Just how much more “action” they require of their respective governments beyond going into hock to pay for massive stimulus and spending programs is unclear.

Clare Smith, a member of G20 Meltdown and a 27 year-old post graduate anthropology student, played a giant game of Monopoly inside Paternoster Square as her chosen method of protest. “This is a parody of what’s going on inside the building,” Smith said. “Meanwhile, the poor are getting poorer and that has even started to show in this country.”

Admittedly, the idea of protesting a government that spends piles of money it doesn’t have to underwrite a lifestyle that allows a 27 year-old anthropology student to play Monopoly is a bit vexing to me.

Who is to blame then? A lot of ink has been devoted to this subject, but I think economists Steven Horowitz and Charles Dana sum it up nicely:

Before talking about how we did get here, let me say a quick word about what didn’t cause this mess. Those who wish to blame greed for the crisis need to explain how and why it is that greed seems to causes crises only at specific times, despite the fact that it is omnipresent as a feature of human nature and market economies. As the economist Larry White has noted, if we saw a bunch of planes crash all on the same day, we wouldn’t blame gravity. It’s always there. Something else must be at work. I would argue that the key is the set of institutions through which greed or self-interest is channeled. That is, good institutions can cause self-interest to generate desirable unintended consequences, and bad ones can cause undesirable ones. So perhaps we should be looking at institutions and policy.

The full text of their work can be read here.