Citizens expect from their Government , security, freedom, order, justice and welfare. Rather that to fall into the “nasty, brutish and short” life that Hobbes predicted and what life was like during the Middle Ages.
Hobbes also assumed that nature and humans are inherently selfish and self serving. A forerunner to todays 'Me , Me , Me' attitude.

So to hand over control to private enterprise under the banner of 'free trade' will result in exactly what Hobbes et al suggested.

We now see private police forces, run for profit. We see private immigration services, run for profit, Private armies, security contractors with no measure of responsibility to the people. Private contrators running detension centres. Private schools, private health. All run for profit.

Where is the peoples representaion in private companies, we dont get to vote for the CEO of whatever Transational company, the IMF or The World Bank, but these people are running our lives.

Globilisation is tauted as the saviour of our system, yet Globilisation is 'Asymmetrical' which results in an unequal balance where the vast bulk of economic and political activity is concentrated with the small group of OECD countries. (Baylis & Smith).

I want a say in how my country is run, thats democracy. I want my country to be responsible for the welfare of its people. I want my country to be more caring for each other.

I dont need an SUV or a choice of 50 different types of toothpaste.
Consumerism is the new ideology, thats sad.

'As the government stops providing...services,...the free market will dominate international affairs.' That is abhorent.

"Devolving more power to the markets will balance the current contractual deficit and mean that people's wants and needs will be satisfied by the raw power of consumerism."

Spoken like a true cargo-cultist. On a flat Earth of endless natural abundance, economists and treasurers reap but do not sow. There it is always afternoon, just before knockoff time.

Not for them the squeezing of a cow's tit before breakfast, nor wading barefoot through a paddy. Rice comes in natty little packets and milk is poured from a bottomless carton.

So let's all turn up for the great selloff barganza of the old round Earth. Don't miss this great chance to be in on the last of the fish stocks, the last of the arable land, the remnant forest sale, the last of the clean water and energy supplies. All must go - but hurry!

On the new flat Earth, the only inheritance worth passing on to the grandkids will be piles of iconic little pieces of paper. Employment will be no problem thanks to the new "industries" which are springing up everywhere. As well as the advertising "industry", there are the banking, insurance, security and retail "industries".

Who knows, maybe we'll start a Thinktank Industry.

Tom, a very thought provoking piece and disturbingly true on many levels. That people have, by and large, forgotten the responsibilities that are critical to a dynamic and democratic society does mean that the shortfall must be taken up elswhere. Expectations of what governments should provide grows on an almost daily basis yet reciprocity seems to be becoming an alien concept.
That is sad, indeed, however the market, far from being a flexible panacea to the problem could be seen as a funadamental root cause of it. The 'greed is good' 80's instilled a take all and give nothing back ethos. That was a government/business joint venture.
The 'let the market dictate' political economy has been trialled and failed on sociological grounds in many parts of the world. New Orleans is a prime example of who picks up the pieces when the economy, for whatever reason, falls off the rails.
What disturbs me most about your article is that I fear that you are correct in much of your assessment. Well written.

All good responses to our neocon/neoliberal/globalist contributor. Substitute 'corporation' for 'the market' and we have a more accurate picture. Global corporations are becoming the new government and they do not promise freedom, they demand obedience and operate through highly sophisticated brainwashing of mass populations. Witness the drive in the US by Verichip and others to make it 'cool' for people to have a subdermal microchip implant; or the drive to put thumb scanners in supermarkets and other big (corporate) stores. The mass brainwashing methods of corporate/government interests is mindboggling. 9-11 is a case in point - The Day the World Changed Forever, The Coalition of the Willing. Operation Desert Freedom etc, etc. Great scriptwriting there by clever corporate interests. And these are the people bringing up a new era of 'market-driven freedom'? Give us a break!

Chris Shaw carisbrook 3464. I have spent the last hour reading your posts to O.L.O. at the risk of pissing in your pocket, you Sir, who ever the hell you are,in my humble opinion are wasting your writing talents here.Your antagonists are surely wasting good power trying to contradict you.But I digress, where was I oh yes."When the last fish stocks are gone".My son has been involved in the fishing industry most of his working life,and no he is not a Marine Biologist or an Oceanographer,he is a skipper of an ocean going fishing vessel.

He has told me that the fish stocks off the coast of W.A. are diminishing at alarming levels.Fish that even ten years ago that could be caught in a few hours are now taking a few days to catch,with as much as five days at sea with nothing.This is not the opinion of some academic who has trolled through mountains of data,this is from a man who has felt the sea spray in his face.He has also told me they have taken fish aboard covered in bilge oil and other contaminates.But the most alarming thing he has told me, it is normal to pull up plastic shopping bags and other industrial rubbish 50 Klicks out to sea.He is seriously thinking about leaving the industry.What a great legacy we are leaving for our kids.

All the long winded posts about trade deficits, interest rates,the dow,employment numbers,and all the other economic mumbo jumbo in another forty or fifty years will mean nothing.People will be fighting each other for a glass of clean drinking water.

Fascinating article. All good posts. Chris Shaw has expressed it most profoundly, with the contemptible sarcasm that it deserves (governments divulging power to profit-driven, balance-lacking, sustainability-blind private enterprise, that is).

This is truly depressing. As if climate change, peak oil, population overload, inevitable pandemic and a few other things that are now completely beyond us to reign in, weren’t bad enough, our so-called democratic governments are steadily divulging more power to the very sectors that need to be tightly controlled. So now, when we need strong leadership more urgently than ever, in order to adapt to (no longer try and prevent) these enormous looming issues, we see the trend going precisely the wrong way.

One of the most fundamental roles of government, and one which very few democracies have ever really come near, is to balance this profit-motive tragedy-of-the-commons economy-before-the-people mentality with the negative effects on its citizens’ quality of life.

Would I being stating it too strongly if I said democracy is demonstrating abject failure. It seems that it was a critically flawed concept in the first place that governments could remain separate from big business (profits, political donations, kickbacks and all that) and hope to effectively regulate them.

I don’t understand the notion that there is a contractual deficit in terms of government giving much more than they get from the populace. It is entirely the other way around – governments just profoundly let us down where it really counts. (By crikey does my local council stand up as a prime example.) The people aren’t demanding anywhere near enough of them.

Oh what hope is there. We’re all going to pot and that’s that.